Archive for the ‘Accessibility’ Category

New ASU accessibility service lets students get files in more formats

Students at Arizona State University can now download class documents as files formatted for screen readers, braille or MP3 audio, the school announced Thursday, a service university officials said will make digital course content more accessible for all students. Ally, the new tool from learning management system provider Canvas, not only scans content and converts […]

Download White Paper

Bologna Digital 2020: White Paper on Digitalisation in the European Higher Education Area 1.1 Why this White Paper? Europe needs new visions for contemporary higher education in the digital age. Digitalisation is not only an additional challenge, but also an effective means to address key challenges for higher education in the 21st century. This paper […]

Open and distance learning – Making transformation happen

In a Times Higher Education report dated 19 November, a panel discussion on critical emerging issues in higher education evolved into thinking about ways that universities should modify their approaches to learning, teaching, technology and employability. These are the new realities of education. University World News

Catching the Waves: Technology and the Community College

Four waves of technology are linked to access and success—the twin pillars of community college philosophy. We are poised to have more tools, techniques, and technologies at our fingertips than ever before to help our students access learning, succeed on their learning journeys, and ready themselves for productive careers and lives. EDUCAUSE Review

Humanising Text-to-Speech Through Emotional Expression in Online Courses

This paper outlines an innovative approach to evaluating the emotional content of three online courses using the affective computing approach of prosody detection on two different text-to-speech (TTS) voices in conjunction with human raters judging the emotional content of the text. This work intends to establish the potential variation on the emotional delivery of online […]

A Taxonomy of Inclusive Design: On Disclosure, Accessibility, and Inclusion

Before you read further, we’d like you to consider how you define inclusion. What does it mean to you? Please enter a brief (three to five words or up to forty characters) definition of inclusion into the Answer Garden text field below and click Submit to view a word cloud with other responses. EDUCAUSE Review […]

Download Report: The Promises and Limits of Online Higher Education

The Promises and Limits of Online Higher Education UNDERSTANDING HOW DISTANCE EDUCATION AFFECTS ACCESS, COST, AND QUALITY This report finds that, to varying degrees, online education can benefit some student populations. However, important caveats and trade-offs remain. Existing experimental and quasi-experimental stud- ies on semester-length college courses typically find negative effects on student course persistence […]

Student Perceptions of Open Pedagogy: An Exploratory Study

With the increasing development and adoption of Open Educational Resources, many researchers and practitioners are interested in more carefully examining pedagogies connected with their use. This study describes the perceptions of 173 students of implementations of various approaches to open pedagogy by nineteen instructors in post-secondary institutions in New Hampshire. Students were asked about their […]

Open Education and Learning Design: Open Pedagogy in Praxis

Beyond providing alternatives to traditional learning resources, there exists a gap in the literature in understanding how openness is impacting teaching and learning in higher education. This paper explores the ways in which educators describe how open education is impacting their pedagogical designs. Using a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners, we explore how […]

Teachers’ Adoption of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to change the domain of higher education; however, adoption is still limited. As teachers are the pivotal actors to adopt OER, more insights are needed on their practices with OER and need of support. This exploratory study uses the OER Adoption Pyramid as a framework to analyse adoption […]