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 of the Blackboard Ally
Tour Podcast series. It's been a while since our last recording, we
have been on the road. We made it as far as Singapore and Australia on
our inclusive learning mission, and today we are in Chicago land
gearing up for the Edgy Callers conference next week in downtown
Chicago. But today, we're on the campus at the College of DuPage, the
second largest community college in the country. We'll be sitting down
to talk with the Learning Technologies team. They are a passionate,
fun loving group who are doing amazing work supporting their diverse
learners. This campus is supporting all students from high school
students who are transitioning into college to students with various
disabilities and learning needs. So really excited to hear about how
they are supporting their faculty and designing more accessible
courses, as well as how they're taking advantage of the alternative
formats to provide those diverse learners with different types of
learning opportunities, different types of formats, different types of
media that can work with different types of study tools and different
types of assistive technology. So very excited to hear what the team
has to say about their journey so far with Blackboard Ally. Welcome to
another episode of our Allied Tour podcast series. I'm at the College
of DuPage, just outside of Chicago with the team here, who is going to
talk a little bit about how they're supporting their diverse students,
be more successful on their pathway to higher education. Talk a little
bit about how they're using Ally to support those students. We're
going to start off with a round of introductions. I'm joined by five
members of the team. I'll start on my left. Lara Tomkins. I'm an
instructional technologist. Becky Benkert. I'm an instructional
designer. Michael Maxse, I'm also an instructional designer. Kelli
Kerns, accommodation specialist. Susan Landers, manager of the
Learning Technologies Department. All right. So thanks everybody for
joining us today on the podcast series. I wanted to start off. Just
thinking about, what kinds of students are you supporting here at
College DuPage? Give me a little bit of the context of the college,
the kinds of students that are here. What kinds of needs that they
have and what is their general goals? Where are they going from
DuPage? I'm in center for access and accommodations and we see a
variety of students really, whether they're coming in to talk about a
short term disability, they may have. I need accommodations on campus.
Maybe they had a surgery and they need a handicapped parking pass. We
go over what their needs are and then also in the classroom as well,
and that goes along with long term as well. A lot of disabilities at
least. So lots of, we see a variety, all types of different students.
It doesn't have to just be physical. It can be invisible disabilities
as so cognitive. But yeah, we see all around I'd say and we provide
what we can to help them be successful. What's generally been the
process for supporting students with disabilities here on campus? As
soon as they are accepted into the college or they enroll for courses,
they disclose, they come to you. What does that process look like? We
like to have them enroll in classes first. But obviously, it can work
both ways. Maybe there are parents even that will reach out to us from
students that are just graduating high school because high school is
very different from college. So we see both sides of it. But we don't
like to conduct our intakes until after we have students enrolled in
courses. So we know that they know their plan, at least in some way or
another they have something set up for them. But we also hold
information nights or sessions throughout the year as well to provide
some guidance for those that are thinking about college. But we do
intakes and that's when we sit down with them and figure out okay, so
they bring in their documentation. We review it. All of our
specialists here in the college have a background and some
disabilities or maybe special education, teaching. So we go through
that documentation prior and then sit down with the student, maybe the
parents as well, and we go through what do they need, what do they
previously receive and what were they successful at? Because a lot of
times I've seen I'm very new in the office, actually, but I've seen
that just because a student was provided something in the past doesn't
mean that they necessarily want it moving forward, and that's a big
part of them leaving high school where they had someone else
advocating for them, and now they're learning to advocate for
themselves. So we help them along that process as well to communicate
what they need to be successful in the classroom to their instructors.
We're not going to initially reach out to the instructors and say this
is what the student needs and we're going to help guide that student
in being successful that way and maybe setting up an email to the
instructor, but working with the student to help them self-advocate
because that's what they're going to need along their college path
whether it be here or when they move out as well. Do you have a sense
of how many students have disclosed disabilities here at the college
and has that number been increasing over time? Yeah, it has. I know.
