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 loyal listeners to the 5th episode of
the Blackboard Ally tour podcast series. We've made a quick drive down
from Gaston College in North Carolina, and arrived here at the campus
of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. It's our
first visit to a medical school. It's going to be really interesting
to hear about some of the unique accessibility challenges that they
deal with in terms of medical school curriculum, as well as how
they're thinking about inclusivity to the broader hospital and patient
community. So let's check in with two members of the team, to hear a
little bit about their story. All right. So I am here at MUSC, The
Medical University of South Carolina. I'm glad I got the name right
this time. I'm here with the team who's really supporting Ally
rollout, and really thinking closely about how to support students in
medical university on how to really succeed, be successful in very
challenging learning environments. You are facing some unique
accessibility challenges, so we'll talk a little bit about what those
challenges look like, and how you're using Ally and UDL, and other
sound digital pedagogy to support those students. So first, I'll allow
Melissa and Alex to introduce themselves. I'll start with Melissa. Hi,
I'm Melissa Hortman. I'm the Director of Instructional Technology here
at The Medical University in South Carolina. My role is in the central
office in Instructional Technology and Faculty Resources. We provide
support around technologies, and good teaching practices, media and
graphics, as well as classroom support to the entire campus, all six
colleges here in USC. I'm Alex Walters. I'm the Senior Instructional
Designer and Digital Accessibility Specialist. Also with the Office of
Instructional Technology and Faculty Resources. My role really centers
around a lot of training, and best practices for online learning,
instructional design, and really helping faculty learn how to teach.
So tell me just a little bit about the university here? You mentioned
you have six colleges, what kind of programs do you offer? How much is
kind of online, on ground? Just a little background. So at the Medical
University we have six colleges here, the college in nursing, college
of pharmacy, college of dental medicine, college of graduate studies,
college of medicine, and college of health professions. So we have a
wide variety of health professions here in USC, and they're all
graduate level, doctorate level programs. So we're getting students
from all walks of life, and we have some unique challenges here where
many of the health professions have this sort of antiquated look at
their profession of, I had to go through this and I had to go through
these admissions standards, so our students have to go through that
too, and this sort of rigor that comes with it. Our students are
extremely stressed out and anxious. All of the time our entire
libraries full with students studying 24/7. Our lecture capture system
has we're on track for 80,000 hours of viewing lecture content this
year, just because students are studying all their time. They're
studying in class, while they're in class, they're studying outside of
class. They're missing class to study. It's all about passing that
board exam that kind of next step, to become that professional that
they would like to be. I mean it ultimately help people. So that's why
they're here because they care about people, they care about their
profession, and they want to help all types of people. And you're
using open LMS here at university. What is the usage? How do they
organize courses? I imagine it varies quite a bit, but what do you see
from an Instructional Design perspective in terms of the usage of the
LMS? So it's kind of all over the place just because of where we are
out there's all the different colleges. We have some colleges that are
very structured, very organized in how they use the LMS. So lots of
training, others templates, there's things that they use that really
help them set up those courses. In other parts of colleges, they use
LMS more as just a way to put their content for student access. So
they're not necessarily using it for evaluations, assignments, things
like that, it's more of just a way to get that content to students,
which is why we have such a huge push right now with our digital
accessibility initiative. We want to make sure that content is
accessible to all those students that are getting into the LMS. So it
kind of varies throughout each college different uses. You all have
fully online programs as well? We do. We have fully online programs,
we have 3 in nursing, and then we have a couple in the college of
health professions, and graduate studies too I believe, so we do. In
kind of historically, who has owned accessibility, how have you
approached accessibility with the digital content specifically? So we
started about two years to kind of move on this journey towards
digital accessibility and what this means for MUSC. It's really been
housed in our diversity and inclusion office with our 88 compliance
officer, and as we started to dig deeper into it, we found that there
were more and more stakeholders that needed to be involved in those
high level discussions. So we actually had one of our legal counsel
individuals start a task force that would move digital accessibility
for what does this look like? How do we even imagine this at an
enterprise? Because, we're not just a university, we also have a
hospital with now 16,000 employees. In that hospital, where learning
is happening on that end as well, so it's starting to get bigger, and
bigger, and bigger, and learning happens at every level that we're
finding, and there's more and more content that's being shared online.
