Monday 19 May 2008

Week 10 Access and Equity

I did a bit of research; unfortunately there is not much out there. So I am just going to talk about my own point of view on “Access and Equity”. Bronwyn, Leigh and whoever is reading my blog, feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

When I first saw those two words, I thought they are the two advantages of being a flexible learner. Variable accessibility gives learners the freedom of “when, where and how” to learn. Equity gives everyone an equal chance to be educated, especially when people have other commitments that occupy most of their time and energy.

Then by looking at Australian Flexible Learning Framework on the "Access & Equity in Online Learning" project. I realized, equity can be also applied to those learners who have literacy needs or with disabilities. It makes me rethink about my project. My project design is to give the support for those tutors and students who think they need to improve/consolidate their maths knowledge. But due to the scarcity of the resources, the support weren’t always there for them. If I/we can develop this open space for these students, using a discussion board, messenger, online quizzes with answers and some animated demonstrations for problem solving. All students from Polytechnic have the access to this space and all contents will be in plain English, so will be straight forward even for ESOL students. Maybe we can develop the software that produce sound while playing the animation or read out the quiz questions for some of the students who have difficulty reading.

1 comment:

Leigh Blackall said...

I like that you are mentioning the word "open", and hope you'll extend it to people generally, not just students at Otago Polytechnic. By that kind of open you not only service the needs of Otago Poly students, but potential students or people who find access to Otago a problem somehow. Of course, open but online has another level of access problems for those who cannot reliably access a computer on the Internet, so even better if your resources could be designed in such a way to work on and offline.