Last I heard. Because again, I'm new. I just started this semester and
in this department at least I know it was over 2,000 the last I heard,
and I know prior to this, I was in the Learning Commons, which is a
tutoring center more or less I'd say, and I was providing
accommodations during those sessions when they came in for tutoring or
maybe needed math assistance or writing, reading, speech assistance,
and even when enrollment will be down, our amount of students with
disabilities disclosing to us went up dramatically by hundreds every
semester. I would think it went up by at least a few hundred every
single semester. So there's an increasing availability for supports
here at the college is what I'm thinking is maybe that's why maybe
they're feeling more comfortable learning how to voice what they need,
and that's exactly what we want. I say to in our county and this is a
community college, so it's district run because people are driven here
based on being within the taxpayer base. They get a cut on their
tuition by being an in-district resident. The K-through-12 schools in
to DuPage County are very special education strong. We a lot of really
great support for special education in K-12, and we've got a lot of
anecdotal evidence that people move to the area when they have
children with special needs. So I think our population has a higher
base of students with various disabilities that we're drawing from to
begin with too. Interesting, and you do have even a transitioning
program to help with those high school students that are coming here
taking courses, things like that. Do you want to talk a little bit
about that program? Yeah. So many of the high schools in the district
support their students beyond graduation. In Illinois, we have a law
that provides education for them up until the age of 22. So the high
schools are already set to provide supports of some kind for students
who'd like to take their diploma and come on to college. Some of the
local schools actually pay for transition coordinators to be here on
campus all the time. That's where they work, and their job is to
provide, I don't want to say a whole. They hold the hands of the
students who are here and ease them into the different needing to
advocate for themselves environment of college, and it provides them a
little bit of a safety net that maybe regular students without any
disabilities are learning needs would not need as much as these
students do. So the districts are even supporting having that staff
here and working with the retention to keep the students in school and
give them just a little bit of extra support and teaching them some of
those navigation and advocacy skills that they may not have just yet.
I think it's really helpful or it's been helpful. I mean, the
program's only growing. They just received their own space. So it's
like safe space more or less where they check in. I know they do
weekly check ins with their case managers as well, and then it helps
again, teaching them with self-advocacy. I'm coming up with what you
need and okay, let's figure this out together. At least one of the
schools, Hinsdale is running a couple of I would call like first year
experience courses that the students enroll in that first semester
that teach them some of those study skills and other advocacy skills
while they're taking some of their other credit classes. Yeah, it
seems like such an important part of it in that transition is that
self-advocacy piece I hear that a lot, and being able to figure out
what you need as a student, what's going to help you be successful so
that you as a college can put the procedures and support in place for
those students. Now, on the flip side, for the instructional designers
that are working with faculty, is thinking of us used with
disabilities part of that design process? Are you taking more of a
universal design perspective? How are you thinking about that and
working with faculty? I would say definitely the universal design
perspective and just encouraging faculty to bring in content for a
variety of modalities. So visual content, audio, text based images,
just you bring in a variety of different modes so that students with
different abilities and not just even disabilities, but students who
have interest in learning different ways, will be better able to
understand and perceive the content. I think that's one of the things
that we really emphasize in our accessibility training is really that
you're not just doing this for those certain students who might have a
disability. That you are actually doing this for the entire college
population, and that's really the accessible content impacts all
students. It really helps with their success in the class, the way
they acquire knowledge of the concept that you are delivering in the
class and really trying to emphasize that point home that this is for
the benefit of all the students and not a select few. You mentioned
there is accessibility training that our faculty mandated to do that.
Is that something you're starting to put in place? What is that
training look like? Yeah, that's something that we're trained more to
put in place, offer it to all staff and faculty through in-service
presentations. Also just general trainings throughout the year. We'll
do that as well. When I was done in the Learning Commons, I know we
reached out because we were confused on maybe how to successfully
upload a PDF to make it accessible because we were promoting to the
students that would come in for extra tutoring assistance or whatever
it may be. We found out that many, I think almost all of our flyers
were not accessible. So students who had a vision impairment, they
couldn't open the documents, but no one ever really voiced that, and
it wasn't until Learning Technologies came up with or brought in
Blackboard Ally and we started playing around with them a little more,
and then it's just figuring out how to use it, and you guys were
great. We reached out and don't really know what to do with this, and
you guys came down on it just a separate day and provided that
training to the coordinators and people who would be uploading that
type of information. So I feel like you guys are very accessible to
all departments to their needs, and I know Lara, when we took our
class together too over the summer, I think universal design and
choose great teaching a class, anything we didn't know about it. So
yeah, I think you guys provide a lot. All we have to do is ask or
anyone on campus just needs to ask for that assistance. Ally has
really been the beginning of our accessibility conversation here on
campus. In the past, we've been really reactive when we have a student
who comes to the Access and Accommodations Department and says, "I
can't read the PDFs because they're scanned, and my screen reader says
they're blank and I'm blind." So I can't read this. They would contact
us and we would work with a faculty member to remediate things. But we
weren't really doing anything here and there. Some faculty members are
very strong with accessibility, but overall, as a campus, we weren't
really strong in that universal design or accessible content, and so
when we had the opportunity to purchase Ally, we jumped on it and used
that as our springboard for starting the conversations. We developed
the accessibility training over the summer, presented it where we can.
