New Program Promotes Access to Distance Learning

An increasing number of institutions of higher education are turning to distance learning to serve their students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. However, most distance learning courses are limited in accessibility and pose problems for full participation of students and instructors with disabilities. This is soon going to change.

The Southeast Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC), a unit of the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA) within the College of Architecture, recently received a grant from the Office of Post Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education for a demonstration project to enhance access for students with disabilities to distance learning courses.

“ The exciting thing about this project is that we are not just going to ‘make over’ a few distance learning courses, our goal is to provide training and technical assistance that can improve distance education practices nationwide,” says Robert Todd, Project Director for the grant.

Todd and his team will collaborate with two other centers at Georgia Tech: the Center for Distance Learning and the Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. Georgia Tech faculty will receive training on accessible course design, and these core faculty members will be funded to make existing and new distance education programs accessible to students with disabilities. Project staff will also work with the Georgia Tech Office for Students with Disabilities to raise awareness about the need for accessible distance education on the Georgia Tech Campus for both faculty and students and to evaluate the accessibility of the courses identified.

"While Georgia Tech will be used as an example of successful practices in accessible distance education, this information will be disseminated to other educational entities nationwide, giving them the tools they need to create their own accessible distance education courses,” says Todd.

The grant will also help fund a public-private partnership between CATEA and IDET Communications, Inc., a private company based in Atlanta, to develop a fully accessible ten-module online training course designed to increase awareness about disability and accessibility issues in distance learning.

Additionally, the project will work with Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) to develop voluntary standards and procedures for evaluating the accessibility of online courses and to include that information in the MERLOT database of online courses. MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students in higher education.

For more information on this project, contact Robert Todd at robert.todd@arch.gatech.edu.