We're on a worldwide search to see what inclusive education looks
like. So Blackboard Ally is going on tour for 2019, visiting campuses
around the globe to learn how they're tackling their toughest
accessibility challenges, and improving the learning experience for
all their students. Welcome back to another episode The Blackboard
Ally Tour podcasts series. After about a four hour drive down Highway
55 from the College of DuPage. We have arrived at Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville. Just outside of St. Louis, and we're here
with the team recording our seventh and final episode of the 2019 Ally
Tour. It's been amazing to connect with campuses all over the world
and we're sad to be wrapping things up here for 2019, but we're very
excited to be here on the campus at SIUE where diversity and inclusion
key pillars to their institutional mission. We spent the morning
watching the line at the Starbucks grow with students. We set up camp
there, demoing alternative formats on a big touch screen with the
team. Is really cool to see students getting excited about having
options to engage with their learning materials. Seeing the enthusiasm
that the team demonstrated in connecting with those students. So now
we're going to sit down and hear a little bit more about their journey
with Ally, how they're thinking about accessibility, what's going on
on the campus to support their diverse students. So let's hear from
the team. So welcome, everybody, to another episode from the Ally Tour
podcast series. I'm here at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
with the Information Technology Services Team. I'm going to let the
team introduce themselves. But we've had a great day so far. We were
promoting alternative formats to students at the muck, giving out swag
and discovering a lot of students were aware of the alternative
formats icon. We're clicking that and we're excited to see that they
could get their content in different formats so I'm going to let the
team who's been supporting the roll-out here on campus introduced
themselves starting on my left. Jodie Nehrt, Instructional Designer
with the SIUE School of Nursing. Emily Keener, Instructional Designer.
Jennifer Albat, Instructional Designer. Laura Million, Instructional
Designer. Niki Glick, Application Support Trainer. Jonathon Coons,
Instructional Designer,. Mathew Schmitz (Assoc Director of Online and
Blended Ed). All right. So you've got a big team that's doing some
great work. So first, just looking back, maybe historically, how has
the university thought about accessibility what had been some of the
processes for supporting students with disabilities on campus? It's
changed a lot in the last couple years. Earlier, we spoke with Dominic
Dorsey, who's a director at our access unit. That unit is transformed
over the last 3-4 years and they're much more proactive reaching out
to students to help them in any kind of situation they find themselves
in. Test-taking or in-class combination anything like that. So it
really is different now in campus than it was back in the day. There
was as a few years ago. As recently is that and tools like Ally have
really been help to our group I think to get involved in that
initiative or to those actions that we're. What's in the kind of the
motivator behind that brief freshing? I know they underwent like a
whole name change. So what's been motivating this move to a more
inclusive culture? Well, the office had staff change. I think that's
where the name change came from. But also, there are more
institutional goals around inclusiveness and diversity. I think that
has something to do with it. As far as web accessibility, that's maybe
a newer priority in the past several years, just as we use more
technology at the university and use it to support our students. I
think before maybe our physical spaces were more of a priority and
they still are now, obviously but Web accessibility is definitely
coming to a forefront. In course design accessibility has always
obviously been a concern for us and something that we want to educate
faculty on. It's just not always been at the forefront of faculty
thoughts, and Ally has definitely helped us start that conversation
with faculty and help us educate them on what accessibility means and
doing universal design for learning with chops. I think, too, that
individuals have played a real role in helping push Ally and encourage
more people to utilize access, for example, Emily is the Access
Employee of the month and Jennifer is the SIUE employee of the month
and they've helped make SIUE have large strides in improving those
service. That's a good point. The junior workshops that you did then
pointed Emily. Actually she did open a pull up of eyes in terms of
accessibility for faculty and not really thinking about it in terms
just as like, it's just close captioning, its not things just like so
that it may help whole conversation back there on campus for courses
like conversations. I think like pinpointing faculty who are already
doing this good work and know a lot about maybe, for example, we have
a faculty member over in Applied Communications Studies who his
research is in accessibility and learning and communication and so
just identifying those people once we have a workshop like that, they
come do it. They're already passionate about it. Now we know them. Now
they know each other and then we use that to help each other and
spread the word. That way, it's not just one person's research or one
person in an office caring about something. We're all starting to talk
about it together. Yeah, that's definitely something I hear a lot.
