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Articles

Designing accessible MOOCs to expand educational opportunities for persons with cognitive impairments

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Pages 1101-1119 | Received 28 Mar 2019, Accepted 26 Feb 2020, Published online: 18 Mar 2020
 

ABSTRACT

Despite the promotion of equal access to education, the proportion of persons with disabilities decreases drastically from primary school to higher education, resulting in a lower level of education. This lack of qualification represents an additional obstacle to employment opportunities, reinforcing their exclusion from the social sphere. In recent years, computer-based approaches to education have undergone a real revolution, as reflected by the massive growth of MOOCs platforms. As they are flexible enough, they could provide a real opportunity to create learning environments that are beneficial to persons with disabilities. Unfortunately, most MOOCs are not ‘sufficiently’ accessible, especially for persons with cognitive impairments and limited learning capacities. In this article, we describe the results of a participatory design process that involved students with cognitive impairments and specialists from various fields of expertise and led to the co-design of new functionalities to enhance the accessibility of a MOOC player. We also present the results of a multiple-cases study evaluation of a first prototype, whose results support the positive impact of our design decisions. Finally, we propose an integrative framework for the design of accessible e-learning systems derived from the different needs and guidelines that emerged during the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

2 Since 2013, this platform counts 488 available courses for about 1.6 million registered users. For anonymity purposes, we do not provide the name of the platform in the submitted version of this article.

4 The quotes proposed as examples are translated from the original interviews transcription.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Université de Bordeaux [Doctoral Contract n2016-KB-01].

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