So once that task force kind of ended, we started a digital
accessibility committee that meets on a biweekly basis, and we dive
into auditing, what that looks like in each one of the areas, external
web sites, our hospital side, our university side. We are diving into
our purchasing processes, our 700 plus softwares that we have on
campus, and what that looks like to audit those and ensure that
patient care isn't inadequate because of the software that we can't
provide, or can't provide because they're complying. So again, digging
deeper and digging deeper and digging deeper, we're finding more and
more content in different places that's being shared with individuals.
So even now, we know that there's a long road ahead. But I think that
once we started introducing Ally into the puzzle about a year ago,
last month actually, we started to see that there was a little bit of
movement at least on the university side, because the technology was
able to support that movement. I'd say the training aspect of Ally has
been really key, from the time we turned it on, because folks were
able to get in there and click around and really investigate some of
the issues that were showing up on their documents, which was really
key and that led to more questions, whether that was towards us or
towards the folks kind of the point people for digital accessibility
in their college. So really jump started the conversation, which I
think just the raising awareness part is such a huge deal when it
comes to this initiative. Yeah. Just as far as that audit in trying to
look across really complex, even fragmented systems, you've been
mapping all of that out. What's been the process of checking that from
the LMS to the websites to your technology? Has there been a
particular strategy that you've been using that other institutions may
think about as they try to audit their accessibility? We have tried to
take down every single piece of content that we could look at for
digital accessibility purposes, and then we found that more was being
added on a daily basis. So we almost went to an estimate of this is
our baseline of what we think we might need moving forward and what we
know can kind of be put on the back-burner in terms of we probably
don't use this, once we implement standards. We probably won't need
the 60-minute lecture. We'll only need the 10 minutes of the meat of
the conversation. So we thought that we would have to take down every
single thing. But in reality, it was almost looking forward to the
future. So what does the future of education look like at MUSC and in
those fragmented places? What do they plan to do? Then we've started
to be able to envision this is how much work is going to have to go
into this area. These are the priorities in this area. So it's
actually helped us to look forward which has brought into a lot of
other conversations around UDL and best practices in teaching and it's
almost revitalized that side of the conversation a little bit more to
say. But we're not just talking about digital accessibility anymore or
the thousands of pieces of content that have been out there since
1998. Let's re-look at your course, let's re-look at that content that
you're sharing. Let's talk about what teaching really looks like in a
digital world for our students today. That's right. It's really been
around where we're trying to re-frame the entire- what's the culture
change, first of all. We're really trying to re-frame the entire
conversation around, teaching best practices for teaching and how this
digital accessibility is part of teaching, part of that UDL and all it
comes into one thing. So it's been really interesting to have
conversations around that with folks that maybe have considered it
before. So actually, best practice is part of good teaching which is
really key. Helping them start to understand to that. Just because
you've taught one way forever. It's okay to change, it's okay to
review, it's okay to look back, and take a look at what you're doing
and how can it be improved. Because I think teaching is a continually
improving process. Nobody's ever the perfect teacher. So it's always
good to look at and see what can I do to make my instruction better?
When did accessibility really get on the radar as a priority? So at
MUSC, we've really hit the ground hard running, not just hit the
ground but running. Probably about last August, in terms of pushing
out to the campus, not just kind of talking about policies,
procedures, auditing what this looks like, kind of higher level
conversations, but talking to every single user on campus. We went
around and we met with every single unit, even our Finance and
Administration unit. Everybody is involved in this conversation.