That communities of practice approach really allowing champions to
emerge and influence others and train others and things like that. It
seems like it's such an important process of that culture shift. So
you talked about this shift towards a more digital deliveries, using
the LMS. So you're all working with a variety of instructors. What are
some of the challenges that you see? For example, you're working in
the nursing department. So when you think about accessibility in that
context, what are some of the barriers, some of the challenges that
you see in course designing that space? Well, that was one of the
initial conversations we had, was the general thought of all school of
nursing students have to meet so many specific physical requirements.
So accessibility isn't necessarily the highest priority all the time.
But there have been some students who have registered with access and
now are requesting accommodation. It's making the whole school start
to think maybe needing more proactive, as Matt was saying, instead of
just reactive because it is a lot of work to be a reactive process for
increasing accessibility. So working with nursing instructors to talk
about things like it's not necessarily physical concerns but even just
accommodating our working nursing students. They need more flexibility
in the way content is delivered so that they can access the
information when they need it, where they are, whether that's on their
break in the hospital, break room or wherever. So being able to say,
well, this will help your students if they have to sit in a busy break
room on the phone trying to study, here are some Ally. Alternative
downloads is a good resource for them in order to have some
flexibility there. Anybody else who's working with different types of
faculty, different disciplines, what you're seeing as far as, how are
the courses here? Are we looking fully online, is there hybrid, is it
face to face where they're using the Blackboard LMS is a file
repository? What do you see across the board? All across, all of it.
Yeah, I think one overall trend is the use of scanned PDFs. I think
that's maybe an overall trend in higher education and maybe it's a
residual of the paper document coming online. But it's a big problem
and I think that's across the board is the use of scanned PDFs and
then our worker, no one is doing a remediation, but doing the
education, that explain other options and other ways around it. I
think Ally does a good job of providing guidance on that. You know
that faculty can work through on their own, but we can also use as an
opportunity to work with our librarians and other people in the
university to find some alternatives. But yes, scanned PDF, if you had
to find one thing that was like all inclusive issue its that, I think.
Laura is working with those just in a program design and has had to
deal with this. There's nothing they can do about it. If you go back
in time, instructor had an article from 1987. So I went back to see if
there was a digital copy of that and the digital copy was what he had
was a scanned version because 1987 they weren't making digital copies
and so that's going to be an issue as faculty want to go back to older
searching for research, go back to older things, they're only going to
find digital or a scanned copy. So that's just something we'll have to
work with. Yeah. I think that's why library staff sometimes includes
somebody who digitized those old materials. This is where way I think
here's the utopia I envisioned. One day there will be no need for a
scanned PDF and they'll all be digitized and properly tagged. But
until that day, that's the problem. In educating too, because for the
longest time, the course reserves up in the library or just all
scanned as they were scanned digitally. Several years ago, we were
trying to figure out how to do a search on these forms that they
scanned only to realize that then they're not OCR. So it was like,
"Well yeah, here's all your documents, but you're just going to have
to do an old fashion manual search because it wasn't scanned
properly." So hopefully, that's starting to change. Jodie is right to
it's not just that. The School of Nursing used to be like meet
students where they are but helped them study where they are too. So
when the fact that like, "Oh you, the Ally works in your room device,
you are totally fine." It doesn't take into account the fact that
you're in busy break room and you may not actually read this faster
before the lecture you watch later on when you're in your second
break. So it is more what's helped us, I think, to try to teach facts
and to be more student focused and their decisions, what they do and
we're going to always live with that several times. I think that in
this too we talk about being student focused a lot. I think the big
part of it is not that, maybe they're highly student focused but they
might not know what situations do then and every moment and then you
got to have that empathy thing like, "Where are and just ask where are
you reading this material?" I think that the Ally reporting helps to
see what they're downloading. But maybe even just asking what; how do
you know, when do you study, what do you do when you studying? How you
look because it's changing and will continue to change. Laura and I
were surprised to find we did an online retention workshop. Our
average age of online students, I think, was in the past two years was
25. So it's not your typical straight out high school students that
we're serving. So it's probably people who are juggling families and
jobs and it's our job to remind faculty that their students are in
line. Is that a general trend? The demographic changing over time,
who's taking courses here and their particular kinds of needs? Yes
they maybe so. It's hard to say no because online in the past was very
much a one and done thing. So you may have all point 11 be online
during the summer semester, but generally they are going to offer up
all 11 online in the fall or spring semester and know there are entire
programs that are exclusively all are under BS in the School of
Nursing for example. They saw the benefit of having online as the
medium. Then she stocked a specifics program in favor of the online
program. So it's it's hard to say they change historically. I mean, it
has but to say what evidence there is. It's hard to say right now
because we've got a subsystem one of approach to now like whole entire
programs are either being launched online or moving from place to
place to online. As far as demographics go, I'm sure we could track
the student age average over time just from looking at the data we
have on ONS. I don't know that up top of my head. It sounds good. But
I'm sure we probably could. I wonder if it's- Worth it. Yeah and I
wonder if people are, I don't want to say aging. It's not right.. I'm
coming back for continuing education. Yeah. Do we have more of those
students? Well, we also have higher-level programs. That's true.
