With the emphasis to move more courses online and non-traditional students being the fastest growing demographic in colleges, there is no better time to learn or review the theory of Universal Design for Learning. Applying this theory will promotes diversity, provide equitable learning environments, and improve student success in the class room as well as in online courses.
The SUNY Center for Professional Development is offering training in applying universal design for learning to your courses to further inclusion design and improve pedagogical practices. In this six-week class you will directly apply Universal Design for Learning strategies that will cultivate a more inclusive and effective environment that will increase student success and retention. The course goals will include increasing the accessibility of your course content and developing scaffolds to stimulate student engagement. You will walk away with skills to benefit:
In Blackboard there are several ways to create content. An Item offers a ‘flat’ presentation of content that allows users to see the content without having to click to another page and, more frustratingly, have to click to go back the top menu.
What are the advantages of an Item?
Some advantages include:
Items can offer quick information, like module objectives or advice, that can help students
Items allow you to insert a title, descriptive text, and file attachment. This is a great way to offer instructions or supply context to the content – such as an attached file.
Items are developed with the content editor. Thus you have the same freedom as other content tools
How do I make an Item?
An Item can be created by:
Selecting Build Content
Select "Item"
You will have to add a title and will be presented a content editor. Thus it is capable of anything the editor offers, such as links or embedded video.
You can also attach a file
Select “Submit” and you have an Item.
Recommendations
Best practices for using Items include:
Items are best when short and share a brief message. More detail can be supplied in a Blank Page.
The content editor, which allows: embedding of web 2.0 tools, video, audio, images, hyperlinks and more, is a powerful tool. Tragically, this is often overlooked. Be sure to use it wisely to best meet your objectives.
Items display at the top level, and do not open like pages in Content Folders. Used correctly, they can offer insight to navigation, act as an abstract, or offer quick access to a link, video or file.
Items allow for information to be included with files. If you want to add context about an attached file or hyperlink, you can include instructions about the content you are sharing with the students with an Item. The Link and the File feature do not offer such an elegant solution.
If you have only one page for a content section on the menu, consider using an Item for easier navigation. Less clicking makes for happier students.
Warning:
As a rule, you want to be careful with the size of your Item. If your item is too long, it may distract students and make it harder to navigate the course. It is important to avoid the ‘scroll of death’ by creating long content dumps with Items. Your Items should not impede student navigation and being able to quickly review the entire course at a glance.
Follow these tips and your course can offer items that can improve your students’ success.
Knowing more about your students can go a long way in your effort to make a more inclusive environment. There are apparent areas that we can help, such as considering students physical disabilities, e.g., visual impairments. However, there are other factors that are often overlooked that may be a less obvious, but equally as deserving of attention in creating inclusive learning environments.
The following are a few factors that contribute to inequity in the classroom:
Family crisis: It is difficult to devote the attention or be able to work around inflexible schedules when a student must simultaneously address issues, such as a sick child or terminally parent.
Mental Health Issues: Anxiety or depression are just a few unseen issues that some student must overcome in addition to classwork. Likewise some content may even make students very uncomfortable, such as those dealing with PTSD. In 2016, 39% of students polled reported struggling with at least one mental illness. Mental illness is not always visible, the National College Health Association attributes it as one of the leading causes in inhibiting student success.
Lack of healthcare: In 2013 studies show that one in four students ages 18-29 do not have health insurance. This one more level of stress that can compound financial issues if the student has a health condition that requires help.
Homelessness: In the past year about one in ten of your students have experienced homelessness. As hard as that is to believe, between 9-14% of students experienced homelessness depending on what type of school they attended. Moreover, between 36-46% housing insecure. Obviously, the stress of not having a home has devastating effects on student success.
English as a Second Language: 23% of immigrants with a college degree from abroad are underemployed or unemployed and see going back to school as way to help. These students need flexibility to accommodate possible strict working schedules as well as differing needs in learning from those without college experience. They may also find our education norms, communication habits, and participation structure to be quite different from their educational experiences. You should consider this when you let them know they, ‘can nuke a hot pocket in the food pantry”.
These are often stealthy, yet sinister factors that impede many students. When developing your educational environments, try to remember to consider ways to accommodate or ameliorate these to help students who need it most. While we may not be able to fix all problems, creating a more inclusive environment can help, one student at a time.
Atchison, B., Diffey, L., Rafa, A., and Sarubbi, M. Equity in Education: Key Questions to Consider. Education Commission of the States, June, 2017, pp. 1-6.
Batalova, J., Fix, M., & Creticos, P. A. (2008). Uneven progress: The employment pathways of skilled immigrants in the United States. Washington, DC: National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, Migration Policy Institute
Batalova, J., McHugh, M., & Morawski, M. (2014). Brain waste in the U.S. workforce: Select labor force characteristics of college-educated native-born and foreign-born adults. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Non-traditional students are a growing demographic that is increasing. Traditionally we considered college students to be between 18 and 24 years old and matriculating fresh directly from high school. However, today's college students include:
Social Isolation: The age difference or life experience difference makes non-traditional students struggle. That has significant impact on their success (Wyatt, 2011)
Interrole Conflict: with multiple roles, non-traditional students have to balance the roles with that of being a student (Markle, 2015)
Lack of Flexibility: Class times and course work schedules often do not afford flexibility non-traditional students require (Gonclaves & Trunk, 2014)
These general concerns do not even address many other factors, such as economic or race issues, that also may impede student success when not accounted for in higher education. For these reasons inclusive class designs and practices are needed to improve our teaching success.