It's been grassroots in some ways because the library invited us to
come and speak with them last January, and so that was the beginning
of our accessibility presentation. Learning Commons had reached out,
so people are becoming more aware and talking about it. But there's
not been a mandate yet. Next week in our in service, I got a talk with
you and we will be doing some information about access and
accommodations, what an accommodation is versus accessibility. I'm
just beginning those conversations and we're hoping that that will
increase interest in the training. We also felt it was important to
have discussions about accessibility. We don't want to just roll this
too out and say, here you go. When you look at all your red markers,
you have at it and you wanted to have some framework for people as
they were beginning to discover what it means, and that's where it all
started. How has the response from faculty been as this has become
more of a focus and more a part of that conversation? I don't have
much, I'm going back again, Laura and I take this disability and
universal design class over the summer with Michael Dugin and ICE
witness because none of us here are faculty. But we saw with some of
the nursing faculty, it was overwhelming at first because it was like
my whole curriculum because I had to change it all. So a little bit of
panic, any change causes panic. But it sounds like they sat down with
you for a short amount of time and then they were able to figure it
out. They were really heavy table with like all of their activities
and like there was just no way to even make it accessible as it was.
So I like prototyped a few modules. I was like asterisks it's okay,
but if you have fifty asterisks, how is someone going to connect the
asterisks to know what was referring to and like all these other
things. So they are super excited. Then they were just like buckling
down their offices together, like going through everything, trying to
get to a hundred percent. Like they're definitely just like, yeah. So
into it, it was adorable. Their enthusiasm, I think infected the whole
class. So that was a positive outcome I think, but otherwise, I don't
really have much interaction with the faculty as much yet in regards
to ILA. It was a good outcome, I'd say. I think that one of the things
in our accessibility trainings that we kind of lead off with is that,
they're not going to learn any new tools. This isn't really earth
shattering, groundbreaking things. These are settings that they're
going to use in programs that are familiar to them. That's either
they've ignored or they don't know the impact it has on accessibility.
I know that during the in-service training, I sat down with an
instructor to make her syllabus more accessible. Really, a lot of it
was the headings and styles that weren't there and really, once she
got on the roll with that, she was like that's it. That's really one
of the main things that was wrong in my documents and basically
resolved it. The score went up from there and I think just made her
feel a little bit better too of how familiar the tools are and what
can be used already with making content more accessible. What about
other tools, technologies in the ecosystem to support diverse learners
from the tool side? I know access and accommodations, site licenses
for read, speak, not Read Speaker. That's on my wish list. Read and
write via text telephone and creation by text telephone . I haven't
had an opportunity to learn those yet, but I have actually used a
group meeting. One of the attendees just raved about a quiz show and
how amazing it is for faculty. That's what I've heard as well. So when
I first got brought in on the onboarding of when you guys were
presenting Blackboard Ally and that was my first thought because that
was when I was in the learning comments and was like our biggest or
largest amount of students that come in for assistance is for math. A
lot of times, math is the biggest struggle for what I would see at
least behind the scenes in that number is wise of students coming in.