There's the doctoral programs, the school of nursing. The MBA just
went online, the school of business. So that's also why it's hard to
say too, because we are offering more graduate and professional
programs. Correct. So they would naturally be drawing those students.
But, yeah. So probably, the demographic's changing because of that
too. But there's probably a lot of factors. In that too, even within
every class, it's not necessarily specific program. In our MBS,
students who just finished their associates degree and are immediately
ready to go on for there BS through our program. But you also have
practicing nurses who have been RNs for 20 years and are now coming
back, and you have those same students within the class. So your class
has to be flexible within every section to meet the needs of a 20-year
age gap of students. So the audience is huge. It would seem that with
a lot of these online only courses or online only programs, that when
students are actually in face-to-face classes, they can tend to come
up to the instructor and say, hey, these are things I kind of need.
With online only and especially like the MBA private courses, they're
only seven weeks long. They have to be ready to jump right in, and so
we need to anticipate the needs of our students and whether they're
going to be able to serve their needs and meet their needs for
completing the program successfully. The bottom line is we need to
make sure our students are getting what they need and be successful in
whatever way they're coming to SIUE for. Yeah, that's definitely
something that I've heard in my conversations with other universities
too; is that students that aren't on campus taking face-to-face
courses, they maybe even less likely to disclose that they have
something, they maybe less likely to receive the supports that you
would get. And so taking that more proactive approach to designing
inclusive experiences can be really so important for those online
learners. So how did Ally kind of enter into the picture? Where did
you all kind of discover it? What kind of motivated you to bring it to
campus here? Where did we discover it? I think on the access, on the
edu cause access list? Yeah. That was where we first saw it. We saw it
within our, like, early, early spring. Yeah. Once upon a time, we were
looking at captioning. Yes. It all started with captioning. We saw
that we had this sort of hole in our support around captioning and it
was one of those like whose job is it to caption? Whose doing the
captioning? And it was like, oh we're not, and you should be, so hope
you are. Like, here's a vendor. Good luck. That wasn't sufficient and
we knew that. So we're like, okay, let's try to rethink captioning and
the budgeting for it, and we just started out looking at just
different accessibility tools. I know that Ally wasn't an answer to
captioning, but it was like part of a package because we're like,
okay, we found a solution to captioning, a couple of different
solutions that would work depending on what faculty needed to do. And
then we're like, oh there's still a gap in how we handle documents.
And so, Ally was one piece of that and there's awareness. So how can
we help faculty make their documents more accessible and also just
understand why they'd want to and give some support around that, and
just to complement the workshops and the communications that we've
been doing. So yeah, it started with captioning and it went on to Ally
and beyond. Open the flood gates. It was a question we didn't know we
were asking. We were like, we need captioning solved and it was like
it was solved. We were like, oh, there's other parts of this stuff. We
still hadn't thought about that before really. Maybe that's too
simplistic to say captioning solved. It's not solved but we definitely
met the beast face-to-face and we were like, all right, captioning,
we're going to do this. And so I think we definitely addressed like
the glaring problems with not having a specific process for
captioning. So that happened and that was good. But yeah, Ally came
out of that search. Yeah. So you're doing Ally, you've got captioning
services. Any other tools in your ecosystem currently that you're
using to support accessibility, inclusive design? We just adopted
TextSmith Relay, which also includes captioning. So that's on every
video that's ever created by the university. So students, faculty,
staff or member can generate captions on their videos. As a good
starting point, some auto captioning there. Yeah. I think you could, I
don't know if you could add this to the list, but we have obviously
there's the built-in wizards that check for accessibility in all of
our documents, software. And then we have Adobe product that allows us
to do some additional work with remediation. Although we try our best
to just create a good document ahead of that. I don't know. Access
might also have some. I mean they're able to digitize materials, paper
materials and things like that. I would say that's a part of that.
