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Increasingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having an impact on distance-based higher education, where it is revealing multiple ethical issues. However, to date, there has been limited research addressing the perspectives of key stakeholders about these developments. The study presented in this paper sought to address this gap by investigating the perspectives of three key groups of stakeholders in distance-based higher education: students, teachers, and institutions. Empirical data collected in two workshops and a survey helped identify what concerns these stakeholders had about the ethics of AI in distance-based higher education. A theoretical framework for the ethics of AI in education was used to analyse that data and helped identify what was missing. In this exploratory study, there was no attempt to prioritise issues as more, or less, important. Instead, the value of the study reported in this paper derives from: (1) the breadth and detail of the issues that have been identified; and (2) their categorisation in a unifying framework. Together these provide a foundation for future research and may also usefully inform future institutional implementation and practice.

It is widely acknowledged that graduates need to develop skills and competences beyond the theoretical knowledge nurtured within higher education curricula. In the last twenty years there has been an increased interest in supporting learners with work-based learning (WBL) (e.g. apprenticeships, practice-based lab sessions, project-based learning). The experience of COVID-19-related lockdowns has ignited a push to support and provide these opportunities for skills development online. In this systematic literature review, the authors explored (1) which innovative technologies and online WBL typologies are implemented in online WBL in higher education; and (2) to what extent there is evidence that online WBL is effective. From an initial pool of 269 studies identified from two datasets, the authors selected thirteen studies which implemented and evaluated online WBL. In total, 1,015 respondents were included in these studies (M = 84.58, SD = 118.28, range: 7-390). The authors' findings indicate that most studies used descriptive, qualitative approaches to explore the lived experiences of participants, mostly from Australia. Substantial differences were found in the designs of online WBL practices and technologies, although there was limited robust evidence of effectiveness due to a lack of evidence-based evaluation approaches. The authors encourage WBL researchers to be more precise in their design parameters of online WBL, and to consider (quasi)experimental designs to measure the impact of their approaches.

Administrative burden in education is a serious issue for disabled students. Form-filling and bureaucracy are ubiquitous in further and higher education, particularly for students who need to disclose a disability and arrange for accommodations and support for an equitable educational experience. Paradoxically, many of these processes are inherently inaccessible for disabled students, and yet completing them can be critical to their success. Artificial Intelligence has potential to alleviate some of the burden imposed by administration and bureaucracy; virtual assistants and chatbots can replace forms with dialogue, without placing additional strain on institutions. However, it is essential that solutions are designed in partnership with disabled students to ensure that students' needs are met, their concerns addressed, and the final solution is equitable for them. This paper explores a case study of participatory research with disabled students in a large UK distance learning institution, in which participatory research identified an issue of administrative burden for disabled students, and a virtual assistant was designed as a solution using participatory design. It shares the methodology and design process, explores findings from different phases of the research, and shares recurrent themes arising throughout the study. In doing so, it aims to provide a foundation for future participatory research to reduce barriers for disabled students.

This paper showcases relevant initiatives to address inclusive and sustainable development through the objectives of UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) towards ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. These research projects have been possible thanks to initiatives such as the global Open Educational Resources (OER) Graduate Network (GO-GN), a research network that facilitates collaborative research in the area of open education. These types of initiatives empower collaborative research proposals thanks to joint participation in working groups and seminars, which facilitate research collaborations with a clear focus, in this case, on inclusive and sustainable development. In this paper, several challenges on achieving a more inclusive and sustainable Open Education are discussed, such as the need to use accessibility metadata standards to improve the search and sharing of OERs in open repositories, the recommendation to use frameworks like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to provide inclusive design feedback, and the benefits of action-oriented Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to promote sustainability.

Professional development (PD) is a key element for enhancing the quality of academic teaching. An increasing number of PD activities have moved to blended and online formats, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the desire, potential, and need for collaboration among educators to learn from innovative and best practices, several institutions have started to pool their resources and expertise together and have started to implement cross-institutional and cross-national online professional development (OPD). The questions of what type of a (cross-)institutional OPD educators might prefer, and whether educators learn effectively from (and with) peers in such cross-cultural context have not been adequately explored empirically. In this case-study across three European countries, we explored the lived experiences of 86 educators as a result of a cross-institutional OPD. Using a mixed methods design approach our pre-post findings indicated that, on average, participants made substantial gains in knowledge. In addition, several cultural differences were evident in the expectations and lived experiences in ODP, as well as the intention to transfer what had been learned into one's own practice of action. This study indicates that while substantial economic and pedagogical affordances are provided with cross-institutional OPD, cultural differences in context might impact the extent to which educators implement lessons learned from OPD.

This paper outlines an innovative approach to evaluating the emotional content of three online courses using the affective computing approach of prosody detection on two different text-to-speech (TTS) voices in conjunction with human raters judging the emotional content of the text. This work intends to establish the potential variation on the emotional delivery of online educational resources through the use of a synthetic voice, which automatically articulates text into audio. Preliminary results from this pilot research suggest that about one out of every three sentences (35%) in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) contained emotional text and two existing assistive technology voices had poor emotional alignment when reading this text. Synthetic voices were more likely to be overly negative when considering their expression as compared to the emotional content of the text they are reading, which was most frequently neutral. We also analysed a synthetic voice for which we configured the emotional expression to align with course text, which showed promising improvements.

