Session 6: Accessibility and Inclusive Design (October 2022 C Cohort)

Textbook Success Program October 2022 C Cohort
1

Hello, @oct22-c-cohort ! I look forward to seeing you all Friday for our session on Accessibility and Inclusive Design. Here are the slides 1and handout.

As far as Accessibility and Inclusive Design,

  • What excites you?
  • What would you like to know more or have questions about?

Do you have any updates to share on any research/pre-thinking work done or collaborative efforts (i.e. meetings) completed on your projects since our 1-on-1 meeting two weeks ago? Just one person from your team needs to post an update.

Thanks and see you soon!

2

I am reporting for the Anatomy and Physiology I group.

Our group met this week and reviewed two concepts that will be on the forefront of making the OER resource: finding resources under appropriate Creative Commons licenses and developing Learning Outcomes using Bloom’s Taxonomy.

While ultimately LOUIS will stipulate which kind of Creative Commons license we will be using for our OER product, most likely the CC BY, it was informative to know that certain resources under different CC licenses can not be used together.

As we get ready to review some of the OER sources suggested in our group OER spreadsheet , we were provided with a rubric to consider when vetting a resource, especially considering online access to open content.

Our next meeting will be dealing with Universal Design, as well as addressing DEI, so the topic for this week’s TSP should be useful.

3

Hi Jonathan and A & P Team,
Wow, sounds like you all have made a lot of progress and are filling in that spreadsheet with resources that will be valuable. Also, that’s awesome that you are using Bloom’s to undergird the learning outcomes!

As for the licensing conundrum, collections and curations allow for a mixed bag of licenses:

“In specific use cases, it may be possible to combine content that has been licensed under a more restrictive license (SA and ND) that would not normally allow free remixing. For example, if you were to collect chapters from various OER books into one, these chapters may be able to carry their own licenses separate from the overall license on the book itself. If most of the content in the book were under a specific license, say CC BY, and there were a small number of chapters under a CC BY-SA license, it may be possible to license the entire book at CC BY so long as the license on those BY-SA chapters remained.” Source: CC License Compatibility – UH OER Training

When I went through the Creative Commons certificate course, that’s the way collections were also explained to us. I am not an expert, however, so I defer to those who might also have taken the course or webinars who might shed additional light on this common issue. :smile:

4

Hey @oct22-c-cohort ,

Thanks for a great session! As usual, here’s the chat transcript. We had a lot of great discussion today around accessibility, inclusive design, and how to apply these concepts to your OER projects and workflows. In the words of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha in their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

“When access is centralized at the beginning of every action or event, that is radical love.”

Below you’ll find a recap of the session and the homework activities for Week 6.

Recap

Accessibility is often thought about as just being for students with disabilities, but as we see it, accessibility benefits all. It’s about reframing accessibility as a proactive approach to designing inclusive teaching resources and experiences which are rooted in principles of care, humility, and social justice. Inclusive design, or the practice of inclusivity, is the belief that the design of a “thing” – whether it is a piece of technology, an activity, or even information itself – should be mindful of a broad range of users, their variable abilities, their variety of environments, situations, and contexts.

Access is one of the fundamental principles of the open movement broadly. Given OERs’ digital-first nature, this is all the more relevant as resources should not only conform to web accessibility standards, but they should also be designed with the human users in mind. In this way. we will think of technical accessibility, content accessibility, and even how this can extend into the accessibility of your human teaching interactions.

While no teaching technique or practice will ever be universally accessible for all, an inclusive education lens can be integrated into any and all approaches as long as you think about accessibility as an ongoing process that has you repeatedly cycle through the following three stages:

(1) Anticipating barriers and (2) finding ways to mediate these barriers (3) to enhance access for all.

We took a look at examples for the three dimensions of accessibility, namely:

  1. Technical Dimension:
  • BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit as a guide to help non-technical users make content accessible, including images, links, tables, multimedia, formulas, font size.
  • Accessibility Assessment To communicate to your users the results of an assessment undertaken towards the end of completing an OER.
  1. Content dimension:
  • Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies chapter 5 communicates outcomes and aligns the Iearning activities with the written content. As you will clearly see, the content Is informed by different social and cultural perspectives.
  • Business Writing for Everyone offers flexibility within every chapter, explaining to readers key takeaways and different methods to read the resource.
  1. Human dimension:
  • Building Democracy for All The introduction to this text will show you how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles have informed its design and Active Learning opportunities were incorporated to further engage the learners in unique ways.
  • Students and instructor users in the course/material/program evaluation and development processes, e.g. through adoption and user feedback surveys.

With forethought and flexibility, accessibility is built into the process of publishing. Try not to be overwhelmed. Take small steps because these small steps will go a long way. And remember you are uniting your efforts with other people within your teams, within this cohort, within your institutions or beyond. If everyone chips away at a small task, you’ll bring the resource leaps ahead. Ultimately, it’s about giving your resource the best chance to make an impact and difference for people.

Many of you noted that accessibility tends to make y’all more nervous than excited because you don’t want to exclude anyone. A reminder that none of you are doing this alone, and as @emily.frank mentioned in session, “we never reach the “finish line” with accessibility but that is because we can improving, enhancing, learning more”. Each one of you is thinking about the end results for your students in terms of each dimension of accessibility - so fear not, you’re all in a really good spot!

Homework Activity

Continue your team conversations around the accessible and inclusive design of your OER and work through the session activities [in Week 6 Handout] when convenient.

To let each other know of the progress you are making as you are working through the tasks of the week, post your reply to Session 6: Accessibility and Inclusive Design thread in the Discussion Forum prior to our next session if you have not already.

I’ll post the Session 7 info middle of next week.

Enjoy your weekend!

Amy

5

I am reporting for the Developmental Psych group.

Our group is excited about the possibilities for being more culturally inclusive in our textbook and future course, but will need to learn more about how the technical possibilities can make our materials more inclusive of students with varying abilities. The example of transcripts in videos used by students who either lack patience or the attention span to sit through a long video still enables them to learn the content despite not actually watching the video. There were some interesting examples quickly shown in our presentation today that the group would like to examine in more detail.
As for the OER Remixing worksheet and project summary template, the group is still working through those items. We hope to be done and ready to review them by Dec 16th.

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6

Thank you, @johannah.white , for checking in for your group! Transcription seems to be a prioritized accessibility piece for our students, so I’m glad you are thinking about that from the start. Yes, please examine those examples at your leisure and pick and choose the elements that pertain to your discipline or pedagogical style best. Great job on the continued work on the remixing worksheet and summary template–the latter is a dynamic document that will ebb and flow as needed. Have a wonderful weekend!

7

I am somewhat tardily reporting for the Physical Science Group. Our team had a productive discussion regarding accessible design (particularly captioning). We discussed hidden disabilities or differences and the importance of universal design for all people - not just those with a documented accessibility issue.

8

Report from Introduction to Criminal Justice Cohort. We had our first meeting with all members on Monday, December 5th. We are very aware of issues of accessibility and want to build our OER with inclusive design in mind. We are looking at various OER textbooks and other materials for our project. We have posted syllabi from our various colleges and universities that have course learning outcomes. We are currently reviewing these. Our group discussed adding local Louisiana content to our OER and we were in agreement that this would make the OER more interesting to our students.

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Great collaboration among your team, @psimek ! Narrowing down to those essential course learning outcomes can be tedious but important work. I love how you want to localize the content to Louisiana–your students will appreciate the extra effort your team takes in refining and personalizing the material. Thanks for the update!