We're the software that you can think as technically accessibility
software, like Ally specifically. Like the worst thing, they have no
students need accommodations. Which all of a sudden, there was a
student through an online program, had to do a capstone and then
actually give feedback to other people doing capstones. She's like, I
can't hear and I need to see you sell on the screen and read your lips
the whole time. In just plain content too, they couldn't do that. So
just using other tools inside of things you already have, is we
basically use Zoom, and she was fine with that. It was okay to say we
have to have a kind of split screen experience, but there's a trick to
another tool into operating in a way that the student was able to be
fully part of the class, fully part of discussion. Everything was
great. And basically it was nice because the video concept that she
brought the other students to her level. So you couldn't like do
anything, you had the chat. Everything had to be done via chat and
when you spoke, you had to actually speak, and you're showing your
content, you had to pause, show the content and then come back so lip
reading could be done by her. She said it worked pretty well. Yeah.
Multiple means of engagement there and expression is really bringing
everyone to the same level. Yes, exactly. The faculty who was in that
section said she has never had such quality discussion after every
student's presentation as she did when she said this is chat only.
Then, I had to speak into the mic, everybody was like, no, no
questions. And once it was open on the chat, they went to town. She
said they talked for like 10 minutes between each, talk through chat.
So they might have even just shifted how they do their capstone, how
they even teach that. The instructor was kind of planning to. So just
give that as an option; Do we want to be a chat group or do we want to
be on an audio group? See and I think that's what UDL is really all
about, is you're trying to shift to how you do your teaching or how
you design your experience so that it's better for everybody, and
that's what happened there. It's great. It makes those online courses
more like those face-to-face courses where you actually have those
real organic interactions between the students who are in the course
and the instructor so that they're not missing out on that part of the
learning experience. I mean, too often, I think having just online
only courses, it takes some real effort to make those connections and
to build the social side of the classroom. I think when we have those
accessibility features available in there that sort of bring down all
the barriers, it's like you were saying, it helps everyone and helps
the learning environment making it richer and more beneficial. So you
have some of these nice aha moments with faculty. I know I talking to
Mark earlier and he was talking about how he started seeing the
connection between accessibility and usability, and coming from web
design and things like that, and the importance there and making it
part of your process. But then I imagine you've also have some moans
and groans from faculty about kind of why are you making me do this?
And so first maybe going back to when you kind of turned on those
indicators in the courses, were phones going off? Was there a riot in
the streets? What was the response there? It seems like we've always
been reactive to things like this. We've always had to wait until
somebody is needed. Then she found out we don't have any visually
impaired people here, and suddenly if we get a visually impaired
people, everybody's going react to it. And so now they've got the
ability to be proactive and a lot of them were like, that means I've
going to spend hours redoing this because we don't have anybody who
needs it. It's like, well, we've been trying to explain since
beginning; start small, do a little bit here, but from this point on,
make sure that everything becomes accessible. You guys can correct me
if I'm wrong, but from what I remember, the indicators got turned on
and we use that as an opportunity to say, are you curious what these
red things are? Come on in and we'll tell you, and that kind of gave
us an opportunity. Yeah. It was like a marketing spend. Yeah, you're
right. And Jennifer had it phrased like, are you seeing red? Turn
those red indicators green. It was a marketing thing. What a great way
to flip it. Actually, I think we had fewer calls on it than I
anticipated. Not to say we didn't have very many. We did, but I
thought it was going to be, "Oh, boy, here we go." I don't think it
really was. I would say these were ones that were like, "Catching this
off?" That was the fun one. No. "I can't turn it off. How do I fix it?
We'll go and try into our knowledge base like search engine, a key
phrase I guess was, "Can I turn this off?" Things like "What are they?
