One of the recurring issues that came up in my last class was the need for e-educators/designers to think about access limitations that our participants may face. Specifically was the idea of not including too much or any at all multimedia into courses. The reason was not everyone has access to broadband connections and many still are using dial up. Perhaps that is a Canadian realm though. We certainly don’t have broadband access everywhere and friends of mind that are only 2.5 hours from Toronto only have dial-up. (Mental Note: If you know any Canadians, you know we measure distances here in the time it takes to drive somewhere, so 2.5 hours equals about 150 miles.)
I found it strange that we were learning how to make course material more interactive and more engaging, however we were being told to avoid multimedia (video, sound, etc). Well I just read a lovely article from Pew Internet/American Life Project which reports that:
- “47% of all Adult Americans have a broadband connection at home as of early 2007, a five percentage point increase from early 2006.”
- “Among individuals who use the internet at home, 70% have a broadband connection with 23% use dialup.”
While they report that broadband use has not continued to grow as rapidly as previous years, in fact it’s growth rate has decrease, it is still penetrating the market while dial-up is slowing disappearing.
What a wonderful world to imagine if everyone could have “instant” access to all the internet has to offer.
Pew has some great reports that come out frequently and recently had an interesting on on teen cyberbullying as well a few weeks ago when that was a common thread on blogs.