So I was a little nervous about with Ally. I'm like, oh my goodness,
that's where we need it. Now that EquatIO is being involved, I think
that will be fantastic. I know I was doing some research with one of
the math faculty members, Jim Bradley. We came in and I don't know if
it was some other specialist in our department and the access and
accommodations department that found it and said Learning Commons
needs this. I used to work as a bridge between them and say, whatever
you guys get, let us know. We're going to get downstairs to make it
accessible for everyone and then EquatIO came across and it just, I
think that's awesome. That's the last piece that it would need us to
read through those damn programs to be helpful, because that's where
students need a lot of help and it's math. Well, especially when I do
my intakes with new students coming in, any who is have you taken the
math placement test yet? No, I'm holding off. I don't want to take
math. So if we can provide that little extra assistance, it would be
great. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's nice that you mentioned that the
user group call and we talked all about some of the unique challenges
with STEM content and complex equations. I actually spoke with Zack
about it yesterday, who's an accounting major. A simple formula,
simple equation is not too bad. But when you get into that advanced
multi layered equations and things like that, that's when that
accessibility stuff becomes such a challenge. Math can be such an
anxiety point for a lot of people too. Those even with more emotional
disabilities or challenges in that area and how they react to it and
really interesting to think about. So on the campus here, are you kind
of offering all kinds of programs? I mean, are there particulars? You
mentioned a nursing program. Are there kind of other unique types of
programs here on the campus that students are participating in and
what do those look like? Well, since we're a community college and
essentially feeder college for four-year degree, we do have some
associate degree, actually several associate degree programs that will
lead directly to employment. But a lot of the students are coming here
to get their feet wet in college, to save some money and plan to move
on. So we have a really wide range of things and a lot of gen-ed type
so that they're getting that stuff done before they head off to
another institution. But we do have very specific programs like
nursing and automotive, a lot of career in technology. Got some CAT
and CIS, culinary. Pretty much everything. So about eight percent of
our students come from outside districts and usually that's because
their community colleges don't offer the programs that we have. So
they get, I think, in-district tuition. They do, we have a program in
Illinois that was designed to keep community colleges from duplicating
programs and then having small enrollments just to make more
efficiencies of scale, where if their home district doesn't offer the
program, they can go to another district and then what we do is call
the charge back. Then the home district of the student ends up paying
the difference between in-district and out-district tuition, something
like that. But basically, it doesn't penalize the student and it
doesn't keep a student who really wants a particular program from
missing out because their home college doesn't offer it. So we do get
some students from outside districts for that. As you've been rolling
out Ally to the campus, have you been targeting particular programs or
areas or has it been more based on faculty? What's that process look
like? I think in the beginning, Blackboard recommended that we do a
pilot to roll things out and get our feet wet with it. We had really
hoped to get a nice broad spectrum of faculty involved. We knew the
people that would probably be game and willing to jump on board. We
wanted some of that easy, low hanging fruit for the first term. So we
did get a pretty good across the board representation of about, I
think, 38 faculty members. So we had theater people. We had Chemistry.
We had English. We had Philosophy. We had Nursing. So we really did
have a nice wide spectrum. We didn't necessarily target any programs,
I think we targeted individuals more than anything because we know in
our office who is going to be willing and would step up and try it
out. We wanted to get a good sense of how we knew STEM, in particular,
was going to present a challenge. Honestly, the first semester, we
didn't hear a whole lot, probably because the faculty that we
recruited are people who are already doing that. I don't know that
there wasn't much student outreach that particular term. That was back
when the icon was just the little gray carrot and I think there were
probably a lot of students who didn't notice or didn't pay attention.
We did ask the faculty to point it out to the students, but we had a
really, a hard-hitting campaign starting in the summer when we rolled
it out to all the courses so that the students would know it was
there, and they would take advantage of it. We really tried to frame
the conversation around universal design and the benefits that all
students can get from the tool, not just students with disabilities,
and learning preferences are very well covered by their alternative
formats. So we wanted all the students to know this is here. We've
paid for it. We want you to use it. We're also in a Guided Pathways
Program, which is a community college initiative to improve student
success by making the pathway easier to navigate. A lot of community
colleges have first time college students in the family and so their
parents can't help them navigate because they've never done it before.
So there's this whole design process to make the college pathway
easier, is out there. So we tied it to that whole student success
piece. That was good and bad because some people think pathway is a
dirty word, because they think they're already doing student success
and they didn't want to be told how to do it differently. But we
really felt like making this tool an obvious piece of that project
just made a lot of sense because it speaks to learning styles and
every student can benefit from it, not just the students with
particular disabilities. Especially for getting buy in from the
administration. Right. For faculty, UDL like Ally, it's thing you do
incrementally and initially it scares them. You can't just make your
course UDL in a day. So we've had success re-framing it as a social
justice issue or a mobile first issue. I think that's probably one of
my favorite aspects about Ally. We know as a community college, 20
percent of our students are only accessing their course from their
phones. When I meet with students and when I initially meet with them
and do their intakes and figure out, "Okay. Well." When the student
says that they've previously used books on tape in the past and that's
been successful then. Maybe they have a reading disability of some
sort. So at the college, we have and we provide a link for students to
go to. So they have access to books on tape and they work with our
assistive technology specialist from our department. But I talk about
Blackboard Ally, because of that, how students, the technology,
they're using their phone all the time. So I use that exact example.