Can I turn them off?" So yeah, if you're searching that on our
knowledge base, you're going to find like here's what they are. No,
you can't. No. No you can't. This is why you don't want to. Yeah, this
is why. This is really why they're there to help you do, and really,
they can turn it back to like, "here's what it's providing your
students, and here's how we can help you turn them green." Yeah, I
think that went a lot more smoothly than I anticipated. Well, then
they're not wrong in the marketing behind it, it was genius. It was
Jennifer's idea to play on faculties not insecurities. Insecurities,
let's just say that. No one will hear this, it's fine. Basically, how
do you want to improve your student experience? Oh, do you want to
have always red indicators? Do you realize they can't do X, Y and Z
and so it was really playing to their abilities to want to do better
for their students. A lot of them reacted very positively, which is
fantastic. I'll tell you one gripe, and you can edit this out if you
want. I got it just recently, and I was very surprised by it because I
was like, "I understand what you're saying." One of our Biology, no,
Chemistry professors. He was concerned about the alternative formats
translating his handwritten notes. So he makes some handwritten notes.
Now, we had some workarounds for this, but he makes some handwritten
notes and he scans them, and he's like, "There's no way," and they're
all formulas. He's like, "There's no way it can pick up on my
handwritten notes, " and I was like, "Okay, valid concern. What other
ways can we do this?" So we talked about other ways we could make the
notes. "Is there any you can do it on a video? Can we caption it? Can
we do that?" "Yeah, I could, but I just like to just get these out
quickly." This has been my process for 20 years. I said, "I don't
think it's going to translate your handwritten notes. I don't think
that we can OCR your handwritten notes, so let's talk about some other
ways to do it." That's where we left it, but I hadn't even anticipated
somebody doing that. Oh, yeah and it definitely comes up. Math
instructors are notorious for doing a lot of handwriting stuff because
equation editors can be a little bit clumsy, so you do see a lot of
math in handwriting. There is some software out there that is designed
to translate handwritten equations into text, just like any kind of
automated conversion stuff. It can depend on how clear that chicken
scratch is and how legible it is and things like that, but it's
definitely an area of concern and focus for some of this technology
stuff, is situations like that. There are lots of those complex
situations, right and Angie, We were talking earlier about some of the
business school stuff. Do you want to point to some of those
challenges that you see in the content in the business school? Oh,
yeah. Actually, I had a conversation with one of the CMIS instructors,
and he was saying, "Is there seriously going to be somebody who's
going to go into this type of field who can't, who is visually
impaired? Why are we doing this?" I said, "Well, one, it's the law;
two, we need to meet our students' needs overall, regardless of who
they are." Some of the things had to do with the graphics, the
diagrams that were on there and a lot of what's in the CMIS
presentations were screenshots of different work tables and things
like that. So a lot of that came to be a challenge of trying to what
kind of alt text do I need to go into with this? How do we how do we
make this meaningful? I can't just check on every one of them, mark as
decoration. It's obviously not. It's serious content, and so that was
one of the challenges I found specifically in that area. Along the
same lines of challenge I had with the CMIS instructor yesterday is
that she gets a lot of her PowerPoints from the publishers, and
they're not making their materials as accessible as they should.
Because you put a PowerPoint up there and it's bright red, and if you
try to go through it, you'll have everything from images, little bars
in the background as part of the design that are coming up without alt
text. I think I had over 300 PowerPoints that only had 30 slides on
it, and because it was all that in the background, that was the
problem. It's like faculty don't have time to to deal with it. They
shouldn't be. That's a spot where you have the power, I think as the
faculty member, as a department, as an institution, "No, thank you. We
don't want your material if you cannot comply with these standards."
