Rethinking the accessibility of online higher education: A historical review

The rapid growth in online higher education, in terms of course offerings and student enrollment, has often been celebrated on the grounds that moving education online is an innovative way to increase the accessibility of university education. This article problematises a range of assumptions that underpin those claims. To do so, two concepts are deployed: “authentic accessibility” and “programmatic definition”, each of which encourages us to examine actual practice rather than aspirations. This article further deconstructs the commonly held perceptions of online education by presenting conflicting discourses about the purposes of distance education, the characteristics of distance students, and the technologies that have mediated distance education throughout its historical development. The findings highlight the increasing multiplicity of online education practices and realities, and the limitations of typical conceptualisations of those phenomena, which have historically conceptualised distance education as a single domain. The article calls for a more sophisticated approach to considering the quality of online higher education, a value judgement which continuously needs to be understood and discussed in relation to the complex and multi-dimensional issues of increasing the accessibility of university education.