Post - Discussion - Ally User Group

James Umphres

Discussion · Apr 22, 2025 ·

Anyone have guidance on how colleges use their Ally scores? No one reports them to the government, right? Are they mainly just an alert for the individual faculty? Is every class being 100% even an achievable goal?

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Amy Rovner · Apr 22, 2025

We are still discussing this as a college and as a state system (of 34 community colleges). 100% is not really achievable and you will have a lot of frustrated faculty. We have set a tentative goal of 85/90% using Ally course level report for individual courses. For our whole college, I’m hoping to hit 80% by April 2026 but I don’t know if we’ll make it. We are training our faculty to start “fresh” in our training sessions. Create a new sandbox course, copy ONLY the content you are currently using into and then working on remediating the issues flagged by Ally in that sandbox course. So much old content is hanging around in courses that is unused but bringing down their scores. It takes a little longer at the beginning but faculty appreciate the process after they get going. Of course, sometimes their new Ally course score on the sandbox course is actually lower/worse than their full/old course but we just focus on what that means for students trying to use that content and how valuable the faculty time/work is to make it accessible. It’s a steep hill to climb but we are taking one step at a time. Good luck!!

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April Akins · Apr 23, 2025 · Last updated Apr 23, 2025 - 11:35 AM

As a QM school we are setting the goal of 85% or better on the Ally score, to meet accessibility standards within QM. We have used Ally in several ways as part of our academic program reviews, course design, and course observations by school leaders. We provide trainings and one on one support with accessibility. Would love to hear how others are using it! We mainly use it as an internal improvement goal.

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