What is the Approach?

Article Contents

Who is Currently Excluded?

All learners potentially face barriers to learning. These can be seen as a product of a mismatch between the needs of the learner and the learning experience and environment.

Learning needs that affect learning can include:

Some learners are more constrained than others and are therefore less able to adapt to the learning experience or environment offered; for this reason the learning environment or experience must be more flexible. To learn more about potential learner constraints, read the Floe user states and contexts work.

What is Accessible?

An accessible learning experience (or OER) is a learning experience that matches the needs of the individual learner or the learners within a group. Thus a resource cannot be labeled as accessible or inaccessible until we know the context, the learning goal and the learner (or learners). An OER may be accessible to one group of learners and not another. See Accessibility principles for more information.

How Do We Achieve Inclusive Education?

Inclusive education or accessibility is achieved by a sufficiently diverse and flexible pool of OER to address the diversity of learners, as well as a way to find and deliver resources that address each learner’s individual needs.

OER can meet the legislative and policy commitments to accessible education by expanding the pool of resources to include derivatives that meet the needs of learners who cannot access the currently available resources and by designing resources that can be easily reconfigured. This will also make OER more accessible to learners who speak diverse languages, have diverse educational backgrounds, or have diverse cultural perspectives.

The Floe project is working with OER projects globally to create supports to enable the delivery of inclusive learning using OER.