Accessible learning management systems in higher education

Abstract

Within a research project at TU Dortmund University/Germany a new learning management system (LMS) will be developed. This research project “Degree 4.0 – Digital reflexive teacher education 4.0: Video-based - accessible - personalized”, particularly works with videos to foster reflexive teacher education – provided via the learning platform. Due to the increasing diversity of the student body, accessibility and full participation need a greater focus. Even though, technology and digital media have the potential to foster participation in higher education, this potential cannot be exploited, when accessibility is not considered in the development. In order to gain insights on accessible digital learning platform, in advance of the development, expert interviews were conducted. It became evident that all student interactions on the platform need to be accessible, according to the WCAG guidelines. Additionally, when using videos to initiate reflexive learning, these videos and all related tasks have to be accessible, too. Especially the online editing software and functions need careful considerations. A learning platform, providing such interactions needs to support different screen modes, e.g. with the option to see the given task and the own progress, simultaneously. Furthermore, the videos must have captions and audio description, which may pose didactical challenges: the audio descriptions need to include all important aspects without giving away possible solutions. Overall, the learning objective needs to stay in focus; thus, the editing itself should not be too complex and be done step-by-step.