Everybody is involved in this initiative and that's what we wanted to
portray to them that, sure, this is a legal issue, but we're all in
this together to create a more inclusive environment for everyone, not
just even our students, but everyone. From the time that they look at
MUSC to the time that they don't look at MUSC anymore. We want them to
have that inclusive experience. So we've really hit the ground running
last August. We've generated, I think, a lot of buzz around this on
campus, people who know what digital accessibility is. Our teachers,
our instructors aren't teachers. They're not trained teachers like
Alex said. They may have never heard of UDL before, but now they know
what digital accessibility is. Our physicians are walking around the
hospital and talking about digital accessibility or this signage is
inaccessible, who do I talk to about that? We're almost crowd sourcing
internal complaints so that we can address them and that we can make
sure that everybody on any level is getting that inclusive experience.
Just as an example of that,  we gave a presentation on Wednesday about
using technology like thoughfully and effectively. We had a question
afterwards where how does  this affect digital accessibility. We're
getting questions, just people are thinking about it which is awesome.
Do you also have those people that are thinking about it in terms of,
well, I don't have students with disabilities. We don't typically
think of a doctor as somebody that's going to have disability or a
nurse as somebody that has a visual impairment. There are certain
necessity. So how do you approach those conversations? Because they
also happen in other domains as well. I don't have a blind student in
my course. Why would I care about that? What has that conversation
looked like? So I think from faculty, when I speak to faculty about
it, we just bring it back to that UDL part. As a teacher, as a faculty
member, you want your students to have the most access to content
possible. So they have better access to content, they're going to
retain more information, and they're going to have a higher success
rate. We really want to constantly tie it back to teaching. I think
sometimes there's confusions between what's an accommodation and what
accessibility really means. So we're trying to break down that barrier
and really get faculty to understand that they're separate and we
really need to have content out there that everybody has equitable
access to. So everybody has a fair game, fair playing field. Health
care is changing, our environment is changing. There are dentists out
there that have one arm or low mobility. There are physicians out
there who may have had a stroke after residency, but are still
practicing. There are a lot of different circumstances in our lives.
So let's say there are these admission standards, we don't accept
anybody, which is also not true. We do accept people with disabilities
into all of our health care professions. So I think just, again,
getting faculty out of that mindset of, well, I had to go through
this, so you have to go through this quicker or you don't look like
me. I think that that perception is changing slowly. But like Alex
said, it's a culture change. We have to get people out of that health
care mindset, of that rigor mindset and say, "You're not losing the
rigor at all. You are offering more opportunities to a wider
audience." We do have nurses on campus that I know have low vision,
are legally blind, but there's a spectrum. So I think that, again,
getting people outside of this accommodations versus accessibility,
getting them outside of, well, since you're legally blind, this is
what that means, almost re-educating our healthcare professionals at
the instructor level and physicians who are going into patient care
offices. What digital accessibility means, what disabilities even
mean, I think is really picking up on campus and people are really
talking about it and starting to question a lot more things than just
the digital realm. But how are we providing better patient care? How
is this going to change compassion? How is this going to talk about
empathy in our classrooms? So it's actually a really amazing
conversation in the health care professions, especially because
they're going to be working with a diverse audience for the rest of
their lives. So they need to be able to understand that we need to
give everybody that opportunity. We went and talked to the SGA and the
students were very open to digital accessibility. They had no
questions, no concerns, no anything. They were fine with it. They
loved it. More opportunities for studying and retention, sign me up.
