Educational institutions often waste significant resources rebuilding foundational course materials that already exist elsewhere. This session, led by Sander Renes (TU Delft), advocates for a strategic shift from isolated development toward a model of collaborative reuse powered by Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Grasple platform. By leveraging Grasple’s open ecosystem, educators can share and scale high-quality materials across institutions, drastically reducing the maintenance burden. Drawing on TU Delft’s experience and Grasple’s student engagement data, we demonstrate how structured overviews drive actual student interaction rather than just content production. We will also explore how new technologies make this transition seamless. Participants will learn how Grasple’s Content AI digitizes existing materials in seconds, while LLM-driven syllabus comparison identifies curriculum overlaps and gaps instantly. These tools ensure that adopting OER is a fast, intelligent process rather than an administrative hurdle, allowing educators to focus on pedagogical impact over manual content creation.

This paper presents a collaborative project between the Access Office and the E-Learning Development Services Unit (EDSU) examining how students navigate and engage with support within the institutional virtual learning environment. As digital learning environments become increasingly central to the student experience, the clarity, navigability, and accessibility of institutional platforms play a critical role in enabling equitable participation. Recognising that accessibility must be shaped by those it is intended to support, the project adopted a co design methodology that positioned students as active partners in the redesign process.

Student partnership activities, including structured feedback and iterative review, identified key barriers within the existing Canvas environment. These included unclear pathways to support, inconsistent terminology, and navigation challenges for students using assistive technologies. This insight was integrated with established accessibility standards, Universal Design for Learning principles, and user interface and user experience design practices to inform the redesign.

The resulting changes led to clearer navigation, improved organisation of support information, and more intuitive access to services and resources. More significantly, the project highlighted how institutional terminology, structure, and assumptions can unintentionally shape digital exclusion. The work demonstrates how co design can surface issues that are often overlooked in staff led development processes and can generate solutions that better reflect the diversity of student needs.

This paper outlines the project’s methodology, key insights, and practical outcomes, and considers the wider implications for inclusive digital learning environments. It argues that accessibility must be embedded within the design of institutional digital systems rather than addressed through retrospective accommodation. The project offers a transferable model for cross unit collaboration and student partnership in the development of more inclusive, navigable, and responsive virtual learning environments across higher education.

References

Bovill, C. (2020). Co‑creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole‑class approach in higher education. Higher Education, 79(6), 1023–1037. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00453-w

CAST. (2018). Universal Design for Learning guidelines version 2.2. CAST. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/

Contemporary definitions consider mobile learning “..a learning approach that leverages mobile devices to enable learning across contexts through social and content interactions” (Garzón, et al., 2024). Mobile learning can provide learners with flexibility, enhance revision opportunities and support interaction (Asabere, 2013), and in doing so foster inclusion and reduce barriers to learning. However, challenges with mobile technology, such as its reliability and consistency, remain present (Kyslova, et al., 2025). A key mobile technology at Dublin City University (DCU) is the branded mobile app of the university’s virtual learning environment, Moodle. This app has been available to Apple and Android users for 10 years and has had a wide range of adoption across the student population. Given its presence in the DCU technology ecosystem for 10 years, the learning technologies team sought to evaluate students’ experiences of using the mobile app in early 2026. Drawing on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) theory (Venkatesh, et al., 2003), the team sought to understand students’ perceptions of the app’s performance, its ease of use, their expectations of it, the social influence exerted on them to use it, the support available to them, and more. Survey results were very mixed. Whilst most students had positive experiences of the app, a major contingent did not. They noted performance issues with the app, navigation issues, and challenges with how lecturers presented learning content and activities. Such issues present a danger to the inclusion and flexibility which mobile learning purports to offer. This paper will present the student views from the survey, as well as concrete next steps to address student challenges, and serves as a reminder to conference delegates of the importance of ensuring learning technology reliability for our students.

References:

Asabere, N. Y. (2013). Benefits and challenges of mobile learning implementation: Story of developing nations. International Journal of Computer Applications, 73(1), 23-27.

Garzón, J., Kinshuk, Burgos, D. and Tlili, A. (2024) ‘Advantages and challenges associated with mobile learning in education: a systematic literature review’. Journal of Computers in Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-024-00342-x.

Kyslova, M.A., Semerikov, S.O. and Slovak, K.I. (2025) ‘Mobile learning evolution: a decade of developments (2014-2023)’, Educational Technology Quarterly, 2025(2), pp. 186–208. doi: 10.55056/etq.25.

Venkatesh, V., Morris, M.G., Davis, G.B. and Davis, F.D. (2003) ‘User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view’, MIS Quarterly, 27(3), pp. 425–478. doi: 10.2307/30036540