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:
Thursday, April 27, 2017
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