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An accessible Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) environment should consider every learner's abilities, learning goals, where learning takes place, and needs for specific devices to facilitate the learning experience. Learners with accessibility needs can face difficulties in using certain technologies, and different MOOC designs may also affect their self-regulation skills, engagement, and communications with their fellow learners. Unfortunately, technologies and pedagogies used in MOOC platforms are not necessarily accessible. In the literature that the authors have reviewed, there seems to be a lack of understanding of what learners with accessibility needs expect from MOOCs, and studies that report demographic data of MOOCs rarely consider learners with accessibility needs. In this chapter, the investigations related to current state of accessibility of MOOCs are reported. The investigations involved conducting interviews with a range of stakeholders (providers and learners), analysing survey data, and conducting an accessibility audit. The results provide an insight into the understanding of how MOOC providers cater for learners with accessibility needs, motivations of learners participating in MOOCs, and ways to improve the accessibility of MOOCs.

As a part of Google-funded research programme, we have been investigating the role of Google Expeditions, a smartphone-driven virtual reality educational app, in learning and teaching. In this presentation, we will discuss the empirical derivation of educational affordances of Google Expeditions. Through case studies from our data, we will examine how these affordances facilitate inquiry-based learning, bridge virtual fieldwork with physical field trips in geography and science education, and support experiential learning via simulations.

A 3D virtual world, also called synthetic world, is a synchronous, persistent multi-user virtual environment, facilitated by networked computers, in which people, represented as avatars, experience others as being present in the same environment, or 'being there together' even though they are geographically distributed. In 3D virtual worlds users synchronously interact in 3D spaces via avatars, their graphical self-representations, and converse in real-time through gestures, and audio- and text-based (chat and instant messaging) communication. \ud Second Life is the most popular 3D virtual world in the education domain and is increasingly being used at the Open University (OU) in the UK and other institutions all over the world. Seminars, small-group tutorials, conferences, art and design workshops, role-play activities, and meetings are some of the educational activities that are being carried out in Second Life. \ud \ud Over the last eighteen months, our experiences of bringing in students and educators into Second Life (SL) have shown that there are four specific issues related to socialisation and skills development: (a) educators and students require training (via user guides and hands-on sessions) to use the SL software; (b) it is important that students gain communication and group-working skills for interacting with fellow-students and educators during educational events such as seminars and tutorials; this involves learning to use the group communication features of SL and to become acquainted with the etiquette and norms of SL; (c) educators require awareness of and training to use the various educational tools and functionalities within SL such as the Power Point presenter, note-card giver, survey tools, and so on; and (d) educators need guidance for designing and conducting course-related learning activities within SL.\ud \ud We have designed and conducted SL socialisation and training activities that have enabled us to implicitly facilitate the SL skills development of educators and students. In this poster we will present the different phases of students' and educators' skills development for interacting with SL software and within the SL environment. For each of the phases, we will present scenarios from our experiences on two OU courses over two presentations indicating what has worked well during our induction and training sessions, and the obstacles that we have faced.

Three-dimensional virtual worlds are multimedia, simulated environments, often managed over the Web, which users can ‘inhabit’ and interact via their own graphical, humanoid, self-representations known as avatars. 3D virtual worlds are being used in many applications: education/training, gaming, social networking, marketing and commerce. Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) is the most widely used 3D virtual world in education. Our research as well as experiences on two courses at the Open University has shown that it can be very challenging for an educator to design and conduct course-related learning activities in Second Life. There is currently little (formal) guidance for educators to assist them with the design and facilitation of learning activities. Most Second Life teaching and learning initiatives are personal initiatives in the sense that an educator or a team of educators have realised the potential of 3D virtual worlds in education and have adopted Second Life on some of their pedagogical activities in conjunction with other 2D tools (eg blogs and wikis) or the course’s virtual learning environment (VLE).\ud \ud For designing learning activities in Second Life, some of the questions that an educator or instructional designer may face are: How should Second Life activities be situated within the course to engage learners? How should the activities be designed to implicitly impart Second Life training and skills-development to students for using the Second Life software and for interacting within the Second Life environment? Is there a relationship between design of activities and design of 3D learning spaces in Second Life?\ud \ud In this paper, we report the results of a study in which we conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups with Second Life educators, designers and students. Based on this empirical research, we have derived design guidelines for educators and designers who are involved in designing learning activities in SL. In our presentation, we will specifically focus on the relationship between the design of activities and design of learning spaces within Second Life, and the corresponding effects on student experience and learning. We will discuss vignettes from the data to illustrate the design guidelines. We hope that our presentation will provide useful guidance and triggers for ideas to educators and designers who are planning to set up learning activities and spaces in Second Life.

