Hello, @oct22-d-cohort! I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow for our session on Accessibility and Inclusive Design. Here are the slides and handout.
Hello @oct22-d-cohort! Thanks to those who were able to attend our Week 6 session on Accessibility and Inclusive Design. As usual, here’s the chat transcript. We had a lot of great discussion this week and it sounds like teams are progressing well at this stage. As a reminder, below the recap you’ll find the Week 6 homework activity.
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 web 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 looked at concrete examples for all three of accessibility dimensions in session, namely:
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Technical Dimension:
- BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit as a guide to help non-technical users make content accessible, including images, links, tables, multimedia, formulas, font size.
- *Building a Medical Terminology Foundatio*n We looked at Chapter 6 to see how alt. text for images and image descriptions are presented.
- Accessibility Assessment To communicate to your users the results of an assessment undertaken towards the end of completing an OER.
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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.
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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.
For some of you, this might be the first time you’re hearing about these concepts and considering them this deeply. It takes time to develop these skills, and it is a practice.
There is no expectation that you will immediately incorporate everything described here with the resources we shared. Check with your grant organizer if and what accessibility stipulations are to help you focus and put a plan in place how you will meet the requirements.
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.
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.
Weekly Deliverable: Share Team Progress Updates in Forum
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:
- What activities have you managed to complete this week?
- What resources have you found that guide your work?
- What challenges have you faced and what solutions have you found to address those?
Leave a few thoughts around the outcomes for Session 7: Content Creation [Read the initial 5 slides].
- What excites you?
- What would you like to know more or have questions about?
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This week the Philosophy cohort began discussions on accessibility in course design and what that might include for us. This will be discussed in more detail throughout the project, but it is good to start thinking about this now with an awareness going forward. One resource that has been invaluable the information provided by W3C(Introduction to Web Accessibility | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C ). The information mostly apples to websites, but the ideas are adaptable to what we are trying to create. Going forward we are looking at options for adoption that include primary sources. Thinking about how to include these items and how they will align with the project summary, and learning objectives is exciting because it offers the first window into what the completed project might actually look like (IE it becomes more tangible).
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This was my first session, so I was a bit confused. I am in the process of reviewing Sessions 1-5 and will view Session 6 again.
The World Regional Geography cohort is in the process of accumulating student learning outcomes, as a step toward selecting a final set.
We are also taking the next steps in examining and critically reviewing existing OER resources on our topic.
Our next meeting will be Friday this week.
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Human Geography Cohort
Weekly Deliverable: Share Team Progress Updates in Forum
What activities have you managed to complete this week?
TSP meeting with new HG members in meet-and-greet in breakout room
What resources have you found that guide your work?
Resources to guide work for Accessibility and Inclusive Design: Accessibility Checklist;
[https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/back-matter/appendix-checklist-for-accessibility-toolkit/\](Appendix A: Checklist for Accessibility – Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition)
Make your document or presentation more accessible - Google Docs Editors Help – google docs has accessibility help, too
The team likes the checklist so if we come across something new and different, we will add it onto our list.
The HG team is working on the SLOs.
Bloom’s taxonomy is very useful for SLOs Bloom's Taxonomy - Center for Teaching Excellence - The University of Utah
We are collecting syllabi to cherry pick great SLOs. Syllabi are being loaded into Google Docs folder
The HG team is working on the Discovery sheets, too. We have selected our textbook but will meet one more time to confirm our choice with the full team.
What challenges have you faced and what solutions have you found to address those?
Getting everyone together at the same time to discuss things.
Leave a few thoughts around the outcomes for Session 7: Content Creation [Read the initial 5 slides].
This is my personal reflection on Lesson 7:
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What excites you? reviewing pedagogical devices
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What would you like to know more or have questions about? how to create an authentic assessment. Aligning content in a data driven way is a bit intimidating.
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Our team meeting was delayed until Friday Dec 9.
Western Civ cohort is also meeting this Friday. However, in our breakout room last week we did discuss issues like universal design and accessibility barriers. I am looking forward in particular to adding more inclusive materials to our course, as Western Civilization textbooks and courses have historically focused on white westerners, and often excluded minorities and other marginalized individuals.
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Hi, all —
I’m new to the Human Geography group and spent time this week catching up on previous meeting recordings and talking with members of the cohort.
Adam
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Hi,
College Algebra Cohort has a team meeting today (12/6/22) at 4 pm.
See y’all soon!
I’ve caught up on last week’s recording, and I am always interested in the accessibility of documents since I post a lot of them. I type everything in Word, but upload them as pdfs (which get lower accessiblity ratings) because mobile still seems to not display equations! And students don’t even seem to be aware that stuff is missing…
For next week - Anything that makes content creation less overwhelming is exciting! There’s so much data available for statistics that it is hard to narrow down to specific examples.
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Kevin, I agree. Last year when we worked on World History we found that the textbooks were weighted in favor of the dominant culture and adding the under-represented voices really helped improve the overall material, focus and theme. “Western” civilization might be even more biased, but I think it is just as important to broaden out the focus and more fairly represent the history.