Where do you live at? No matter what, where you live at around here,
you could live five miles down the road and it still can take a half
hour to get here. So they'll use in their car. I said, "So if you
haven't read an article you're supposed to read for class, you're on
the way to class. You can then connect your car to Bluetooth or
whatever it may be and you can listen to it that way." So I encourage
them to try it out and let them know. If it doesn't work, talk to your
instructor. Let them know, "Hey, I tried to do this in the car and it
wasn't working." So that could be or at least I'm trying to get them
to advocate to their instructor. So if it's not working maybe the
instructor wasn't aware of it. Maybe they thought that it was working
and it's actually not. So I try and encourage it that way at least. We
can definitely help you develop some messaging templates to you for
students to save that like. That's a good idea. Your document is
inaccessible so the MP3 is unusable and kind of... Right. Right. We
have some options for you. Okay, good call. We did a really big push
at the beginning of the term, in talking to new student, orientation
and just handing out flyers and letting new students know that Ally is
here and the alternative formats are available for them and it's
something they can do and download them. It's not something they have
to wait for the instructor to do. I think a lot of students are really
excited about that, especially those reading content on their phones
or listening to content on their phones. We saw a lot of student
excitement and we really hope they'll approach their instructors in
order to make their content more accessible. That presents a challenge
too since we've always tried to have as much content as possible in
the content editor, so would look nice for a mobile. So now students
are like, "But I can't listen to that." So I have to rethink how we
deal with putting content into courses and as we continue to work with
faculty on development. Yeah, we had also hoped that students would
advocate for Ally because we only have about a 75 percent adoption of
our mass four classes across the board. Obviously, they are online.
They're all using them, but we have lot of professors who are still.
If they're supplying content to their students. They're emailing or
they're handing them pieces of paper. So we would hope that the
students would say, "Hey, in my English class, you get this really
great tool and I can download an MP3 of this. How come you're not
using it?" Whether or not they would, we don't really know. But that
was one of the things that we talked about was, this is available to
you, should be available in all your classes. If you don't see it,
talk to your professors, and we were hoping that that would increase
adoption of Blackboard overall because that helps the students if they
have one place to go, everything is centralized and the expectations
are a little more and the standard across the board. The tools that
they have to use that has to help with their success on some level. So
we're also using it in an ulterior way to get faculty adoption higher
and just giving the students an opportunity to get to things the same
way in every course. Well, it's definitely a great strategy trying to
get the students to be the ones to prompt that culture shift for
instructors. I think that can be a huge motivator because faculty want
their students to be successful, right? So getting them to move
towards it in for the content stuff. Alternative formats coming soon
for that HTML content so that will have you covered there, so you
don't to have to go rearranging things right away. Hopefully, that
will be out soon. But now, and so you've got the ground up push from
the students. Now, you're also talking about putting some policy in
place or putting some more top down measure. Do you want to talk about
what's motivating that and how you're thinking about that. I know that
thinking about accessibility policy is something that a lot of
institutions are thinking about. What is a good accessibility policy
look like? Are there thresholds that we need to put in place for
faculty to have to meet? So how are you approaching that? So I
mentioned earlier with the accessibility conversation is really just
getting started. We are within this first year here of a big push.
We've had some staff changes. Even at the administration level, we
have a new provost structure. We have a new Assistant Provost for
students and we have an opening in the Dean of students. We have a new
manager in the Office of Access and Accommodations. I think all of
those pieces have fed into just people looking at how we were doing
things and wanting to make some changes. We are starting an
accessibility committee that will include people across campus because
we do know that what works well at this campus is getting buy in from
the faculty. They don't like those top down mandates. So we'll be
getting a group together and I think from there start talking about
some policies like what are we going do with with Ally? What are our
benchmarks? How do we want to move forward with it? Do we want to just
make the goal for everyone to have their syllabus accessible by a
certain percentage, by a certain date? Or do we want to have people
try to achieve their particular average across their courses? We'll
have the committee come up with some of those pieces. Obviously, we'll
have some input and make some suggestions. But definitely if we just
throw it out there, we're probably going to hit some resistance. So we
want them to help to frame the direction that this goes as well. Yeah.
So related to kind of thinking about that. Now, you've had a chance to
see some of your data. Did that help you in thinking about that? Were
you encouraged? Maybe let's start with the alternative format download
and what you saw there. Were you encouraged to see a nice jump in the
beginning of the term there. Definitely. Especially considering how
much time we spent tabling during our busiest time. So faculty are
trying to build or adjust courses really quickly and classes we're
about to start or just had started. So it was gratifying to see that.
