Accessibility and Open Educational Resources

Challenge

The Babson Report mentioned previously in the Overview included in its findings faculty-reported challenges in locating and evaluating OERs as a barrier to their adoption, as was a lack of a centralized clearing house for OERs.⁶

Solution

As digital resources proliferate, the use of descriptive metadata has been increasingly standardized to facilitate the storage, organization, location, and use of these resources. For example, standard meta- (and micro-) data “schemas” are maintained by an international collaborative entity known as Schema.org. For a model of Schema.org’s standardized meta- and micro-data used to provide detailed information about a “book,” see this digital example.

Challenge

Of the respondents to a 2012 survey conducted by SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education at Open University) in the UK, approximately 89% worked in the higher education sector. When asked which accessibility features were deemed most important to them as they searched for OERs that could be used by the widest range of users, their collective responses highlighted the importance of alternate format availability, the ability to customize OER content, and the importance of features that would make the resource usable by individuals with sensory or physical disabilities (see graph below).

Solution

The emergence of accessibility-focused metadata has been supported by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), whose goal is to establish a process for its inclusion in educational resources to enhance their discoverability and describe their applicable instructional use (grade level; content area; and, soon, accessibility supports; etc.). Learning objects that are LRMI-compliant are designed to be searchable using standard web search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) and able to be compiled and commented upon at the Learning Registry, a federally-supported initiative. The primary purposes of the LRMI initiative are: (1) to enable educators and students to locate desired resources efficiently and accurately and (2) to ensure that information about learning resources and their usage is captured, collated, and correlated to other educational data systems (interoperability). OER aggregators such as OER Commons or MERLOT have committed to using all or most of LRMI’s metadata elements. As of January 2014, the Learning Registry has committed to using a set of Schema.org-approved accessibility-focused metadata developed by the A11Y Accessibility Metadata Project. For more detail about accessibility-related metadata, see this wiki entry.

The Learning Registry is also enhancing their EasyPublish Tool to include practical and unambiguous accessibility-related resource information based on A11Y standards.

It is intended that LRMI’s accessibility-oriented metadata elements will become widely adopted by both OER creators and sites that provide content cataloguing, aggregation, and search capabilities, since this uniform and detailed approach to OER identification could significantly increase the efficiency and accuracy of OER location for faculty and students alike. Further, by making accessibility information about an OER resource readily available, this effort will be a step forward toward addressing the needs highlighted in SCORE’s 2012 Survey.

This image by Benetech is licensed under CC BY 3.0

More image information

This image by Benetech is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Screenshot of LRMI Accessibility search box. Accessibility Information: feature; hazard, API, Control.

Challenge

In contrast to the range of options available to institutions for retrofitting a print work to increase its accessibility—digitizing via an inexpensive scanner and optical character recognition (OCR) software; sourcing from Bookshare, Learning Ally, or American Printing House for the Blind or other braille producers—few if any institutions have the knowledge or capacity to retrofit digital materials effectively in-house. A variety of federal education and civil rights statutes compel education institutions to provide equitable access to educational opportunities for students with disabilities, including access to technology-mediated opportunities.⁷ A 2011 Hewlett Foundation/Virtual Ability study reviewed 60 open college textbooks using federal and international accessibility guidelines.56% of these materials were web-based; 42% were downloadable PDFs. Nearly half of the web-based textbooks (42%) evidenced accessibility problems with page layout, headers, and tables; none of the PDFs reviewed were accessible.

Solution

On a positive note, products from OER aggregators Connexions, Flat World Knowledge, and Open Learn were determined to be moderately accessible. This study also noted that, functionally, digital instructional materials such as open textbooks could not be separated from their delivery medium: If a web site hosting the materials was inaccessible, then students with disabilities were effectively blocked from those resources. In an investigation with similar findings, the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities found that readily discoverable information about the accessibility of a product was available for approximately half of the open source products reviewed.⁸

Challenge

Smaller OER publishing operations may not offer materials with standards-alignment.

Solution

Some OER stakeholders provide online tools for OER classification Achieve.org.’s OER Evaluation Tool (now incorporated into OER Commons) and some purveyors of OER creation software offer utilities for faculty to align OERs to standard-specific expectations.

Challenge

In the OER space, editorial oversight is often accomplished via user reviews and other types of crowd-sourcing approaches.

Solution

Editorial oversight is a hallmark of savvy and responsible publishing, especially for content designed for postsecondary instruction. Authors who consciously design materials for the widest possible audience, including students with disabilities, are addressing variability from the outset and are more likely to monitor the orientation of their content for its balance.

Some states, such as Washington, Kansas, Utah, and California, which have actively moved to incorporate open resources as key instructional materials, have established editorial criteria and a review process for OER selection.

Challenge

In contrast to the instructional efficacy validation often required of commercial (print) textbooks and their associated instructional materials, research related to the educational efficacy of OERs is spotty at best. This may have to do with the informal nature of OER publishing and the associated lack of research-based distribution and procurement protocols, and it may be partially to do with the fact that OERs exist as only one component in the digital learning universe where content, delivery, data, and discussions are all part of the education process. This connectivist theory of learning postulates that digital learning requires both a learner and a learning community and that knowledge occurs at the intersection of the two as a distributed function. Reviewing the efficacy of OERs through this lens as well as in light of activity theory and social constructivism, Panke and Seufort have explored the importance of self-regulation and engagement as important factors influencing the success or failure of students using OERs. These researchers noted that OERs present distinct challenges for efficacy research and felt it was unlikely that a single theoretical framework or approach would prove to be sufficient in capturing both the potential and the liabilities of these resources.

Solution

There is little reported efficacy research information associated with specific OERs, the best approach to assuring that resources are felt to be effective and useful is to ask colleagues or students for their impressions. The Open Education Group Review Project provides a summary of empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption.

Challenge

The SIIA Report notes possible links between assessments and OERs. Fundamental to the field of assessment and progress monitoring, however, is the extent to which OER resources are designed to track user data or are interoperable with systems that do so—not simply end-of-lesson assessment information but real-time data tracking: student log on/off, activity dwell time, pathways, support/resource selection, etc. Without this rich trove of user information, fixed documents (like PDFs) are as inert from a research perspective as they are instructionally, and they fail to advance the understanding of which materials, activities, and supports are truly critical to the process of education. When this type of user/material interaction data is available it can be correlated to academic achievement outcomes using available tools of learning analytics.

Solution

Prior to adopting an OER for use, it would be important to determine whether the resource was a stand-alone product (similar to a printed textbook) that was not designed to be interoperable with a content management or delivery system. In this circumstance, it might be important to determine whether or not any assessments were provided by the OER author(s).

Challenge

The issue of keeping OER versions up-to-date also highlights the problem of OERs to remain topical and up-to-date. Many OERs are positioned as “one off” resources that become fixed in time and functionally unresponsive as regular updating is necessary to keep them current both in terms of their subject matter and their compatibility with new technology. This may become increasingly more of a challenge as OERs of this type proliferate and the original authors or other resources required to update them are simply unavailable.

Solution

Aside from the challenges presented by format compatibility issues and the capacity to access and render OERs across multiple operating systems, browsers, player software, and devices, the most flexible and scalable OERs are those that are also customizable and allow for the addition of region, state or content -specific standards that may be mandated by different municipalities.