Making eLearning Accessible For Older Adults
Educational opportunities are great resources for older adults. They give everyone opportunities to learn about themselves, make friends, and develop skills they might not have had time for during their careers. You can use specific optimization strategies that prioritize their unique needs to make your classroom or eLearning more accessible for older adults.
Why Older Adults Start Classes Again
Going back to school is something you can do at any age. Retirees may look forward to starting a class for numerous reasons.
They Want To Learn Fun Skills
Retirement gives people extra time. Your older students might sign up for your class because it gives them something to look forward to and teaches an interesting skill. Depending on what you teach, they might look forward to speaking Spanish fluently or exercising alongside your ballroom dancing videos.
They Hope To Advance Their Education
Some degrees might not have existed when your students were in college. They might not have had access to higher education, either. Some retirees also get certifications or degrees after being inspired by something later in their lives. You don’t need a 20-year career in front of you to pursue a new college education.
eLearning For Older Adults: Review Their Common Learning Barriers
Younger students might struggle in classes because they don’t know how to study. Retirees face other obstacles. Adjusting your teaching strategies for their age-related challenges will make your classes more appealing to an older demographic.
Neural Changes Affect Cognition
When people get older, their minds undergo physical changes. Blood flow becomes a greater challenge, and parts of the brain shrink [1], reducing a person’s typical mental functions. They may not problem-solve as quickly or have as much energy. The specific effects differ between individuals.
Their Bodies Need More Rest
Factors like weight and muscle density morph with time. Losing muscle mass can make a person feel weak [2], even while watching an online lesson. Older students may need more breaks or slower lesson plans because their bodies can’t maintain the same energy levels as young adults.
More Students May Have Depression
Research shows that global depressive disorder affects 10%-20% of older adults worldwide. The same experts note that underdiagnosis occurs in around 50% of cases, so the percentage of older students with depression in your virtual classroom may be higher than you realize. Age-related challenges, the passing of time, and other personal factors could hold older adults back from feeling as excited or engaged in their studies.
Using Digital Devices Is Challenging
While some older adults use tech devices to monitor their health [3] or reach personal goals, learning new technological platforms can take time. Retirees need more repetition to remember things as their cognition changes. Keeping that learning barrier in mind could inform how you structure online learning opportunities and make them more accessible.
Essential Elements For Designing eLearning For Older Adults
When you’re ready to create educational modules for a student body of retirees, merge your understanding of their age-related challenges with your expertise. You’ll create virtual lessons that inform, inspire, and encourage everyone who participates.
1. Readability
An older student body will have more diverse vision needs. Your lesson content should come with adjustability features. Let each user change the text size or contrast in pictures. Students may drop out if they don’t feel like their online classroom technology can meet their needs before lessons begin.
2. Pacing
Aging cognitive abilities present numerous difficulties in the classroom, especially for memory retention. While there are common signs [4] of memory loss you can look for—like asking the same question repeatedly—you can assist students struggling with slight challenges by changing your pacing.
If your teaching materials have shorter, scannable paragraphs, retirees may remember their lessons and finish their work with less effort. Your text-based modules will also double as study resources because each fact or topic will be easy to identify on the screen.
3. Accessibility
Although you’ll help your older students learn the technology they need for virtual classes, making those lessons accessible is crucial. Design modules with a straightforward platform that requires minimal clicking to access or submit content. Accessing the information with a single login portal also simplifies usage for retirees. They may learn their way around your digital classroom faster if there are fewer steps to memorize.
Strategies To Boost Their Academic Success
Once class begins, you can still modify your teaching style to help retirees through the semester. Remember simple strategies to empower everyone who signs up for your courses.
Suggest Assistive Technologies
Speak with your students individually if they show signs of needing help. You can mention the availability of screen readers and voice commands to make their virtual lessons more accessible. Speech-to-text apps help if typing is challenging. They might not know those tools exist until you say something privately.
Incorporate Different Resources
Reading and writing are fundamental parts of any classroom, but you can get more creative to help older students. Adding videos or audio modules to your course diversifies the skills your students need to learn. They may do better if they’re not trying to learn everything by reading text that’s hard to see. Changing the instruction resources also shifts how long everyone sits for your modules, which assists those with shorter attention spans [5] due to cognitive changes.
Create Classroom Reflections
Feeling a sense of community is a significant reason why people take classes in retirement. Forge relationships between your students with classroom reflections. You could create forums to celebrate everyone’s wins and encourage them to brainstorm their challenges together. Meeting twice a month for a video call on the same topics could help as well.
Older adults may not feel comfortable asking for help if they have spent decades not verbalizing their needs. Classroom reflections show how everyone’s struggling in similar ways. Your students may lose their potential embarrassment and ask for help more easily if they feel less alone.
eLearning For Older Adults Can Be Empowering
eLearning designers and teachers can change the educational world for older students. Implementing module creations, strategies. and real-time teaching methods will make any virtual classroom accessible for retirees. If they see their instructor adapting to their needs, you’ll quickly become a leader in encouraging the learning potential in older adults.
References:
[1] How the Aging Brain Affects Thinking
[2] What Do We Know About Healthy Aging?
[3] Older Adults and Smart Technology: Facilitators and Barriers to Use