Problems with usability and accessibility

Problems with Usability and Accessibility

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Thursday, April 27, 2017 Post 311

What needs to be done when a Working Adult Student (WAS) or any other traditional student in higher education is having trouble with the course content and the cognitive, learning-driven balance it needs to show for them? If

usability in course content and balance is meant to imply easiness in use of the content for a course and if accessibility is the possibility of material being accessed by all learners, having trouble with any of these two college education constructs will alter the logical balance for a WAS and how s/he is to cognitively interact with it for learning purposes; consequently, this “ill” situation must be corrected to aid them in their learning process.

How could this “ill” situation affecting WASs (and any other student) be solved satisfactorily to foster deep learning through usability and accessibility?

First of all, course material that is provided for learners in a course needs to be adhered to the principle of usability. Material must be representative of what is being addressed in a F2F classroom or while the students is interacting with the course content on a virtual environment; it needs to have epistemological meaning and specificity within the discipline in which it is used and where skills

and competences are meant to be developed. Moreover, material, which does not favor learning, does not use the principle of transferability and durability. For instance, if a mindmap is rather confusing than helping learners recall information to be used for application, analysis, synthesis or evaluation, then this map violates the principles of transferability and durability, and it will not help a student learn or even just recall information that can be used –initially- in the classroom and –later on- in their future jobs. If readings are long and questionnaires meant to help learners comprehend them are vague, then we encounter problems with specificity and representativity and lacks real epistemological meaning for what the learner is studying and its applicability to his/her future or current job.

Secondly, material that is provided for students in a course has to be linked to the principle of accessibility. As a faculty member at a private university in my home country, I have seen learners trying to find books, material, mindmaps, software, and the like for their course homework, term papers, projects, and so on, material that was supposed to be available for them from day one onward since it was included in the course outline. Through my many years in college settings, I have been appointed to teach courses in which the material is not available for learners in the campus library, or at least in the copying center when this material has been designed and developed by other professors. As a proactive faculty member, what I have done many times is to either have the material ready for students to get it at the university photocopying center (which I rarely do), or what I try to do is to have the material ready to be downloaded from the university’s Moodle platform. In this way, I have provided accessibility of the material to every single member of a

course directly from their Moodle accounts, just one click away, and tried enhance usability from day one onward.

To sum up, if there are problems with usability and accessibility, they must be fixed at once, and not just for WASs but for any other traditional student taking the same course with adult learners. To be sure that these college pillars are met, here you have a simple checklist to use or to have learners provide you with some feedback: Pillars Accessibility

Principles Material available at college library  YES  NO Representativity:

Usability

Material represent what needs to be studied  YES  NO

Material available to be photocopied  YES  NO Epistemological Meaning: Material is based on the major content  YES  NO

Material allocated in the college CMS  YES  NO Transferability: Contents in material favor learning and comprehension  YES  NO

Material easily spotted on the Web  YES  NO Durability: Material helps build basic and fundamental concepts  YES  NO

Material easily spotted on databases  YES  NO Specificity: The data is pertaining discipline studied  YES  NO