Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Page Titles and Language Sets in Brightspace

The Problem

You have been working on ensuring your course has a perfect Ally Accessibility score and to your surprise you see a page that has an issue.  It reads:

  • 96%: This HTML file does not have a language set.

If you explore the issues, you may notice that the page is also missing a title.  Both are critical for accessibility.  To your dismay, Ally states, “Guidance is not available yet”.

Screen Shot of Edit HTML option
Figure 1

Guidance is Here

Luckily, we do not have to rely on Ally to solve this problem and you do not need to be an experienced HTML programmer either.  Any faculty can resolve this issue in the Brightspace editor.  You simply need to follow these steps:

  1. Select Edit HTML to the page in question to open the editor. (See Figure 1)
  2.  On the toolbar select the drop down from the Other Insert Options icon – it has a + sign on the button (See Figure 2)
  3.  Select the Attributes option.
  4. Select the “Page Attributes” Tab (See figure 3)
  5. Give the page a meaningful title (if it doesn’t already have one)
  6. Set the language set – “en’ for English (This is so much easier than adding <html lang="en"> to in the html code.)
  7. Select Create.
  8. Select the blue “Save and Close.”

That was it.  

Figure 2: Steps 2 and 3 in selecting other options

Figure 2

You didn’t have to open the source code and drop in the appropriate code ( <html lang="en"> for the English language set).  Instead, you can quickly fix any problematic pages with these issues and ensure your content passes WCAG accessibility standards. 

Figure 3 - Steps 4-7 how to add the title and language set

Figure 3

Now that you know this, you can have perfect pages.

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Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Self-Regulation

 

Universal Design for Learning

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Self-Regulation

The third principle of UDL, "provide multiple means of engagement”, helps promote an inclusive learning environment on many levels.  When developing a course and focusing on this principle, there are three guidelines to follow.  They are:

  1.  Recruiting Interest
  2. Sustaining Effort and Persistence
  3. Self-Regulation

We are now going to take a deeper look.

Self-Regulation is the ability to regulate emotions and motivations necessary to succeed at a task, such as learning. Naturally, developing and mastering this ability is important for all learners. While a learning environment can increase engagement by recruiting interest and sustaining effort and persistence, the ability to self-regulate, or to control one’s emotions and motivations so as to effectively cope and engage with the environment, is critical for learners’ success, both in and outside of the learning environment.


Many learners have developed these skills in primary school, however, there are still adult learners who struggle developing these skills. This is partially true due to most classrooms not explicitly addressing these skills and marginalized students finding this skill set inaccessible or imperceptible within an implicit curriculum. Regardless of the cause, designing a course to promote this skill, through prompts and modeling, helps level the field for everyone.


This approach provides alternatives to support learners with different aptitudes and prior experience to effectively manage their own engagement and affect. When adopting this approach, consider the following criteria:

  1. Promote expectations and attitudes that optimize motivation
  2. Facilitate personal coping skills and strategies. These strategies should offer flexible options to account for the individual variation
  3.  Develop self-assessment and reflection. Learners need to monitor their emotions and reactions accurately in order to develop their ability at self-regulation


By promoting an inclusive strategy with multiple ways of promoting self—regulation, your courses will be more develop skills that will promote student success in the course and in life.

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Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 3

  Universal Design for Learning Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 3 When developing a course using the third principle of  U...