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>>Narrator: Sheryl Burgstahler shares historical highlights
and tips to create accessible online learning activities.
[Music]
>> Sheryl Burgstahler: I’m going to share with you
a little bit about access to online learning,
what instructional designers and faculty members need to know.
Often when I’m talking about this topic,
faculty members will say, "I don’t have enough time,"
and then, if it’s not that, "I don’t have enough funding."
That gets some support.
"And I don’t have enough technical support for me."
Well, what I can come back with, politely, of course,
is there are some things that we can all do.
We don’t need to do them all at once.
We can do them incrementally but make our courses accessible.
That led to this particular publication called
20 Tips For Teaching An Accessible Online Course.
And so I’m going to go through that a little bit.
It’s part of our AccessCyberlearning project,
one of our resources for other projects.
And I’ll just step back for a minute, back to 1995.
I actually taught the first online course
here at the University of Washington.
That’s kind of a little known fact about me.
It was in 1995 and I’m still shocked to this day
that they hired an 18-year-old girl
to be offering these courses!
[Audience laughs]
But I was quite precocious so, I offered the class
with Dr. Norm Coombs at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
He and I had been giving talks on accessible technology
around the country
and the University of Washington had a very extensive
distance learning program, all based on the postal mail system.
And so they mailed out things including videos to students.
And they proctored their exams in proctoring centers
around the country
so it was pretty elaborate what we had here.
And I wanted to make sure, my kind of somewhat hidden agenda was
I wanted to make sure these online courses
would be accessible to individuals with disabilities
but I also was kind of curious if you could really deliver a class online
that was anything close to what you could do onsite.
Particularly something like assistive technology,
which usually people touch things and manipulate things.
So I recruited Norm Coombs to teach this class with me,
Adaptive Technology for People With Disabilities.
Now back then, for those of you that are old enough to remember,
people communicated using email and we had discussion lists, email-based,
and we had a Gopher server - Gopher from the University of Minnesota, of course.
It was kind of an online catalogue system, all text-based.
We’d get into a little outline of your resources,
and then it would link to resources around the country.
And we actually received an award for having the most comprehensive Gopher server
for people with disabilities in the world.
And I don’t know if we had any competition.
But anyway, that was our course library.
Then we used Telnet,
which allowed us to log onto NASA and other big computing systems.
The students had to actually learn a different language
to correspond with these systems, with each one,
because they developed their own interface.
And then we used File Transfer Protocol to move files around,
to get images, whatever, that we wanted to move around.
So it was pretty basic technology.
All the materials that we had we put in text format.
You kind of had to. It was on Gopher.
So we did that.
We did use postal mail.
We mailed out publications, we mailed out videos.
DO-IT was around.
We had already made some DO-IT videos on VHS tapes
and they were captioned and audio described, believe it or not.
And we mailed those out to the participants in the class.
We kind of got the class pretty much together.
I gave them Norm Coombs’ resume
and they approved him as an instructor here at the University of Washington.
And then it sort of came out in the meeting one time
when we were talking about proctoring exams
and I said, "Well, we really can’t do proctoring exams
in these different locations because people write those out longhand
and Norm Coombs is blind so he won’t be able to read those
if they’re not in electronic form and I’ll have to grade all those myself
and I’m really not interested in having to do all that work.
Or we have to hire somebody to go over to RIT and read to him."
Now I have to say that the program people were not amused
by the fact that I kind of dropped this idea,
this piece of information about Norm Coombs being blind.
I thought it was a little bit humorous and I really didn't think
it had anything to do with them accepting him as an instructor
even back in those days.
And so they allowed us to go forward with this
and we offered this course to be fully accessible
and the distance learning program kind of the end of the first time we offered
it
she said, "Well tell me, Sheryl, I mean after all this work,
how many people with disabilities even took this course?
So how do you even know if it's successful?"
And I said, "Well I am proud to say we have absolutely no idea
how many people with disabilities took this course.
Because we just designed it to be fully accessible."
No one had to disclose.
So they weren't exactly amused but we continued to teach that class.
But I'm happy to say our first class was fully accessible.
In applying universal design to online learning,
we provide multiple ways to gain knowledge, interact, and demonstrate knowledge.
We have this publication that we've created on
20 tips for teaching an online course that is fully accessible
to people with disabilities.