Studies using co-design methods require the meaningful involvement of stakeholders in creating new knowledge and harnessing, mobilising, and transferring existing knowledge to support comprehensive and long-term solutions. In the health sector, co-design methodology is seen as a way of supporting and engaging local communities in critical decision-making about their health. However, little is known about which specific co-design methods have been adopted, used, and implemented within health education contexts. To address this gap, this paper presents a literature review of co-design methods used to design and implement health education interventions. This rapid evidence assessment (REA) was carried out by identifying 53 papers categorised into four themes: methods, stages, stakeholders, and outcomes. We examined specific co-design methods used in health education stages to support the involvement of stakeholders, second, we reviewed the outcomes of the application of these methods. Based on the review findings, the paper reflects two areas: first, the review shows that there are a wide number of co-design methods being used to support stakeholder collaboration to design health care services as products and processes. Second, there is no clear way co-design methods are evaluated for their outcomes. This review of literature contributes an evidence base to support the future development and use of co-design in health contexts by organising relevant literature into coherent themes in ways that can inform future research.

Flipped classroom (FC) approaches have gotten substantial attention in the last decade because they have a potential to stimulate student engagement as well as active and collaborative learning. The FC is generally defined as a strategy that flips the traditional education setting, i.e., the information transmission component of a traditional face-to-face lecture is moved out of class time. The FC relies on technology and is therefore suitable for online or blended learning, which were predominant forms of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-July 2021). In this paper we present a systematic literature review (SLR) of studies that covered online FC approaches in higher education during the pandemic. We analyzed 205 publications in total and 18 in detail. Our research questions were related to the main findings about the success of implementation of online FC and recommendations for future research. The findings indicated that those who had used FC approaches in face-to-face or blended learning environments more successfully continued to use them in online environments than those who had not used it before. The SLR opened possible questions for future research, such as the effectiveness of the FC for different courses and contexts, the cognitive and emotional aspects of student engagement, and students' data protection. It pointed to the need to examine different aspects of online delivery of the FC more comprehensively, and with more research rigor.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are widely available and have become a common option for learners. However, their full potential cannot be realised if they are not accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. It is, therefore, important to understand the different stakeholders and their requirements and perspectives in designing accessible MOOCs. This research investigated the perspectives of MOOC providers on MOOC learners who have accessibility needs and the processes used to manage accessibility and MOOCs in their individual organisations. In this paper, we report the results of a study using thematic analysis, which involved 26 semi-structured interviews with MOOC providers and focused on MOOC accessibility. The results show that, while MOOC providers are aware of learners with accessibility needs who are participating in MOOCs, they prioritise legislation over learners' accessibility preferences. MOOC providers consider the technology of the platform itself creates barriers and are aware of the limitations for learners in finding help, reporting accessibility barriers and obtaining feedback, when participating in MOOCs.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning at distance universities suggests that this can be best achieved through understanding different roles and the options in planning for adjustments to be made. To effectively apply similar approaches to MOOCs, it is necessary to understand the various viewpoints and roles of stakeholders and how these impact on accessibility. This includes educators who create materials and facilitate learning, and technologists who develop and maintain platforms. In this paper, we report the results from a study involving semi-structured interviews to investigate the perceptions and accessibility-related processes of MOOC platform accessibility managers, platform software developers and designers, and MOOC accessibility researchers. Our results show the awareness that MOOCs can be valuable for disabled learners, and indicate that legislation acts as a driver for accessibility. However, our investigations suggest limited progress to date in either producing universally accessible MOOCs, or tailoring MOOCs to meet the needs of individual learners with disabilities.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have been the de facto standard for Web accessibility evaluation for more than two decades and therefore have been introduced into legislation and university curriculum in Computer Science. At The National Distance Education University (UNED) in Spain, we have been teaching the guidelines for the last 15 years but learning how to apply WCAG criteria is complex. In this paper, we present the results of the analysis of students' performance in applying accessibility heuristic evaluation of an online resource (a Massive Open Online Course - MOOC) using WCAG. The experiment was carried out over two academic years to evaluate how accurate and easy it is to understand and use WCAG criteria by trained students as well as their perceptions of usefulness to evaluate accessibility barriers using automatic tools in combination with manual evaluation. Results from the study show that errors identified are aligned with accessibility evaluation literature: 65% of success criteria in WCAG do not reach 80% of agreement among raters which confirms the complexity of WCAG conformance. In total 62 (86%) criteria are marked as not being correctly addressed by automatic tools with an overlap of those showing false positives, and 25 criteria (34%) are indicated as difficult to evaluate manually. While all areas where raters disagree are potential opportunities for WCAG improvement, this research reinforces that WCAG evaluations are complex and difficult even with current automatic tools, and that the possible solutions for the way forward are: (1) a well-defined evaluation protocol including a combination of automatic tools and manual evaluations; (2) better training and professional development opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring accessibility in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is essential to enable learners with accessiblity needs to fully engage in and derive benefits from online learning experiences. Prioritising accessibility in MOOCs not only adheres to principles of social inclusion but also amplifies the overall effectiveness of online education, creating a learning environment where all participants can thrive and actively contribute. However, there is currently a limited understanding of accessibility in MOOCs. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a systematic literature review of 20 papers, examining the current state of the art, and offers key recommendations for implementing accessibility. The findings highlight the importance of involving all stakeholders, including MOOC providers, course developers, and learners, in including accessibility in MOOCs by using co-creation and participatory design methodologies. This systematic literature review contributes to building an evidence base that can guide the development and integration of accessibility in online educational contexts by organising pertinent literature into cohesive themes that offer insights for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]