So it really is changing that old school mindset of health care
professionals. Sure. Just another example you spoke about the nursing
students. I may never want to be a nurse on the floor, but I may want
to do like research in nursing, or a prerequisite to that is I have to
have my undergraduate degree in nursing. We can't just frame it as an,
"Oh, you can't be a nurse because you have disability." I may have
higher aspirations passed just having an undergraduate degree. So
that's something else, I think, to consider too. I love this
connection around empathy, empathy for patients, and then thinking
about being empathetic to student needs. That seems like it's just
such a synergy there between how healthcare works and how education
works and they are two industries, I think, that share very close
similarities in terms of that care empathy towards others that of
difference of diversity, of different needs and abilities and things
like that. Yeah. For sure. It's been really interesting around campus
to see the culture change, because there really has been a very deep
culture change that I don't know if anything in kind of our recent
history at MUSC has changed the culture this much besides digital
accessibility, because it impacts everyone. Accommodations that only
impacted a certain few or maybe faculty that got that paperwork, but
this impacts everybody and we're all in it together. I don't know that
there's been a movement like this in a while, and so it's really
interesting to see this develop with that human touch, with the
technology touch, with how Ally's come into play, how conversations
with individual faculty have come into play, spotlighting people,
spotlighting programs or groups that are working for it. It's just
been a really cool experience on campus. You spotlight those
champions, you spotlight those departments that are really like
pushing forward with it, I think that's great, because folks can take
a look at that and say, "Well, they've had success, we can do the same
thing. It's achievable," which is something we really want to
encourage. What do you attribute this culture change? I imagine it's a
lot of different factors. I mean, there's conversations outside of the
university and inclusion, diversity. Do you think it's just a
potpourri of factors that are contributing to that? For sure, and we
have a lot of peer institutions that we've been talking to in the
state that have really helped us kind of imagine what this looks like
at MUSC, because a lot of our faculty will say, "Well, I went to a
conference and I talked to my peers and they don't even know what
digital accessibility is." I said, "Well, that's a good thing. We're
on the forefront of something really amazing in health care that we're
going to be providing this for our students and be leading the way for
other people to provide this opportunity to their students as well and
envision what that looks like." So us maybe being one of the first or
only people in the health care professions, especially at the
enterprise level that have Ally, is really important to us, because we
want to lead the way. We want to pave the way of what this looks like.
This is a tough culture change, health care professions are. They're
really ingrained with this culture and we're changing and it's
amazing. Changing what's possible. Changing what's possible. That's
our little tagline. Our tagline. There you go. Changing what's
possible. Put it in there. Yeah, thank you. So how did you come across
Ally and what was appealing about, I mean it kind of fit into this
broader set of solutions that you're looking for to support that
accessibility? So Ally kind of came into a conversation on the whim
with our account executive and she brought it up and she said, "You
should get this. I think that this would be really good for you." I
said what is this digital accessibility thing? I'm not even on a
committee that even talks about this yet. She really pushed for us to
get that in our package and it was really important for her to say,
"You need this. You're going to need this, and you want to get this
right now, you want to be the first people to get this." So it was
actually Leslie Sands our account executive, who is absolutely
fantastic really pushing us to get it and it was the easiest sell I
think that I've ever made to leadership, which is the weirdest thing.
Because you can't fight Ally, you can't fight what it does and at the
time I was an office of one. So Ally is like a team of 15 amazing
instructional designers that you know can get in there at any time, in
any place in the faculty space, in their space and gives them what
they need to know about digital accessibility and how to remediate
their documents. I mean how can you fight that? To be honest it was a
pretty kind of perfect storm for us and when we rolled out it was fire
hose roll out. We just turn it on and let it loose. It was very
interesting that we didn't get any push back, at all from faculty. It
was probably more questions on the college level of like, "What's this
red thing showing up that's not good. I going to get a green like the
rest of them." So we started a small campaign. When we first rolled it
out and it kind of like sit ins where people could come by and learn
about all of the different types of issues that they would see popping
up. And it was really I think kind of effective because we did monthly
campaigns about issues and this is what you're seeing and kind of a go
green campaign. I think throughout the year we just saw more and more
usage from the faculty's end and less and less questions for me which
was amazing. So it's been the work of 15 people that I definitely
could not have done. So for small teens this is a very important tool
I think that can help support faculty where they're are, without you
having to be the end all of any question or know how to do everything
in every single circumstance. They find the Mac users versus a Windows
user. If I am using Microsoft Office versus whatever it is, it gives
you the directions for you. You can't fight that. It allows faculty to
already have a baseline of knowledge so they can ask pointed
questions. So I may get an ally and see that my PDF is a tag. I can
find out what that means, how to fix it why is it important? So when
they come to us with questions, we don't have to start from the very
beginning. They know of digital accessibility. So they already have
that kind of background knowledge which I think is really important
when it comes to training and questions. So you have you been seeing
in some of the trainings and your work with faculty that that
awareness piece has really been key for how those trainings have
unfolded? Yes absolutely, you know them being able to come in with the
awareness of knowing some of the things they're going to have
remediated or some things they're going to have to fix and that way
they begin you- they come with those pointed questions so we can
really focus on what do they need to know. So we can train from there.
