MOOCs for allevaluating the accessibility of top MOOC platforms

Laburpena

Nowadays, experiences with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are being part of modern engineering degrees, thusproviding practical interactive activities to improve teaching-learning strategies with online courses and social communitylearning with peers from different countries. Additionally, this MOOC movement is being identified as a valuable tool toprovide engineering education to all students, including students with disabilities that for different reasons cannot be partof a face-to-face session and, naturally, have the rights to make use of this myriad of teaching-learning strategies. In thissense, if a teacher wants to develop a MOOC course or to recommend a course to his students, it is imperative to identify thebest accessible platforms in order to provide inclusive learning strategies. The aim of this study is to analyze the accessibilityof a selection of eight popular MOOC platforms: Coursera, edX, Udacity, MiriadaX, UNED COMA, Udemy,Futurelearn and NovoEd. To this end, three automatic accessibility evaluation tools have been used: eXaminator, FAEand Tingtun. Hence, it has been checked the degree of conformance of these platforms with the Web Content AccessibilityGuidelines (WCAG) created by the World Wide Consortium and adopted by ISO as an international standard. The studyhasbeen complemented witha heuristic evaluationbyexperts in order to havea holistic perspective of MOOC accessibility.The idea behind this study is that the stakeholders in the teaching-learning process will be able to identify and select themost inclusive platform based on the international standards. Moreover, the technical staff in educational institutions willbe provided with a procedure to identify accessibility issues in other platforms and engineering teachers will be aware of thepotential obstacles that students with disabilities may experience. The results of this study identify edX and Futurelearn asthe best MOOC platforms. Finally, conclusions and future work ideas are presented.