Those efforts paid off. We're not a student facing office. We're
faculty facing. We like students. We enjoy our interactions with
students but we're not something that they're used to seeing. Even
aside from seeing the name of our department as they walk by here, I
don't know that that's something that's within their vocabulary. It's
a big school too so some students probably figured, "Oh, that's a
department I've never seen before." But it was really stepping outside
of our, I don't want to say comfort zone but regular activity. Yes, it
was very gratifying to see that it was paying off. Especially, the
third or fourth day, we saw the tag team too would go to the various
activities during that student orientation week. It was very
gratifying to have students go, "Oh, I already know about that. I
already have one of those flyers. Great. Tell your friends. Tell your
professors." So you put together a flyer that listed the alternative
formats and were passing that out? Yeah. Then on the back, we had that
super cool table that has one column, what's kind of your learning
need and then tells you which formats work, which I pointed out to
students and they absolutely love that. I was surprised how low the
MP3 downloads were. I was definitely really amping that up when I was
talking to students and their eyes got all bright. Yeah. But again,
maybe the files they were downloading, you download one that's not
accessible and you don't bother trying the MP3 format again in the
course. We started with the communication and adoption tool kit and
what would you say we mixed our own. We remixed it. Nice. To meet our
needs. Yeah. So is HTML the second most downloaded alternative
version? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Then I think that's the one I promote
the most because I hate reading something on my phone and having to
scroll over to the right and back to the left and all that stuff. So
this for me, I'm the one that's, yeah. I describe that to students.
Yeah. You have the PDF and you're like, going around every corner of
your phone. But I think, yeah, the next step is really I'd like to
develop, like a tool to help students identify which format would work
best depending on their need, like a program, choose your own
adventure, working off that table and be like. Because a lot of them
they don't know what they want because they don't know. Yeah, like the
HTML sounds scary maybe to a student who isn't tech savvy, could be
their favorite one. Yeah. Just speaking of a choose your own adventure
game and that being I was at, I think it's called the Inclusive
Learning Center in Toronto. Maybe it's based out of Toronto. They've
been working with the cast organization to develop this, choose your
own adventure, to develop your learner preference. So it is that
similar, right? We've talked about it a little bit. There's definitely
an education piece, I think, in helping students understand when to
use certain formats, why they would use them. You all have such a
focus around creating good study practices. I mean, not your
particular group, but the others that are on campus. It seems to be a
big focus helping them become better learners. You mentioned 20
percent access or content on mobile exclusively. Wow. So definitely
the HTML, I mean, hugely important for students. Yeah. That's huge.
For faculty too, because I don't think they realize that. You have
some people who be like, "I can't believe they're writing a whole
paper on their phone." But it's like, that literally might be the only
way they can. So just because that wasn't how you learned. So that's a
challenge you with faculty. I didn't learn this way. So this is how I
do things. For anyone, really, updating how we approach things in our
processes. Well, I think what we found is even with the students that
have socioeconomic challenges, they all have phones. So that's their
access to the Internet. Also, being a commuter campus, they don't want
to grab even a light laptop and haul it around all the time. They
don't want to have to babysit it and make sure it doesn't get stolen
or broken. They know there are machines here on campus in the library
that they can get to pretty easily. Whereas maybe in a residential
campus, that's one of the things you purchase is a computer and you've
got it. It's always in your room. Here, where the students are driving
back and forth, they don't want to have the big machine. So they're
definitely using their phones a lot more to access the content and
maybe other places. Now, instead of going back to the faculty, you've
mentioned putting some training in place, putting some policy. I mean,
is there other promotions that you're doing, other ways that you're
going to try to reach faculty? Are you thinking about helping them
with some of the remediation of content or what else are you thinking
about for faculty? I think one thing that we're doing, there's a big
initiative on campus for the use of OER. Then I think as more and more
faculty maybe develop or adapt or adapt OER and move it into the
learning management system, then there's going to be more more content
that students can access and download in different formats. If right
now, the only thing in there is a syllabus, maybe you don't want to
listen to that mp3. But if it's more of the course content, that's
maybe even more beneficial for students in that way. Also, another
opportunity to get in there and train because a lot of OER content is
going to give you some very red gauges. True. So this is a good
opportunity for more training. Get more faculty who are interested in
the open access and the equity to participate. Well, in some ways, I
think it'll be easier because a lot of that OER content is remix. If
we can remix it, then we can make it accessible. Whereas, if we're
dealing with one of the big publishers,  with the allied pilot group,
I had told some of them that had said, "I don't know what to do with
it." So, for example, one of the first day classes had some checklists
that the way they were designed visually was okay, but for a
screenwriter, it made no sense whatsoever. They had heading two in
front of heading one. There wasn't good semantic structure. What I had
done was I made it better and I handed it back to her and said, "Now,
go to your publisher because this is copyrighted material and I really
can't." I mean, I can change it for a particular student, but this
isn't something that you can now post. So back to your publisher rep
and say, "This was not accessible. What are you going to do about it?"