One of the great things like the go green campaign is, if you work
with faculty, it's really great to see their faces kind of light up
when there gauge goes green because it's a feeling of accomplishment
like even when I use Ally, I still feel good about it. We'll see that
you know jump from 24 percent to 100 percent. So I think that's
something really cool. We had a faculty and a meeting the other day.
The meeting had nothing to do with education. We start out with winds
at all of our meetings and he stood up and showed his computer and I
was like, "What is he doing? What is on his computer?" Then I saw his
course an open and he said I just wanted to share my win that I mean
one of my courses all green. It was just like his face lit up and he
was just so happy and I was like, "That guy is one of our toughest
researchers and he's doing all this accessibility stuff. How did he
learn this? What is he doing? Who has he talked to?" So I reach out to
the college and they were like," He did this all on his own. He just
wanted to champion and do this." So putting that power in the
faculty's hands where they see their gauges, where they have the power
to change their content. It is. I mean just seeing his face light up
was just that was it. That was it for me. I was like I'm sold. All
right, and that's a great motivator to everybody else in the room too,
they see that and they go back to their areas and you know it's great
to see so. Now you all are talking about some of the successes.
There's of course some major challenges in rolling out Ally or maybe
not just in rolling out Ally but then getting that movement, getting
to that green level especially in your context where you're dealing
with some particularly challenging kinds of content. You want to talk
maybe a little bit about some of the challenges that you see in the
content from an accessibility perspective and how you're thinking
about those types of strategies especially incorporating some of those
UDL principles into thinking about that? Sure. Yes, so some of the
challenges we really come across. We have a lot of you know being a
medical university a lot of complex images a lot of complex tables
things like that. So one of the biggest challenges we have, around
specific challenges are alternative text. So you know if I have an
image in my lecture and I'm spending 20 minutes describing it. Make
that- just give the students afterwards. How do I explain what just
happened in that whole text? So we really have a lot of education
about how to write of all text and then if you do that longer
description or to provide more information externally link that out or
send the students somewhere to where they can get that same
information. That's been probably our biggest or the most- the
questions I get most often are around things like that, its because we
have so many complex, images and tables and things like that.
Definitely in the health care professions and I'm sure in all
professions, there's so much content to cover. So there's so much
content that they want to put online, that they want to share, that
they want to have available for the students and that's so much
content can just add tons of time to try to remediate it. So where do
I even start? What are the issues? What are the main issues? So really
diving deep into we'll just take a deep breath. Alex always starts his
training with, Let's take a deep breath together, because we're diving
in." This is going to be a lot but we're just going to take baby steps
and just start slow and start somewhere just start somewhere,
anywhere, just start. So I think the idea of have all this content in
this mountain ahead of me, well just start climbing because we're all
climbing our own mountain in our own way. So I know I looked at my
course for this spring that I was teaching I was like, "Do I have to
too like do I have to make my stuff accessible?" I'll just put it
somewhere else and link to it or just try to get around it and I
started thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm even trying to find loopholes
around digital accessibility." So I've realized that I had to dive in
too and I had to take the time to go through the process to really
feel that pain because it is painful. Our faculty are in clinics when
they're not teaching and they don't have time to remediate. So we're
trying to just take baby bites, baby steps towards the end goal of
compliance at some point but we will get there. It's just going to be
a slower pace. Right. Our message is, we want this to feel realistic.
