How Accessible Are MOOCs to the Elderly?
Literature has shown that learning, including eLearning and distance education, plays an important role in promoting well-being among the elderly. Currently elderly participants constitute less than 10 % of MOOC participants and very limited research has
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Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, St. Olavs Plass POB 4, 0130 Oslo, Norway {Way.Bong,Weiqin.Chen}@hioa.no
Abstract. Literature has shown that learning, including eLearning and distance education, plays an important role in promoting well-being among the elderly. Currently elderly participants constitute less than 10 % of MOOC participants and very limited research has been conducted on the accessibility of MOOCs for elderly users. This paper presents the findings from a case study focusing on the accessibility of a MOOC demo course for the elderly. Different accessibility issues were found from automated testing and user testing. Although the elderly participants expressed general positive attitude towards using MOOCs to learn new knowledge, it is important for MOOC providers to address the accessibility issues and make their courses accessible to elderly users. Keywords: MOOC · Accessibility · Elderly · e-Learning · User tests · WCAG
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Introduction
The number of elderly people is increasing every year. As of today, elderly people constitute a big part of the world population and elderly population is likely to increase over the next three decades [1]. Literature has shown that learning, including eLearning and distance education, plays an important role in promoting well-being among the elderly [2–4]. MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) provides open and online learning environ‐ ments and have great potential to educate large amount of people in a flexible way that meets the needs of today’s learners for an increasingly complex world [5]. As of August 2015, edX, a non-profit and open source MOOC provider has more than 5 million students and offers more than 650 courses in variety of subjects such as business and management, computer science, biology and life sciences [6]. Currently elderly participants constitute less than 10 % of MOOC participants [7]. Research focusing on MOOCs and elderly people are very limited. In this research, we aim to understand the accessibility of MOOCs to the elderly by carrying out a case study on the “edX: DemoX.1 Demo Course”. We have conducted user testing with six elderly people in addition to the automated testing based on Web Content Accessibility Guide‐ lines (WCAG 2.0).
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 K. Miesenberger et al. (Eds.): ICCHP 2016, Part I, LNCS 9758, pp. 437–444, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41264-1_60
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W.K. Bong and W. Chen
Related Work
Al-Mouh and colleagues evaluated courses in Coursera from two perspectives: users and experts [8]. For user perspectives, they tested with the assistance of screen readers. They concluded that Coursera still had accessibility issues to screen readers’ users, thus failed to comply WCAG 2.0 guidelines. For expert perspectives, they conducted heuristic evaluation using ten courses and the outcome indicated the courses’ failure to conform to all priority levels (A, AA and AAA). Instead of evaluating courses, Bohnsack and Puhl [9] evaluated the MOOC providers. They adopted protocol
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