As online education becomes more commonplace (IBISWorld, 2021), there is a need to better understand the experiences of students/SX with a range of disabilities in the online context, and how these can be improved by Higher Education Institutions/HEIs, to account for a diversity of perspectives within the education sector. The concept of SX, derived from the perspective of customer experience (CX), is based on the premise that students are users of HEI products, systems and offerings (Matus, Rusu, & Cano, 2021). Since the core higher education (HE) experience is considered “a learning experience that is the co-creation of the people within the university – between students, students and teachers, students and administrators” (Ng & Forbes, 2009, p. 40), improving this experience can strengthen the relationship between students and HEIs, boost student engagement (Dollinger et al., 2018), and increase satisfaction and retention rates (Pansari & Kumar, 2017). Moreover, a positive educational experience can transform student perceptions, facilitate conceptual understanding, yield emotional qualities, and nurture the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes (Hinchliffe, 2011). Online education has been shown to have significant benefits for students living with disabilities (SWDs), yet the online educational experiences of SWDs have been largely overlooked. This session introduces Experience Territory Matrix/ETM as a strategic tool aimed at helping institutions review their experiential offerings (Batat, 2022) to capture and refine not only SX, but also what the HEI is doing to impact these educational experiences. Derived from the ETM, three types of educational experiences that SWDs encounter in their online journey ( i.e., enchantment, re-enchantment, and disenchantment) will be showcased and contextualised via the psycho-emotional model of disability (Higgins, 2020). Such approach assists in identified varying degrees of both enabling and disabling factors (including perceived student-customer orientation, respect, experience quality, structural barriers, and internalised oppression). Overall, the fusion of selected frameworks enables to capture various components of SX of SWDs as learners, people, and customers. By applying the above approach, educators can add value towards designing student-centric and engaging SX, where SWDs treated with respect and benefit from a high student-customer orientation, hence, creating empowering online learning environments.

Speaker: Svetlana De Vos

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2024

• Date of Conference: 23-25 July, 2024
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2024.0008
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-65-5
• Conference Location: Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada