Rethinking the accessibility of online higher education: A historical review

Abstract

The rapid growth in online higher education, in terms of course offerings and student enrollment, has often been celebrated on the grounds that moving education online is an innovative way to increase the accessibility of university education. This article problematizes a range of assumptions that underpin those claims. To do so, two concepts are deployed: -authentic accessibility‖ and -programmatic definition‖, each of which encourages us to examine actual practice rather than aspirations. This article further deconstructs the commonly held perceptions of online education by presenting conflicting discourses about the purposes of distance education, the characteristics of distance students, and the technologies that have mediated distance education throughout its historical development. The findings highlight the increasing multiplicity of online education practices and realities, and the limitations of typical conceptualizations of those phenomena, which have historically conceptualized distance education as a single domain. The article calls for a more sophisticated approach to considering the quality of online higher education, a value judgement which continuously needs to be understood and discussed in relation to the complex and multi-dimensional issues of increasing the accessibility of university education.

Everyone already has their community beyond the screen: reconceptualizing online learning and expanding boundaries

“…Instructional theories and strategies developed and utilized within this regime focus extensively on enabling student-to-student interaction and on building learner communities online (Garrison and Arbaugh 2007;Stahl, et al 2006;Swan 2002Swan , 2009Thompson and MacDonald 2005). In this context, where notions of ''collaborative'' learning and learning ''community'' have gained substantial legitimacy, other beliefs about meaningful learning (including the one of the student above, who actually participated in this study), are likely to be severely criticised or, at best, simply neglected (Lee 2017;2018). These matters are not merely concerns for theorists, but have influence and consequences for practice in higher education (HE).…”

A Learning Analytics Approach for Evaluating the Impact of Interactivity in Online Video Lectures on the Attention Span of Students

“…Online video lectures have been successfully used for supporting face-to-face learning (Boton & Gregory, 2015;Brecht, 2012;Kinash, Knight, & McLean, 2015;Whatley & Ahmad, 2007;Wieling & Hofman, 2010), as well as in-class learning, e.g., when there is a need to show students visual elements (Ostashewski, Reid, & Ostashewski, 2016). However, online video lectures are not a silver bullet solution for solving the challenges of online learning (Geri, 2011;Guri-Rosenblit, 2009;Lee, 2017).…”

Open Praxis vol. 11 issue 1

“…Distance education is an increasingly common experience in society today (Allen, Seaman, Poulin, & Straut, 2016;Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2018;Lee, 2017;Means, Bakia, & Murphy, 2014;Ortagus, 2017;Watts, 2016). noted that 28% of college students in the United States alone take online courses each year.…”