Designing E-learning is a combination of pedagogical design, usability and information architecture. E-learning environments should have intuitive interfaces and clear information design, allowing learners to focus on learning. However, there is often a mismatch between what an on-line educator thinks the learner would learn, and what a learner thinks he will, and then has learned from the course. In addition, there is sometimes a mismatch between how an educator wants to teach and what is represented on the interface by the instructional designers. Such mismatches affect the learner's experience and his motivation for E-learning. In this paper, we will first discuss the source and nature of these mismatches. Next, we will discuss whether usability techniques in the HCI literature are appropriate for evaluating E-learning environments for the learner experience. We will then propose a combination of requirements elicitation and usability techniques for learner-centred design and evaluation of Web-based E-learning environments. The proposed methodology is based on our experience of conducting empirical studies for evaluating user-system interactions in E-Commerce contexts.

In this paper, we describe the introduction of a wiki for collaborative activities in a Requirements Engineering course offered at a distance to part-time learners. The paper describes the course and how wiki activities were incorporated. The paper then discusses the initial feedback from the students which shows that the wiki has been largely effective for developing students' understanding of the course concepts, the effectiveness of team working in Requirements Engineering and the use of wikis in practice. However, there are particular issues related to asynchronous working in distance education/eLearning that need to be better addressed. We conclude with a discussion of how we are tackling these issues and developing the use of the wiki on the course based on the students' feedbac

The goal of this workshop is to examine and discuss how educators and researchers can adopt and use social media tools such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), social bookmarking tools, photo-sharing sites (e.g. Flickr), or social networking tools (e.g. Facebook) in the service of their teaching and research, and, particularly, in engaging with students and other researchers. \ud \ud We will cover the following topics in the workshop:\ud a. A catalogue of social media tools that can support teaching and research dialogues\ud b. Tips for social networking\ud c. Digital professionalism for educators and researchers\ud d. Social media etiquette for educators and researchers

The Open University, Field Studies Council and Association for Science Education are conducting research into the use of Google Expeditions and other virtual reality tools to a) augment and extend field work experiences; and b) as an additional tool in the classrooms along with resources such as videos, photographs. \ud \ud The following aspects were discussed in this workshop:\ud \ud Does the virtual reality technology improve student engagement, and what are the implications for teachers?\ud \ud Think of one of the difficult concepts in Science: How could Google Expeditions (or Virtual Reality, in general) help you to teach that concept?\ud \ud How would you use Google Expeditions to encourage inquiry-based learning?\ud \ud What are the challenges that you would face in integrating Google Expeditions in your curriculum?

A technology-enabled learning environment should be easy to use by the students and should meet the learning objectives for which it has been included in the course/curriculum. Evaluating the student experience can help in determining the usability and pedagogical effectiveness of the environment. Conducting such evaluations can be challenging in a distance education programme where the students and educators or course designers are not co-located. In this tutorial, we will present a toolbox of data collection and analysis techniques that educators and researchers can apply to evaluate the student experience. We will also discuss the ethical considerations of conducting educational research.

We focus on exploring students' understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education. We report on the findings from a survey of 795 distance learners at the UK Open University, and interviews with course designers whose courses utilise blogs. Despite enthusiasm from educators, the survey revealed that students are not enthusiastic about the potential for blogging activities to be built into their courses. Analysis of students' open-ended comments revealed that some students have positive expectations about blogging facilitating the sharing of material and ideas, for example, whilst the majority expressed concerns about subjectivity. We also discuss some empirically derived guidelines that we have generated that will enable educators to provide the appropriate scaffolds so that students can appropriate blogging tools for their own individual learning needs.