Online Education Grapples with Accessibility
Published May 4, 2020
Momentum behind online education continues to build for a variety of reasons: the ability to reach large numbers of students on-campus and off, economical usage of teachers’ time and classroom resources, and the ability to offer a rich web-based array of content. But online learning is still a work in progress. Even as teachers and professors strive to improve the online educational course material, making online courses accessible to those with disabilities remains an important and sometimes unfulfilled requirement. And course content alone is not enough — the ability to register, pay, drop courses, and communicate with faculty also must be adapted to students with disabilities.
A little history
Online education is hardly new. MIT, for example, began publishing its courses online with 50 courses in 2002 and officially launched its Open Courseware site in 2003 with 500 courses. In 2019, MIT published 2250 courses online, attracting 1.7 million subscribers to its OCW YouTube channel. As long as course content has [...]