We want to feel achievable. So we don't want you to feel like
everything- all of your content has to be accessible by this date,
because that's just not realistic. So we really want to push that
message forward and also the message of you're supported. There are a
lot of folks around here that are more than willing to help you
whether you know it's at Tech team your IT team and champions within
your area within your college. So I think you know being able to get
that message out as well like you're not alone, which I think is
really important in something like this, know you're supported in
this. It's not by yourself. Now, I imagine another challenge that you
all are seeing and we certainly see it at other institutions and you
probably your faculty rely a lot on medical journals and cheering
Journal content into the courses and we know a lot of times that
publish your journal content is not accessible, want to talk a little
bit about the relationship that you have with the library. Is that a
new kind of relationship that blossomed because of Ally because of a
shared mission around this? So I love librarians, I think they are
brilliant people and everyone should have a librarian on their team at
all time. So we actually have always had a library in honor kind of Ed
Tech community team and they've always been represented as part of the
team. I actually brought her in very early into the conversation
around Ally, how are we going to do this. What does this mean for
journal articles. How can we work around this. What do we need to be
doing? What do we need to be thinking about? She has just been so
great. One of the major benefits to having our particular librarian on
our team is she has an instructional design degree. So she understands
a lot of the pieces around the LMS. So she's been able to really dive
in very very deep and say, "Okay. This is what exactly needs to be
done." So recently our librarian whole team which is again they're
amazing, they've jumped in and they said, "Okay, we have this form,
any faculty across the campus can fill this out. What we'll do is,
we'll offer our services to go into your course and we will update
every single journal article that you have in your course and make
sure that it's linked correctly, that it's updated correctly, that
were siting correctly in there." So they've kind of taken this on
themselves. Which is a huge portion of probably our accessibility
institutional score is those journal articles. So they've really kind
of championed this piece all on their own because they feel like this
is their part that they can play. So I feel like that's kind of been
our mantras. What part can you play in this? How can you help with the
bigger picture? It's not just us standing up in front of the classroom
talking about this. We're all talking about this. What part are you
playing in that game? So it's just been amazing to see people step up
and say, "Oh yeah, I am good at this, I can do this or I can help out
this way". Really truly care about it too and not just to poor job at
it they really want everybody to be successful. They want our faculty
to be successful, they want our students to be successful, they want
our residents all of our graduate medical education which extremely
utilizes our learning management system to be successful too, for our
physicians who are doing grand rounds online to be successful. So
learning happens so many different ways and they've really stepped up
to help out. They've been specifically using the library reference
tool in Ally to add those references, add the metadata to the content
to help students access accessible formats or get the HTML content
from library databases. So that's been pretty cool to see the use of
that tool. I know a lot of people in ally community users are
sometimes confused about what to do with that library reference but it
sounds like you all have found a really critical way to use that to
link to those databases to help with the content. Our librarian was
saying yesterday that it went from zero percent accessible right of
course, no PDF that's downloaded from really any journal is accessible
to 100 percent accessible just by putting in that library reference
because it links out to a place where students can get that accessible
version. So the Library Reference I think is a hidden gem in Ally that
has really helped us because it's built into the tool. It's not
something extra like how I have to create a URL and delete this old
thing. It's built right in. So it's always adding this metadata into
all of the pieces of the content. Has it also as faculty are kind of
looking at their content again and thinking about the usability. Has
there been an entry point for how you guys are talking about UDL with
them? Well, absolutely. I think one of the key aspects around that is
really through Ally explain those alternative formats. Which has been
really great to be able to show faculty Ally and then go all by the
way from the student side, they have access to all these different
formats and they can do all these different things with the content.