It amazes me that they don't. Professionals like Wall Street Journal,
Harvard Business Review, they're not tagging their PDF files, and
they're not going to until someone starts yelling about it. I think
that's what you have to do, empower the people, empower your faculty,
empower yourself. I mean, don't stand for them, it's not okay. There
you go. Well, I had one instructor who was sharing documents for a
capstone course, and really, they were articles from Harvard School of
Business, and then they had something they missed, and New York Times
and he's like, "Well, I subscribe to these so I'm just putting them up
there." So we started having conversations about not only
accessibility, but copyright and fair use. So I connected with the
research librarian, and so not only are we taking care of the
accessibility, we're also taking care of being compliant with our fair
use and copyright. It takes a village, I think. It takes a village to
raise accessibility. I mean, the instructor didn't know what he didn't
know. That's right, yeah. I had an instructor tell me, "I know my
content, but I never did any courses on the pedagogy side of that." so
those kinds of things are really where we're here to help. We're here
to help with those things. Exactly, that's what we're here for. What
about on the flip side of it, this kind of student-facing part of it,
the alternative formats. What have you seen? Have you gotten any
feedback from students about using those formats? What do you see from
an instructional designer perspective, the value of those alternative
formats? They don't let us talk to the students. From those reports,
though? I was so surprised to see how few people were downloading the
MP3 versions of a text. I thought for sure that would be the number
one downloaded, but it was, let's see if I can remember. I missed part
of the session today. Was it the CR PDF? Tagged PDF. Tagged PDF. It's
a tagged PDF. Yeah, that's what it was during our first review, too. I
was surprised by that, but I guess that makes sense. They're probably
getting it down for their, maybe some mobile viewing or something like
that. Well, sometimes they go through and the first thing on the list,
they click on that. They're not necessarily going all the way to the
bottom and going, "Oh, look, I have this," especially if they're not
on a mobile device and they have to scroll a little bit to get to see
that, but I know the response for some of the students today, just
finding out about it, "You were really excited about this." First I'm
like, "No, really. You got to see this. This is a great study
opportunity, and you can listen to it while you're reading it and
everything." So you got two modalities of having this information
coming in and then you can do it all at your own pace. You don't have
to steer and try to do it all at one, eat the elephant all at one
time. You can eat it one bite at a time. We talked to a student at the
beginning of the semester when we had a booth for welcome week, and
she was excited because she's dyslexic, and she was really excited
about being able to have a print version and an audio version so she
can listen and read at the same time. Same thing with the students
were English is their second language, is that if they don't read as
well as they hear, they can hear it at the same time. So we've had a
few students interested in both because of it. It's not a learning
disability, necessarily. It is just the way things are and that's
helping those students. I think once they learn and they know what the
project is really all about, I think they're just too afraid to click
that little a after their documents. I don't know what they think is
going to happen. I think more people are clicking that than, maybe we
assume, too. Just by looking at the recording and also when we talk to
them at the last event, "Oh yeah, I've seen that," I had so many
students tell me "Yeah, I've seen that, " or "I know what that is,"
and I was surprised because I thought it would be us just promoting it
and letting them know that it exists and like, "Oh, yeah." I think
more people are probably clicking it than we give them credit for. I
mean, yeah, you can look at the data review and see that they are. I
think the exciting thing is about today's experience of being able to
share it with a few people. We may not have been able to reach more
than half of our remit. We reached a small chunk of them, but they're
going to tell their other friends that they are in classes with, "Hey,
did you see this? This is really cool." It may not even necessarily be
something they use, but they may know somebody who needs it, that it
would serve their learning needs. Or you stumble upon it in your final
semester and you're like, "Oh." Exactly. "Oh, should've had this."
"Where have you been?" We hope that they don't fall into that sad
position. They might. That would have been me, for sure. So what's
next then on your journey towards a more inclusive culture here at
SIUE, you'll continue to do more workshops? Are you helping support
some of the remediation of content? How is the team starting to think
about this work moving forward with Ally and the other tools in your
ecosystem to support this? I think definitely more propping up our
faculty, and supporting them. So how you follow the guidance that we
already have from Ally, and other wizards, and doing more with
universal design for learning, doing more workshops around that,
incorporating that into our course design, materials and marketing,
marketing, marketing. I mean, it operates like Diversity Day, where we
can partner with other people on campus, because accessibility is
about diversity. Things like that. I just like to go back to like,
it's the beginning of the semester, reminder, here's how you make your
syllabus accessible. Now move on, you have some articles. This is
options for that, and just kind of doing these pieces. Look, I'll text
April. I'm so sorry. Because no one knows this; it's off the table,
doing this. As soon as I heard it, I looked over at Jennifer, and sure
enough, she's writing it down. I think you said partnering, sorry,
with them, like Student Success. Maybe our Student Success Center
offices over there, and partnering with them. That was a new thing.
More partnering. They also do No Write November. Next year. Come on,
we have three weeks. We can pull that together. We have three weeks. I
think we're in a cool position, too, in our department because it's
sometimes easier to start to push things like this when something is
new, and we work with new programs and new courses that have not been
taught here before, and we get to touch new faculty with orientation.
