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.
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.