Nine of the tips are about webpages and documents, images, videos;
and the other 11 are instructional methods.
And when I'm working with faculty who are reluctant to admit
that they might be able to adopt some accessible technology practices,
I ask them to really take the challenge of selecting a few of these
to make their courses accessible.
And it really points out how the faculty need
to work with the technology people
but also the designers in developing their online courses.
And I'm going to go through these fairly quickly.
But just to kind of give you an idea
of what things we tell faculty members and designers
to look for in online learning.
Providing clear and consistent layouts and organizational schemes.
That is something that every instructor should do
to present their material clearly.
Of course those layouts should be apparent to someone who is blind.
So we structure the headings to make sure that someone can access them
using screen readers and see organization of the content
rather than just dumping a bunch of text that would have to be read
from the beginning to the end.
So this faculty member would also use descriptive wording for hyperlinks.
Since someone using a screen reader might want to tab through
and go to each one of the web resources on a page
so they could see where they want to start
or whether they want to go to those resources at all.
And so if you use the wording on each of your underlined text,
"click here,"
that person is going to be able to read all those no problem
but what they will read is
"click here, click here, click here, click here."
In contrast if you provide descriptive wording that's underlined,
that link might say "DO-IT website."
Then, that person would know what they're going to be linking to
and can decide then if that's where they want to be.
A very simple thing.
This doesn't take any more time than putting the "click here" there.
But it makes it accessible to people using screen readers.
PDFs, kind of tricky.
We can make them accessible but you have to ask yourself,
why again was I creating that PDF?
Sometimes you're forced to do it
because it's a PDF that's out on the internet.
But if you're creating a lesson or even your syllabus in your online class,
do you want to include that as a PDF file
or do you want to cut and paste the content right into the
learning management system itself into that window so it is text
and then use the features within Canvas or what other system you're using
to structure the headings so you've made it accessible that way.
That's what I do.
The text descriptions of the content when images are provided.
Whenever there is an image that's presented, you just describe that text.
And some learning management systems actually prompt you to do that.
So you're reminded but even if it doesn't,
you can put that in.
So sometimes people will say,
"Well, but it's just a little logo here.
It doesn't mean anything.
Why do I have to have the text description?"
Well the person who's blind and trying to access your course
doesn't know that that image doesn't include anything really meaningful.
For our DO-IT website, we have on our logo on our website we have "DO-IT logo"
as an alternate text for that image.
Some people say we should describe what it looks like.
Other people would say it doesn't really matter what it looks like
but it's important that a person who is blind knows that it's a logo
that they do or don’t need to pay attention to.
Using large bold fonts on uncluttered pages with plain backgrounds.
With the PowerPoints we’re using, we're assuming that their vision is such
that it's difficult for them to see the content
and so we just automatically provide large bold fonts
on uncluttered pages with plain backgrounds.
High contrast color combinations.
You usually can figure this out on your own.
Sometimes you go to a website and it's light green on dark green.
It's like what were people thinking about that?
And to avoid the problematic ones for those are colorblind,
so red and green, for instance.
There are resources on the web actually that you can test some of these things
so it's not hard to find.
Content and navigation is accessible using the keyboard alone.
Sometimes there's not a lot you can do about that
if it's the product that you're using is the problem.
But if there are things that you have control over,
then you need to be aware of that.
But it's important to kind of remember that, that issue,
and to continually work like say
in this Canvas work group that we have going nationwide
to give input to Canvas creators and others about the inaccessibility of something
So it's good to kind of know that.
Make sure that the videos are captioned and audio described.
Captioning first. Audio described is important, too, but as I said
if you're creating your own video, often you can create it in a way
that it's fairly accessible for people who are blind right from the beginning.
That is going to take some technical support probably.
You can read the content on our Accessible IT website
but you might have to have somebody help you do that.
Make sure that your course is designed for a wide range of technical skills.
This is another thing that doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to do this
but so often we’re used to using the technology that we’re using
and we don't tell students how to use it.
We have to remember that even if you have some tech savvy students in your course,
they might never have used that product.
This might be the first Canvas class that they've taken.
So providing a little overview of the technology you're using
to deliver that class and where they can get help,
just include that in the syllabus or in early instruction in a lesson or two.
