If online learning works for you, what about deaf students? Emerging challenges of online learning for deaf and hearing-impaired students during COVID-19: a literature review

Abstract

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, educational systems worldwide were abruptly affected and hampered, causing nearly total suspension of all in-person activities in schools, colleges, and universities. Government officials prohibited the physical gatherings in educational institutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Therefore, educational institutions have aggressively shifted to alternative learning methods and strategies such as online-based platforms-to seemingly avoid the disruption of education. However, the switch from the face-to-face setting to an entirely online setting introduced a series of challenges, especially for the deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Various recent studies have revealed the underlying infrastructure used by academic institutions may not be suitable for students with hearing impairments. The goal of this study is to perform a literature review of these studies and extract the pressing challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing students have been facing since their transition to the online setting. We conducted a systematic literature review of 34 articles that were carefully collected, retrieved, and rigorously categorized from various scholarly databases. The articles, included in this study, focused primarily on highlighting high-demanding issues that deaf students experienced in higher education during the pandemic. This study contributes to the research literature by providing a detailed analysis of technological challenges hindering the learning experience of deaf students. Furthermore, the study extracts takeaways and proposed solutions, from the literature, for researchers, education specialists, and higher education authorities to adopt. This work calls for investigating broader and yet more effective teaching and learning strategies for deaf and hard-of-hearing students so that they can benefit from a better online learning experience.

Keywords: Accessibility; COVID-19 pandemic; Deaf and hard of hearing; E-Learning; Education; Literature review.

Fig. 1

Overview of publications filtering process

Fig. 2

Word cloud of the titles of the selected papers

Fig. 3

Overview of literature taxonomy of the selected research papers in our dataset. It highlights the methodology used and the targeted user group

Fig. 4

Distribution of publications across countries

Fig. 5

Overview of types of dataset used across 20 studies