Online Learning: Unprecedented Opportunity, Limited Access
In K-12 education, online enrollments have grown from an estimated 45,000 in 2000 to more than a million last year. By 2013, 10 percent of all "seat time" will be occupied by online instruction--and within 10 years, more than half of all seat time will be online enrollments. "This is a very dramatic change that will happen in 10 years," according to Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School.
Sloan Consortium's report "Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning, Oct, 2007" indicates that more than two-thirds of all higher education institutions now have some form of online offerings, with the majority of these providing programs that are fully online. The number of students taking at least one online course continues to expand at a rate far in excess of the growth of overall higher education enrollments. The most recent estimate, for fall 2006, places this number at 3.48 million online students, an increase of 9.7 percent over the previous year. The number of online students has more than doubled in the four years since the first Sloan survey for online learning according to the recent Sloan report.
In the past decade, the classroom has moved rapidly from the traditional pen, paper, and chalkboard classroom towards the digital classroom. Instructors present information via computer, using online static and dynamic sources—journals, videos, computer generated visual simulations—and prepare and deliver their materials in slide shows with PowerPoint and by screen captures or recordings. Course material is delivered often both real-time in the classroom and just-in-time through learning management systems or other online repositories which archive course materials for students. Research and homework using web resources—library databases, online journals, news sources, and social networking sites are just a few of the ways students complete assignments. Communicating, collaborating and sharing knowledge between students and their teachers via email, forums, chat, blogs and even text messaging is common place now.
The path to the world of online learning is through websites that host learning managements systems where teachers provide course content and instruction. Sounds simple doesn't it? If you are a student with vision loss, chances of making it through the three barriers---website, learning management system and a course without moderate to great difficulty is nearly zero. Online learning environments are fraught with barriers. And that's not all. Access technologies, such as screen readers, have to keep pace with the rapid changes and growing complexity in order for content to be readily and easily understood. The student with vision loss is nearly always playing catch up. To get a feel for these problems, view this video collection from Utah State University. http://www.webaim.org/intro/#video
Next we will introduce three points as factors limiting access: limits in the design of learning management systems, the state of course content produced and assigned by instructors, and the inability of access technologies, such as screen readers, to keep pace with the rapid changes and growing complexity of online interaction and content formats.