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MOOCs for all: Evaluating the accessibility of top MOOC platforms

Abstract:

Nowadays, experiences with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are being part of modern engineering degrees, thus providing practical interactive activities to improve teaching-learning strategies with online courses and social community learning with peers from different countries. Additionally, this MOOC movement is being identified as a valuable tool to provide engineering education to all students, including students with disabilities that for different reasons cannot be part of a face-to-face session and, naturally, have the rights to make use of this myriad of teaching-learning strategies. In this sense, if a teacher wants to develop a MOOC course or to recommend a course to his students, it is imperative to identify the best accessible platforms in order to provide inclusive learning strategies. The aim of this study is to analyze the accessibility of a selection of eight popular MOOC platforms: Coursera, edX, Udacity, MiriadaX, UNED COMA, Udemy, Futurelearn and NovoEd. To this end, three automatic accessibility evaluation tools have been used: eXaminator, FAE and Tingtun. Hence, it has been checked the degree of conformance of these platforms with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) created by the World Wide Consortium and adopted by ISO as an international standard. The study has been complemented with a heuristic evaluation by experts in order to have a holistic perspective of MOOC accessibility. The idea behind this study is that the stakeholders in the teaching-learning process will be able to identify and select the most inclusive platform based on the international standards. Moreover, the technical staff in educational institutions will be provided with a procedure to identify accessibility issues in other platforms and engineering teachers will be aware of the potential obstacles that students with disabilities may experience. The results of this study identify edX and Futurelearn as the best MOOC platforms. Finally, conclusions and future work ideas are presented.