So when you explain that to the faculty again you know you can't see
their faces light up around that because, you mean I put my content in
this way but students can grab it this entirely other way and be able
to listen to it or get EPUB version and annotate mark and things like
that. I think it's really cool and it's really powerful, and it also
leads- I can always start with that but then also it leads bigger
conversations around, how are you representing your content, how are
you assessing students, how are you providing multiple ways to
demonstrate what they know. So not only around UDL I can talk about
from student side alternate formats and this different means they can
get it but it also kind of leads down the path to the bigger
conversations about how they're designing their courses which is
really interesting. Yeah I think that's really cool because it really
is more than just the content itself. You're thinking about how do
they move through a course, through a module. How are they being
assessed. I think that that's such a key piece as well. Right. Yeah
absolutely, and Melissa had mentioned earlier faculty sometimes the
mindset is here is this is how I went through this school and this is
how I was assessed, this how you should have to demonstrate your
knowledge. So I think being able to open up that conversation as well,
how you move the course and then how your knowledge assess or how you
demonstrate what you know. I think it's definitely a hard issue to
tackle, around you know the medical field but I think it's again as we
have you know a more diverse student population and we have all these
great tools to demonstrate our assess you know what you know. I think
that conversation is just going to get or hopefully that conversation
gets bigger going forward. We looked at your alternative format usage,
yesterday we looked at some of your research your feedback usage. Were
you surprised at what you were seeing there was it pretty exciting to
see that these things were actually being taken up? It was especially
the alternative format usage. We have not done any campaigns around
students using this little drop down arrow. If they find it then they
use it but we've never really told them about it. So they're finding
it and they're using it. Our data is actually for me very surprising
and really amazing that students are using all content in all
different ways and a lot of different ways. So the usage of these- I
mean they're probably sitting in Charleston traffic listening to their
lecture on their way into class so that they're ready for the next
class. It's just absolutely amazing to see how broadly the content was
used and how much it was downloaded in alternative formats. I think
the instructor feedback was also an engagement was very interesting to
me because I didn't know that that many people were getting in and
remediating their documents that to me is amazing. I mean it only
proves that if you kind of put it out there, it's easy to learn.
People will kind of pick it up and I mean yes we have to continually
push and push the cause of it the why of it, but they're doing it.
People have done it without our help. I think once we really focus our
efforts on putting a student campaign together I think our numbers are
just going to skyrocket from there, especially it'll be an easy sell
for the audio version especially for traffic around. That would be
nice. We always sell it with that but I think it's really going to be
awesome once we start that really big student roll out. I think one of
the interesting things too in our conversations yesterday was it's a
very data driven culture here. You have a research culture, you have a
medical culture and accessibility previously was kind of less data
driven. It was kind of more trying to figure out content, has the
Allies kind of numerical and data based approach having that
institutional report. Has that been really helpful? We also talked
about some of the challenges in those numbers and how they can be a
little misleading. Do you want to touch a little bit about just how
you're thinking about that data based approach? Yeah, and I think the
data that comes out of the institutional report has been extremely
helpful for us and a little misleading because of the way that content
is sometimes portrayed or we misunderstand with Ally versus without
Ally, what that truly means. There's a lot of different pieces that go
into the rating of each one of the pieces of content. I think really
drilling down and understanding that and trying to communicate that in
lay language to our leadership and it has been very difficult I think.
It's been just data for a person that loves data. I love data and data
is what drives what I do, data is what I live by. It's also almost
complicated things more because now I have a number behind things.
Now, our faculty are really hoping on, well it's 20 percent, what if
it's 50 percent. What is the number? What's the special number from my
end that I need to get to? Because very black and white in a research
culture. So what is that number and us living in the gray are like,
'Well necessarily you know let's get to Green but what does that mean?
If it's still not usable." So it's really a case by case instance that
we have to work with them on and I think that's where Alex is really
shined as he's able to really dig into the content and talk to the
people about what does this mean and how can I use this and do this.