So we're also using it for that piece too to put some pressure on the
publishers because they're the ones who are going to make the changes
on their own. But with the OER, we'll be able to have an impact, I
think, a lot faster. We're in the OpenStacks program through I think
it's Rice University, Not positive on that, this year. So partnership
program. So there's definitely a very big push for OER on campus. I
think this will be a great opportunity to train people as they're
developing. We've got some grants the faculty  can apply for, some
release time. So we will have some faculty over the next year or two
developing their own. I think this will be a great time to really say,
this is the time to really think about how you're designing this and
how you're going to use it with your students, just promote that one
more way. You're going to pull more rain into the conversation. Could
you slide over so that the mic picks you up. Because this is an area 
that you really work in, right? Yes. Which is remediating content for
those students with disclosed disabilities. What's some of the most
challenging content  that you have to work with? Well, our vision
impaired students have probably the biggest of challenges because of
the navigation piece. Once they get to the content, they're usually
okay. It's the getting to the content that can take an excessive
amount of time. I hate open book tests, trying to read an open book
test to someone who's blind and has to go through the book and try and
find answers when they are, especially something that if they can't
search the information easily, just navigating takes forever. I'm just
trying to remember that as instructors pick their books and what
publishers are using, some are better than others. Yeah, the
navigation piece. Yeah. Our blind students especially have that
because they're using JAWS or other products that are similar to JAWS,
but that and the need to have multiple formats, and I say this all the
time, it's not just that a lot of students with disabilities need both
the being read to and the print sitting in front of them. That piece
of it is difficult when the content is not available in multiple
formats. So from your perspective, as faculty start to take on some of
this work, as they start to make the content more accessible to start
with, how's that going to benefit your office? What's that going to
allow you to do? Well, definitely it will benefit all students, those
with and without disabilities because people do learn differently.
It's going to be, it already is in demand and the students use Ally
without even realizing they're using Ally. They keep coming back to me
saying, well, I want more of this. They want it all over, not just in
the course materials. They love it, but they don't even realize
they're using it, but they just go to that button. I just go to the
button, I hit alternative formats and I'm there. So they're not real
good at identifying why or what product they're using per se. So when
they talk about it they don't refer to it as Ally, they actually refer
to it more as Blackboard just because that's what they're in, but they
love it and they want it for all of it. So it is a definite need,
definite demand. Yeah. They love it. Definitely working on making it
more available across all of the content. So on our way there, one to
be aware of too, with the generating the MP3, there's currently
100,000 character limit. I think we actually talked about on the user
group previously. So if the faculty's uploading a really long PDF, a
really long book PDF or something, I also think it's a best practice
to chunk it out a little bit, right? I do a lot of that. Do you chunk
things out? I have to take books and do it chapter by chapter because
of the fact that the navigation piece. Yeah, becomes so poor, right?
So it definitely if you ever hear students saying, oh, the audio is
failing, and you notice that it's a really long file that's probably
why. So it maybe another that advocacy piece for the student to say,
hey, if you chunk this out for us then I can get the audio and it's
going to help me, and obviously it makes the files more manageable, so
lots of benefits there. It's definitely opportunity to link that with
any first year initiative we do, because one thing that students are
often not taught is how to learn. I think that's something that would
be great for a first year experience in integrating Ally and that
advocacy piece would be really powerful. When you touched on that
point about just having accessibility at the forefront in general is a
good opportunity to have conversations with faculty about some best
practices. I won't name the department, but we did a presentation to a
department this summer where one of the questions was; so you guys can
caption audio? What about my 45 minute videos are not captioned. You
can caption videos for me? What about my 45-minute videos? That's a
chance for us to say, not fairly confident that most of your students
are watching those to the end. So it gives us an opportunity to
identify where the teachers are not using the best necessarily
practices and we say, hey, if you were to chunk that out or take the
most important pieces and narrow it down, you're much more likely to
get your students to go all the way to the end of the video. So it's
good to have that there to force some of those conversations.