So hitting the new people, hitting the new programs, hitting the new
courses so that it's just there, it becomes part of what you do, a
part of your practice, as opposed to like, "Oh, take this course that
you've been working on, and you've taught it seven times, and now
we're going to go through this with a fine-toothed comb and help you
fix all the issues." We have to do that as well, but it can trickle up
from the new stuff, too. It's all education. It's marketing, it's
workshops, it's supporting faculty and students. It's changing the way
you do things, educating people and continuing to do so, and
partnering with the Student Success Center, that's a great thing; just
finding partners across campus. Because when we first started talking
about this, we felt like we were on our own doing this. We felt weird
that our office should be the torchbearer. So it was very nice to
partner with Dominic and other offices. We knew that they had a
similar interest, and they wanted to improve things on campus. We
still have a ways to go, but we're much further than we were. The more
you talk to people, the more you see how similar your interests are.
Obviously, we're all here for the students. So the more you talk with
them, the more you see how you can align your work and your passions
and get stuff done. I feel like I have a unique opportunity as the new
kid on the block and being dedicated just for the School of Business
and the MBA courses that are rolling out they're having to shift from
being eight-week courses down to seven-week courses, they're having to
really go through those courses and rebuild them. So I get to have a
lot of those interactions with the instructors. They're like, "Oh, we
finally have our own instructional designer that's just for the School
of Business." They're excited about having that, and so I get to have
the opportunity of working with them a little more closely and to look
over their stuff and introduce myself. So that's a great opportunity
to say, "Oh, did you notice this?" I'm just trying to get to know the
courses and not in a confrontational way or anything, or trying to spy
on them, but I'm just like, "Hey, I'm just trying to get acquainted
with everybody and everybody's courses, and I just saw these things.
Let's take a look at this." That definitely is something that I hear a
lot, these opportunities for refresh. It's always going to be hard to
dig your teeth into all the old courses and the old content, but
anytime there's opportunity to revamp that one PowerPoint slide that
is looking a little dusty, and make accessibility a part of that, I
think seems to be a key kind of way to keep moving forward. That seems
to be the theme, is to just keep taking those steps forward. As far as
the UDL workshops that you've been running, what have those been? Are
those focused very broadly on course design experiences, and what's
kind of the meat of that workshop? They need to be refined because
they're kind of too big, there's just too much to talk about. When you
talk about all of the principles together, just to give people an
overview of like, "Here's what we're aiming for, here is an example,
and an example, and an example." There's never enough time, so I hope
that, this semester, we can work to just break those down, maybe
principle by principle and make it a little more active, where we say,
"Here's what we're aiming for. Here's one that you can doing in your
class. Let's pull down your syllabus and work through one element of
your course to incorporate some of these strategies. We've taken a
really broad look at universal design and it ends up being more of a
seminar, and I think it needs to be broken down and really get
workshop-y. So we partner with our Faculty Development Center on that.
Thanks, everybody for joining us on the Ally Tour podcast series, and
good luck on your journey to more inclusive education for all your
students. Thank you. Thanks so much to the team at SIUE for sharing a
little bit about their story. As you can hear, common themes that
really resonate across these podcasts. The interest in supporting not
just their students with disabilities, but all of their students.
Taking that universal design for learning approach, providing
opportunities for students of all kinds, all abilities, all needs, to
leverage alternative formats to have access to accessible content
that's more usable, that's going to help them be more successful in
higher education. So with this, we're signing off for 2019. It's been
a great, great journey, and we're excited as we move into 2020 to
bring a new focus to data and research to really take advantage of the
rich stories that we learned about, that we heard about on our journey
and use that as qualitative data to contextualize and bring meaning to
some of the quantitative data and investigations that we're going to
embark on in our data work during 2020. Look forward to reconnecting
with folks and continuing on our journey on the road to inclusivity.
Join the tour along with the rest of the Ally Community at
tour.ally.ac. You can catch the latest updates on Instagram and
Twitter at #AllyTour2019, and listen to stories of inclusion from our
community champions on the Ally Tour 2019 podcast series, available on
SoundCloud and your favorite podcast app. We'll look forward to seeing
you at the next stop on the road to inclusivity.