Accessibility – how do we move beyond text and videos in low-engagement circumstances?

Hi from POD 5. Our interactive learning resource will be a comprehensive guide to sustainability while living in Victoria. For one of our learning activities, I plan to show our learners a couple of Youtube videos outlining the problem with recycling in general (often, products just get downcycled). In the same lesson, I will explain some unique attributes of the recycling system in Victoria and talk about some general info about our waste system. To make this learning activity, I plan to have text and videos, but for the assessment, I plan to integrate a voice memo option to describe aspects of Victorias waste system and list some general ideas that were surprising or interesting to the learner. Likewise, our learners will be asked what one thing they would change within Victoria’s waste system if they had the chance is. I am particularly excited about this last question because it will hopefully engage the learner to reflect on their own potential to make a change if they think there is a problem they could help fix.

I hope to push further into the accessibility of this lesson as we create our draft. One of the significant inaccessibility of online education is that it can be boring, and only encourage low-level thinking and reading. I think the face-to-face online discussion is one of the best ways to create engagement between learners, but this isn’t always an option. Our learning resource is made to be asynchronous, so it will be difficult to have any real-time conversation. It also depends on the types of learners are taking the online course; if the learners are simply trying to ‘check a box’ on their transcript, then it might be more difficult to engage them wholeheartedly. In contrast, if, for example, the learners is taking the course out of interest or because they want to work in a career related to the field, it might be easier to see the direct value of the course they are taking.

I think this problem of engagement is a critical one, and strongly pertains to the topic of “accessibility”; if learners have a hard time concentrating or motivating themselves to work, an online resource which is asynchronous may simply not be the best option. Alternatively, if barriers are present for in-person engagement to classes, then synchronous online classes, with real time engagement such as polls and conversations, may be a better choice.