8. iLRN Illuminators’ Forum — episode #8: Accessibility as Infrastructure, Interoperability Governance, and the Structural Future of Immersive Learning; (February 13, 2026) – with Noah Glaser

iLRN ILLUMINATORS FORUM #7

The weekly scanning forum supporting the iLRN Immersive Futures — State of XR & Immersive Learning 2026 report

Episode Title: Accessibility as Infrastructure: Governing Interoperability and Designing for All - (If access fails at the platform layer, who is actually excluded?)

YouTube Recording link: [To be added]

Friday, February 13, 2026
10:00am Pacific | 1:00pm Eastern | 18:00 UTC

Forum Host: Jonathon Richter
Special Guest: Noah Glaser, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Learning, Teaching & Curriculum — Learning Technologies & Design,
College of Education & Human Development, University of Missouri
and iLRN Doctoral Colloquium Chair for multiple conferences

Purpose

To convene educational leaders and immersive learning professionals around a structural shift in the field:

Accessibility is no longer a downstream accommodation. It is becoming a design baseline — a systems requirement shaping interoperability, governance, and institutional strategy.

Evidence of these structural frictions is visible across multiple layers of immersive delivery pipelines — from hardware and platform architecture to content design, identity systems, analytics, and institutional procurement frameworks.

This episode situates accessibility within platform architecture, co-design philosophy, and emergent cultural practice — advancing disciplined sense-making in support of the 2026 State of XR & Immersive Learning report.

Media

Live webinar + recording + Codex forum discussion

Narrative Frame

Across education, access barriers are rarely singular. They are structural:

Platform incompatibility and data portability gaps
Hardware and bandwidth limitations
Content design and interaction mismatches
Identity and profile fragmentation
Institutional procurement and policy constraints

Immersive systems that do not account for these variables risk exclusion by design — a pattern documented in accessibility research across XR modalities and instructional contexts. Addressing these barriers systemically has become a Learning Engineering challenge, rather than a human sociotechnical one. XR accessibility scholars note that barriers can arise in content development, assistive technology support, hardware deployment, and instructional integration cycles unless deliberate design frameworks are applied.(RTL Berkeley)

The 2025–2026 iLRN signal landscape identifies a clear shift:

Accessibility is moving from accommodation to canon.

Not as rhetoric. As infrastructure.

Special Guest

Noah Glaser

University of Missouri

Dr. Glaser brings design research experience in immersive learning systems, video games, AI, and VR grounded in interdisciplinary inquiry and practice. His work spans educational interventions that support cognitive, engagement, and identity-based variability across learner populations.(College of Ed & Human Dev)

In this session, he will help frame accessibility not as an add-on, but as baseline design logic, particularly where co-design models engage creators with diverse lived experience as design contributors — not merely subjects of study. Glaser's work co-designing with people of varied abilities and perspectives is demonstrative of reflexive design practices that scale and work for the whole learning population. This approach aligns with emerging inclusive design frameworks that treat accessibility as a systems outcome rather than a compliance hurdle.

Questions we will explore include:

What does it mean to embed accessibility in the architecture of learning ecosystems?
How does one go about co-designing with varied groups without disrupting traditional production pipelines?
What evidence suggests that generalized access barriers appear at multiple levels of XR delivery?

This conversation invites research-informed dialogue without scripting conclusions.

Signal Volley #1

Interoperability & Platform Governance

Accessible learning collapses when platforms don’t interoperate. Fragmented identity systems, credential silos, and inconsistent assistive configurations degrade learner continuity.

Governance questions follow:

Who ensures continuity of learner access across systems?
How do standards bodies and institutions align around interoperability?
What procurement policies reinforce or undermine inclusive ecosystems?

Accessibility at scale requires interoperable architecture supported by shared standards — not isolated feature add-ins.

Signal Volley #2 (2025 Trend)

Innovation in Unregulated Spaces

XR tools now appear in contexts where regulatory frameworks never anticipated them — informal learning networks, decentralized creator platforms, AI-XR hybrids.

When innovation outpaces governance, access norms become platform-dependent and variable. Institutions must decide how to engage — and what norms to advocate for — in environments where standards are emergent or absent.

Signal Volley #3 (Early 2026 Horizon)

Emergent Cultures & Plural Ontologies

Immersive environments cultivate distinct participation norms and micro-cultures that shape engagement patterns, interaction heuristics, and shared meaning-making.

Accessibility intersects here too:

Whose interaction norms become default?
How does design encode cultural assumptions?
What new ontologies are forming in XR spaces that influence learning pathways?

Educational leaders require cultural literacy alongside technical foresight.

Why This Episode Matters

For immersive learning professionals, the question is not whether accessibility is important. The question is whether it is treated as:

Retrofit or baseline
Architectural logic or feature
Governance responsibility or optional practice
Institutional performance metric or compliance checkbox

Accessibility as infrastructure aligns with interoperability, procurement policy, platform governance, and quality assurance.

It is not a special-interest issue.
It is a systems design issue.

🗓 [Insert Date]
⏰ 11:00am Pacific · 2:00pm Eastern · 7:00pm UK

🎙 Illuminators’ Forum – Episode #8
🎓 Special Guest: Noah Glaser

This forum convenes researchers, designers, institutional leaders, and practitioners committed to disciplined collective scanning and responsible field-building.