11119

11119

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

NOTE: This session will be conducted in Second Life. TO ACCESS this session: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/UHawaii%20COE/136/52/22

**Accessibility and Distance Education**
Davilla Riddle, University of Hawaii - Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA, driddle@hawaii.edu Thomas Conway, University of Hawaii - Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA, tconway@hawaii.edu Pulelehua RuthMarie Quirk, University of Hawaii - Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA, rmq@hawaii.edu

Accessibility and Distance Education describes a 3-D virtual world instructional unit created in Second Life (SL). The instructional unit provides information for educators on how to make distance education more accessible to those with special abilities or those with one of the major categories of disabilities – visual, hearing, motor or cognitive. The instructional unit was built on an SL island owned by the University of Hawaii, College of Education. Three phases of the project showcase the following: topics surrounding the definitions and issues of accessibility for online education, media tools that can be used for online learning, and digital tools that can be utilized for multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) like SL. The target audience for this unit is faculty members at post-secondary institutions involved in distance education programs.

Novice, Intermediate, All Audiences distance education, accessibility, Second Life, virtual learning