Online learning creates a number of opportunities for disabled people to get an education. But often when we design for online learning, we tend to reproduce disadvantages that are present in the physical world or we create new barriers. This is often out of ignorance. There are experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic that we should learn from, both good and bad. We did a work on that in a learning community of people with cognitive impairments. It resulted in recommendations for online collaboration:
Johansson, S., Jonsson, M., Gulliksen, J., & Gustavsson, C. (2025). User participation in co design – Requirements for accessible online collaboration: an exploratory study. Behaviour and Information Technology, 3001, 1–16.
Being able to study from home and adjust your learning activities to parts of the day when you can perform at your best is a huge opening for many people. The asynchronicity is an important aspect. At the same time, the level of dropouts are higher in online learning. One really positive thing with the ONL course is the “blendidness” in the online setting. Our meeting two times a week really created a bond at the same time as we could organise our own learning activities in-between meetings. So blended learning don’t have to be a mix between online and physical activities. It could rather be a blend of synchronous and asynchronous online work.
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