4.3. Survey results – the experience of students with special needs with online learning

- More affordable devices must be provided. Devices such as tablets or computers to be connected to should be less expensive and governments should give households incentives to buy them. All the involved actors must have suitable devices to follow a lesson remotely in the most comfortable way. This is even more relevant for students with special needs as they must use complementary tools or software to fully participate in the learning process. - Diverse modalities (telecourses, TV, radio/podcasts, online courses) should be used to provide flexible and accessible learning experiences for students in remote areas (Eder, 2020). As we will see later, the resultd of the survey will show us that the need for a different approach toward media is well considered in students with special needs. - Planning for educational material (content, methodologies, and common goals) and eLearning platforms by using interactive suitable digital learning resources (video, animations, quizzes, and games) to maintain students’ attention. While there are large possibilities in selecting technological platforms for learning, content management is left in teachers’ hands and there is no real encouragement or training to support it. - Feedback and strategies for communication for digital education assessment need to be created. As reported by Mukhtar, Javed, Arooj & Sethi (2020), the lack of student feedback is significant, and teachers should communicate consistently and often with students so that they do not feel isolated and confused. This is extremely relevant especially for students with special needs. These experts emphasised that a community of learners and teachers can be built by increasing “human” cyber interaction. - A blended approach should be used whenever possible to reinforce a feeling of community, improving social interaction and collaboration among learners and between learners and teachers. - More inclusive tools, platforms and devices considering different web content accessibility guidelines (e.g., WCAG 2.0) need to be developed in order to make digital learning resources accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities.

4.3. Survey results – the experience of students with special needs with online learning

In this part of the chapter, we present the results of the survey that was carried out at the end of 2020/21 academic year among university students. During this academic year, the instruction was fully online. Overall, 254 students of the University of Economics in Bratislava