Course Syllabus

ADA for Online Learning

ADA for Online Learning is a self-paced, competency based course that provides a basic understanding of how the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to course design and online education.

About this Course

This course is designed to give learners a baseline understanding of the laws that govern ADA compliance as they pertain to online course design, particularly Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The majority of the course focuses on the most common potential problem areas for students with various disabilities and how to address them proactively in the course design and content creation processes. The learner who masters the concepts in this course will be well equipped to anticipate and mitigate challenges that learners with various disabilities face when they encounter electronic media.

Note that the purpose of the course is an understanding of the requirements and practices of creating accessible content, not the techniques for doing so. Due to the wide variety of content creation methodologies (different LMS's, different software suites, different browsers) it is impractical to try to cover the techniques for every possible scenario. However, the Additional Resources section of the syllabus provides a good starting point for researching the "how" of accessible content generation.

Course Outcomes

In this course, learners will…

  1. Identify laws that govern accessibility in online learning;
  2. Analyze the accessibility of text in an online learning environment
  3. Analyze the accessibility of images in an online learning environment
  4. Analyze the accessibility of audio & video in an online learning environment
  5. Analyze the accessibility of electronic documents

Course Structure

The course consists of 5 modules. Each module contains:

  • an introduction;
  • lessons;
  • self-checks;
  • a post-test.

Additional Resources

As this course provides an introduction and high level view of various accessibility concerns, there are times that learners may wish to delve further into a topic to increase their understanding. In order to facilitate this, below are helpful resources, organized by course module.

Module 1: Why ADA Matters

Module 2: Text

Module 3: Images

Module 4: Audio & Video

Module 5: Documents

Course Summary:

Date Details Due