Work Streams

During the group meeting of 13 January 2016, we began to talk about identifying achievable activities that the group could focus on for 2016. Reviewing the minutes, it seems there is some informal consensus that these activities could be focused on two work streams. Further edits to this proposal were made following the meeting of 24 February 2016.

Workstream 1: Gap analysis of existing WAI documents

• Reviewing existing WAI documents for relevance to and coverage of accessibility in online education. (An inventory of Relevant W3C Resources on Accessible Online Learning has been started on this wiki).
• Proposing additions or amendments to existing WAI resources to increase coverage of online education
• Propose new resources focused on accessibility and online learning

Workstream 2: Documenting what the online learning community needs

• What is the scope of "online learning community"?
• What issues do stakeholders in this domain currently face when dealing with accessibility?
• How much commonality/diversity is there in issues faced by different sectors of online leaning community?
• What research activity in the area of online learning accessibility might influence needs of the community?
• What resources would help them most?

Reporting

• This Community Group cannot publish formal W3C documents under its terms of existence
• However, the work streams can document their progress on this wiki
• So we will need to liaise with W3C Working Groups to identify how output can best be presented in a way that it can be most useful to these groups
• Our first point of contact is the Education and Outreach Working Group (EO), so we'll liaise closely with EO to ensure our output is as useful and usable as possible

Are the two work streams parallel or linear activities?

• Having two workstreams would allow the second one (what the community needs) to move forward without being constrained by an existing collection of documents.
• Having two work streams allows people to choose to contribute to either a more methodical review of existing documents or a less constrained approach to defining what the community needs (and what we might like to produce)
• If the two work streams regularly reported on activities, say at monthly activities, we could ensure that activities are aligned.
• Both workstreams can make use of the WG introductory survey data, and any further survey data we decide to gather.

Progress

• The results of the online survey indicated approval for the two work streams, so this proposal is considered approved by the group.

29th July

• Workstream 1:
  • no further updates
• Workstream 2 has:
  • produced a list of accessibility information gaps identified as being present in the online learning space, and associated stakeholders
  • started to refine the list into a list of unique, succinct and valid information gaps
  • This list currently exists (as a work in progress) as a Google Doc, the address of which is available to any group member on request.