Make sure the content is presented in multiple ways
and so if you're using a video in the class,
make sure it's captioned.
A transcript is nice but I also recommend
that you provide sort of a different version of it
because we present content differently when we're writing
than is presented in a video.
So many of our videos have a handout connected with them online.
I guess it's not a handout but it's a publication with that content.
But it's written in a way that you normally would write that content.
And so just because you have a video doesn't mean you shouldn't do that other,
and that can be within your lesson in a class or it can be a separate document.
So that's providing that content in multiple ways.
Acronyms and jargon, we talked about that.
Make sure you spell them out or don't use them. And define them.
Instructions and expectations.
Make sure that they're really clear.
Sometimes putting content in the syllabus
that maybe years ago I would've maybe given later.
I’d think maybe this assignment’s only going to take a week
so I'll give it in the middle of the class.
Well maybe it's going to take somebody longer than that
so give them the assignment at the beginning.
They shouldn't be penalized for actually working ahead.
Even if they can't do all parts of it they can at least be thinking about it
in terms of what you’re teaching. And make the expectations clear.
Use a rubric or use other techniques
to make sure they know what they're supposed to be able to produce.
Make sure that examples and assignments are relevant to a diverse audience.
And so just sit back and think about it. You don't have to survey your students.
You can just think of a variety of people that might be accessing that class.
It might be an older student. You've got male and female students.
You might know that people from a lot of different disciplines take your course
whatever it happens to be on, so try to have a few examples
of a concept that might appeal to a different audience.
Make sure that outlines and other scaffolding tools are provided
so that's what would apply to online learning.
Be sure to provide adequate opportunities for practice
so in an online class sometimes I would have something required like required reading
and then if I think some people might want to have more instruction
or it might be just a little diversion of what we're talking about,
then I put in all caps the name of that lesson
and in parentheses "optional"
and so that is a cue for someone who wants to do a little bit more,
feels like they need more practice or a little more information.
But I’m not requiring that all the students do that.
People have different levels of knowledge coming into your course
but also different learning styles
and it might take them longer or a shorter period of time
to learn something
but also people require, some require more practice than others.
Provide adequate time for activities and projects and tests.
A lot of this as I said can be solved by just putting it in the syllabus.
Another thing that I've done in teaching online learning
is asked the program managers
if I can open my class a week before it really starts.
And I've always gotten permission for that.
It makes it more difficult for the instructor, I'll say that,
because you've got students who start early and move forward.
Well, I figure that's my problem.
And so I don't want to discourage people from moving forward.
Maybe they're going to be really busy in a couple of weeks.
So they want to get ahead but
I make it real clear what discussion we’re on
and when we're discussing certain topics
so they have to kind of stay with the class in that regard.
And I always send out a notice to the whole class
saying "I opened this class a week early so you people can get started.
If you haven't started you’re not behind.
We're starting today."
And so I kind of don't let the class get away from me
even if I’m letting some students work ahead.
Providing feedback on parts of an assignment
and corrective opportunities
and so if you're assigning a big project for a class
to at least invite students
to give you a draft of what they're going to do
and you can give feedback on it or part of it say you're open to that
or you can actually build it into the assignments
and say everyone has to turn in an outline or whatever
by such and such a date.
So the students don't have that experience
where they finish the whole project and then you look at it and say,
"Oh they didn't understand what I was asking for."
And for options for communicating and collaborating
and for demonstrating learning so sometimes you can just give students options
and say the test is going to be three different choices.
You can present your knowledge in three different ways.
Or projects - the same thing.
You can give them options for what project they want to do
or another way to do it is to have just multiple things throughout the course
so because sometimes you want everybody to do things in a certain way.
So you want projects and you want to have short answer tests
and you want to have true and false and multiple choice and whatever it is,
or students creating videos or whatever you have in the class.
Just make sure there's a variety so that if someone isn't very good
at one of those things, they can still end up doing well in the class.
So that's just a simple overview of what you can do in an online course
to make it more accessible to students with disabilities.
Not too difficult and not too technical.
And what I challenge faculty members to do then,
particularly the ones that say, "Well, I just don't have time to do this,"
is to look through here and circle a few things,
circle a few numbers of things that they can do like right away.
And no one has trouble finding them, but even if you just did a few of these things
given you aren't doing them already, it would make a better class.