That's probably our next step, now that we have all this data. We've
been in this for a year. What's the next step for us? I think it's
really digging down to probably individual consultations. That's what-
That's what I'm going to say, I think- -which most successful. Right.
those individual reports. We are going to be able to send and really
highlights, be able to send them report and say maybe target some
things and then you'll have them, train with them or work with them
one-on-one and then send them a report after where they've gone and be
able to remediate the content. I think that's really great because
they're able to see the strides that they're personally making. So
again I think that they really like the personal touch the one-on-one
trainings, I think that's really key in this this whole thing. We've
been able to show with institutional reporting kind of some leaps that
we've taken from semester to semesters, from last spring to this
spring where we at, and showing a number to leadership has been very
powerful. I've even heard our previous use that number in a
conversation and it's just really kind of empowering to see such a
integral tool become almost highlighted at a leadership level. They're
using these numbers in their conversations where they're using these
numbers to kind of drive motivation and I think it's a good thing and
a bad thing. So we have to kind of be very very careful around how
data is given out and how data is used from this. But the amount of
data that we've been provided from this has just been very very
helpful for us to kind of dig down on points that we want to focus on.
You also mentioned that and thinking about kind of next steps and
moving forward that you're also seeing Ally being used not just in the
course context but also for checking content that's being pushed
publicly for that broader population that you mentioned all the
patients everybody that's involved in this medical community. Do you
seeing that continuing to move forward in how you're leveraging that
tool to really support that broader community? It was amazing when we
kind of opened it up to everybody outside of the colleges. Our
research arm jumped on, our hospital arm jumped on, our communications
jumped on. We have people using it in very unique ways not just for
teaching and learning but also for checking their content and learning
how to remediate it. Because it's not always clear and a lot of the
tools that we have on how to remediate content. So we've seen it
utilized and updating external web sites and updating communication
sort of protocols and different things that they're putting out there,
within the library for research so just a lot of different ways. So
this tool isn't just for teaching and learning. It teaches everybody
how to remediate documents. Again, it's that in their face, In their
place, in their time, in their space. So we don't have to necessarily
start at square one like Alex said we can have those upper level
conversations of how do we take this to the next level, how do we use
this content once it's now accessible? I think any time we give some
user a tool that is easy to understand and also is effective I think
is super key, because you know Ally's very very user friendly in my
opinion you don't need a ton of instruction to be able to jump in and
use Ally right away which I think is really important because if you
give someone a tool and they can't figure out within 5-10 minutes,
they become frustrated or something like Ally, very usable, very easy
to understand and then you see it's effective you see the meter move
and things like that again that's really important. Wow. A huge thanks
to Melissa and Alex for sharing a little bit about their story and how
they're using Blackboard Ally to address some of these complex
accessibility challenges that they see at the medical school. I think
it's really exciting to see how they're bringing together different
stakeholders on campus to address some of these complex accessibility
issues like working with library services to identify untagged PDF
from journal articles and using Ally's library reference to replace
them with links to more accessible versions in the library database.
By making equity and inclusion key pillars of the institution Medical
University of South Carolina is really challenging historical notions
of disability. Challenging that deficit orientation and thinking about
the unique kinds of abilities that people bring with them into the
learning environment and into the workplace. Leveraging those diverse
perspectives, diverse abilities to support new kinds of innovation
foster more connected kinds of communities and ultimately build a
better patient care community, a better hospital, a better society. So
thanks again for joining us on the Blackboard Ally tour podcast series
until the next episode connect with us on Twitter at #BbAlly and
#BbAllyTour2019. Thanks so much and see you next time on the road to
IncluCity. Join the tour along with the rest of the Ally community
@tour.ally.ac. You can catch the latest updates on Instagram and
Twitter #AllyTour2019 and listen to stories of inclusion from our
community champions of the Ally 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.