Online exclusion can take many forms and affect many different types of people, not just those with disabilities. In addition, not all potential exclusion is immediately obvious. Within the field of online education, barriers to full participation can occur for various different reasons.

Back in 2005, a survey-based study of student barriers to online learning (Muilenburg and Berge, 2005) identified eight types of barrier:

• Administrative/instructor issues
• Social interactions
• Academic skills
• Technical skills
• Learner motivation
• Time and support for studies
• Cost and access to the internet
• Technical problems

A review of barriers to learning during the first year of the Covid pandemic produced similar results (Bastos et al, 2022). It reported lack of planning, lack of resources (including limited access to devices and poor Internet connectivity), usability problems (including inadequate screen resolution and poor audio quality), and limited opportunities for interaction between learners and educators.

This discussion step prompts you to share your own experiences of being excluded from an aspect of online education. Perhaps you’ve dropped out of a course because you felt overwhelmed by the number of participants. Maybe the use of high-resolution video has been incompatible with the speed of your internet connection. Perhaps you found a requirement to regularly participate in discussions too time-consuming. Maybe you felt the imagery and examples were too far removed from your life or that the course perpetuated harmful stereotypes.

Whatever your experiences, if you are comfortable to do so, share them here with other learners. What were the consequences of your being excluded from online learning? What did you do about it? How could the situation have been improved? Has your experience as a learner affected your own teaching practice?

Discussion area

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