Absolutely. I also just wanted to ask you how things have been going
working with the Blackboards deployment team. So I know Sam and Tim
Wright have been involved with the Campus in helping with the
roll-out. What's that process been like? How have they been helping
you? What's been some of the conversation there? So I've had most of
the follow up after what would you call it, the on-site meeting that
we had back last fall. They were fantastic for that. They came and
they have lots of great ideas. We did a really good job within our
office of getting a lot of good stakeholders on board for those
meetings. That was how Kelly was brought in because we knew we needed
people from learning commons. We had a couple of students there and
that just helped to lay the groundwork for people understanding even
what Ally was and what it would be able to do, because we didn't
really have a lot of issues, I didn't have faculty screaming, what are
these dials? We don't know what to do with this, turn it off. Yes, we
didn't experience that either with the pilot or even when we rolled it
out. We haven't needed a lot of direct support, but Sam has been
really good in sending us and going through the data like you did a
couple of times and she's been good. We've been really busy and it's
fallen off my radar a couple times and she'll just check in and say,
how's it going? What do you need? I asked for some of the data numbers
for our in-service for next week and she said, yes, absolutely, I can
get those together so that it's the most up to date data. So they've
been really great. Nice. Yeah. Well, we'll start to wrap it up here.
So it's been a really great conversation. I think that the approach
and the strategies that you're talking about really I think drive home
just how important it is for all students, accessible content, having
access to these alternative formats. I think there's so much
validation and it's such a good story to push to your instructor. So
we're next, you have a big day Tuesday coming up. What's happening on
Tuesday? What's happening moving forward in the journey as Laura likes
to hear me talk about the journey. Yeah, Sherpa. The hippie journey.
Well, it's what we say too because sometimes when you present and you
start talking about the gauges and inaccessibility and the impact
especially for people who really don't know anything about it, you
guys get really big and so the first thing I say is we're not
expecting you to go home and spend the next four days trying to
remediate all of your content and get to 100 percent. It's a journey,
not a destination, and sometimes you can't make it perfect, especially
with that STEM content. So next Tuesday is our faculty in-service and
we don't have any class for students, but faculty are here on campus
and we'll be doing some activities and some presentations and sending
the message that accessibility is important to the administration and
the college in general, because even though they don't like the top
down initiatives, if they don't think that the administration is
supporting it people will buy in. So we're going to start with that. I
mentioned earlier that we are forming an accessibility committee, and
I think we'll go from there to begin to develop some policies and look
at a timeline for bringing all pieces in to the project. Especially
procurement for the web technologies and software and all that good
stuff. Yeah, is that another area that you're thinking about too now
is making sure that the software that's being implemented on campus is
accessible? Absolutely. So anything that goes in a Blackboard, we have
some control over. I'm testing for accessibility issues and
communicating with the vendors that such issues exist because I had
experience with the vendor the other day who had accessibility as the
second word in their tagline on their web site and they only just got
a V pad and it was partially meets for 2.0 AA, and it wasn't even on
the website. The link was broken and I'm like. So there's a lot of lip
service to accessibility in a tech, but once you get down and test it,
you find out differently. So my hope is to create a usability testing
group of students using various assistive technologies to test these
things as well. All right. Well, that's a wrap from College of DuPage
and the team. Thanks so much for all of your great work and for
participating on the podcast today, and I wish you your best on your
journey to more inclusive education. Thank you. Thanks to the learning
technologies team, Susan and Laura and everyone else at College of
DuPage for joining us on the podcast series today. Really interesting
to hear about the work they're doing connecting with students about
the learning benefits of the alternative formats, working with
instructors to design more accessible course experiences and improve
accessibility issues with their content and they're just getting
started on their journey. It's going to be really interesting to see
the impact that they can make on accessibility and inclusive education
on their campus. After today, we'll have the opportunity to speak with
some students and faculty directly about their experiences using Ally
and some of the challenges that they face in terms of accessibility,
and after that we'll be journeying about four hours south towards St.
Louis, where we'll be meeting with the team at the Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville. Be great to hear about their journey with
Blackboard Ally and some of the amazing work happening at one of
Illinois's premier state university. So with that, wishing everybody a
great rest of your day. Thanks again for joining us on that tour
podcast series and we'll see you on the road to inclucity. 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 hashtag Ally
tour 2019 and listen to stories of inclusion from our community
champions on the Allied tour 2019 podcast series available on
SoundCloud or on your favorite podcast app. We'll look forward to
seeing you at the next stop on the Road to IncluCity.