Using Blended Learning to Support Community Development - Lessons Learnt from a Platform for Accessibility Experts

Blended learning, mixing both online and face-to-face learning, is now a well established trend in higher education and also increasingly used in companies and public sector. While preserving direct contact with the teacher/trainer, it also provides additional electronic channels to easily share training material and to support interactions among all actors. This paper focuses on specificities of adult training such as their goal-orientation, the higher level of practicality and the higher level of collaboration. We also deal with the explicit goal of building communities where learners are progressively sharing their growing experience. Our work is driven by a real-world case study. We report about how generic e-learning tools available on the market can be adapted to address the needs of such a use case and also present some lessons learnt.