Global Accessibility of Higher Education: Using ICT to Build a Worldwide Campus

Academic degree programs suffer from many accessibility issues that risk to impair the right of study. The first limiting factors concern economic and logistic problems: students could not afford paying for tuition, fees, accommodation and they have to find a difficult tradeoff between study, work and personal needs. Disabilities give rise to further barriers against access to higher education. Web-based distance-learning provides a partial answer to the above problems, but it implies, in its turn, digital divide issues. In addition, linguistic diversity, policy constraints and information asymmetry limit the global accessibility to cross-border education. In this paper we present a web-based worldwide campus model conceived to grant global accessibility to academic degree programs. We present the model, we discuss its application to an undergraduate degree program in applied computer science, and we point out its benefits and drawbacks in terms of accessibility.