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According to the United States Census Bureau, over 57 million Americans, nearly one in five people in the U.S. population, report living with a disability. To make certain all your students can have a successful learning experience, it is important to take steps to make the online learning environment accessible. Here are 10 strategies for making your online course space accessible to all users.

A unique way to share information, images with hotspots offer online learners the opportunity to interact with course content. Learners can click or hover on particular parts of an image and receive pop-ups that give them more information. Hotspots represent information in a particular context; thus, they fulfill the multimedia principle—use words and graphics rather than words alone—and the contiguity principle—align words to corresponding graphics (Clark & Mayer, 2016).

This is the third in a series of pieces exploring different types of course engagement. This piece focuses on how course developers and instructors can foster student-student engagement in online courses.

The majority of online learners seek formal education for a multitude of reasons but can be frustrated by the lack of transferrable skills. Online education can bridge this gap by utilizing authentic activities, allowing learners to gain skills that directly connect to their professional lives.

The Third Space theory, introduced by postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, explores a transformative space where new identities and meanings emerge through the interaction of diverse cultural elements. This "third space" is characterized by hybridity, challenging rigid, binary notions of identity and culture, and emphasizing fluid negotiations between dominant and marginalized perspectives (Burke, 2012; Lin, 2014). Bhabha’s theory builds on Ray Oldenburg’s (1999) concept of the "third place"—an informal public space where people gather to form a community that is neither home nor work—and extends it into the realms of cultural and social discourse, creating a broader framework for negotiating power, identity, and cultural exchange (Bhabha, 2012). These third spaces can emerge in a variety of contexts, including both physical locations like cafés or parks and virtual environments such as online forums or social media platforms, making the theory applicable to both in-person and digital interactions.