Accommodations in an Online Environment

Reflect on your experiences with your students. Think of a situation in which online education may have been a preferable option for one of your special needs students or a student with an extenuating circumstance. 

Many regular education students can benefit from taking online courses, but online learning also presents significant challenges for students that are not used to work independently or that lack of a good work ethic and good time management.  This can also be applied to students that receive special services.  For some of them, online education would not be a preferable option, but it could be the ideal learning environment for certain students with special needs.

I once had a face-to-face student who had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, which was mild enough for him to be able to attend regular classes with the supports and accommodations provided by his IEP.  Although he managed to keep up with my course content, he clearly struggled anytime we did an interpersonal communication activity or anytime he had to present his projects to the class.  He also seemed to be overwhelmed when students work in small groups because the level of noise in the classroom was significant higher than during whole-group instruction.

Taking all these factors into consideration, in my opinion, the online setting would have been a more ideal option for my student.  Because of his autism disorder, his struggles in a large classroom setting could have been avoided by giving him the opportunity to access the course content and show its mastery through online education.  There is a variety of multimedia built within LMSs that he could have utilized to reduce his anxiety level during interpersonal communication tasks and presentations.

Also, the fact that in online courses there are no distractions or over stimulus like in the face-to-face classroom would have also helped my student focus more on the content, perhaps even allowing him to engage in more enrichment opportunities.  This is another way in which he could have certainly benefited from the online learning environment: the flexibility of having all the course content available to him anytime, anywhere.

Having said that, I can foresee a few challenges that my student could have encountered in an online classroom.  For example, he would have probably become overwhelmed having access to all the assessments and due assignments, particularly at the beginning of the course when very little content has been covered.  I would have probably had to put in place restrictions or release conditions so that he could view all the course content without having access to the assessments.