A fun reminder that helps is that as a college academic, if you are taking the training, you are probably feeling the same pressures as your non-traditional students. Chances are that 40% of your students are feeling the same way you are, however, many may not have the flexibility or finances you have.
While using Universal Design for Learning will not solve all the challenges non-traditional students face, it does offer a tool to help create learning environments that afford students the flexibility that can contribute to their success. In many ways Universal Design for Learning encourages accommodating environments to coincide with preferences of adult learners, such as allowing students to direct their learning (Wlodkowski, 1993).By offering flexible learning environments, we are helping develop a more inclusive atmosphere that will contribute to the non-traditional students’ success. This is at least a step in the right direction.
Sometimes you want to create a document or presentation that
can show your great content designs the employ principles of Universal Design
for Learning and be able to share it with colleagues who may not be able to
access your Learning Management System.A PDF is a great way to do this.
How do you accomplish
this?
Word, PowerPoint, and many other Microsoft products feature
the ability to save as PDF and preserve hyperlinks and other media (such as
images).If you format the documents, to
include hyperlinks, they will remain active when the document is accessed via a
machine with online connectivity.
How can I do this with a web content document?
In word, you can follow some simple steps.
Copy the text (and paste into a Word Document)
Be sure hyperlinks are
included.
Add images (and be sure to
add descriptions).
If you have embedded media, you can easily opt to add a
screenshot of the embedded image (such as the video).You can then add a description and a
hyperlink in case the viewer chooses to select the image.
Use the Accessibility Checker to make sure
the document is accessible.
Then save the file as a PDF
while preserving formatting.
You should note that PowerPoint offers several similar
options.
Now all you need is a little practice and you can create
PDFs with hyperlinks to web-pages, as well as supplementary multimedia. You can
email the files to students or colleagues. Finally, if you are emailing the
content and using MS Outlook, you will have much of the same functionality as
Word.This means you could even compose
the email message to include multiple representations of the content. You may
notice that offering your content in more formats may increase the number of
people who engage in your content. This is just an added perk of having a
document to share that uses Universal Design for Learning Principles.
Whenever you are creating a course or learning environment,
it is critical to know your audience. First it is important to know what you
want to you audience to accomplish.As
an experience college educator, you already know that if you were to create an
introductory college course you would naturally want a course that enables
students to:
articulate
general principles of the course topic,
have a general
idea of the field
consider the
subject from a variety of perspectives and
apply an
approach to problem solving employed by professionals in that discipline.
Alternatively, advanced level college courses involve higher levels of
abstraction, a more sophisticated understanding of the content, and extensive
knowledge of the field.Consequently,
knowing what level of knowledge the expected student has and the level of the course
expectations gives you great insight as to what your course will need to be
successful.
Knowing your audience also entails understanding the
specific needs of our students.This
will allow for courses to target resources to meet students where they need
most help.For example, if you create an
online course and presume that the students all younger and younger people are
digital natives who should not have a problem navigating the LMS, you may be in
for a shock when you discover that 1 in 4 students in your class are over the
age of 25.Further, often low income and
first generation students do not have the same level of computer competence as
their fellow students. This can greatly affect your courses’ design
effectiveness. It is best to know who your audience is and design it inclusively
for the various students who will be attending the class.While you may want to make it easy for those
who are familiar with computers, you may want to remember you also want to
accommodate those who are not.
Overcoming
your perception of students and looking at the reality of your college is
critical for understanding how to best meet your student’s needs.For example, while most people think the
average college student is 20 years old, the average college student is
actually 26 years old.Further, while
more students enrolled in four year colleges (58%) than two year programs (42%),and
half of these students attend full time, community colleges have generally have
a higher level of part-time students than full-time students.Hispanic students are also over-represented in
public two-year colleges while less likely to attend a four year college and
get a bachelor’s degree.
Over all, knowing your courses audience is critical for them
achieving success. As an instructor or
course designer, you don’t want to tacitly accept your intuition about your
students. The more you learn about them,
the better you can accommodate their needs and increase their success.
Ultimately, this contributes to higher retention, high graduation rates, and
more satisfied students and administrators.
Of course, the better teaching reviews that are correlated to better
course design doesn’t hurt either.
You find yourself teaching a hybrid course this semester,
and are faced with an enigma. Is there no easy way to create a class list to
take attendance when in class and you do not have access to the LMS? Copying
them by hand from a computer screen the night before doesn’t seem to be a
practical solution.
It doesn’t take a detective to unravel this mystery - there
is an easier way. By going into your
course shell in Blackboard, you can create a class list that can be downloaded
and printed with these easy steps.
Go to the Full Grade Center.
From the Work Offline tab, select “Download”
Select the “User Information Only” feature under data.
Select Submit
Press the Download Button and an Excel File will be downloaded to your computer. This may contain sensitive information, so be sure to be careful with this file.
Open the Download file. Excel will probably give you a warning box telling you that the file could be unsafe because of a file format extension mismatch. This is not the case. It is just reading a hyperlink in the file that no longer points back to your Blackboard shell that would retrieve the students’ last access date.
To continue, press “Yes” and open the file.
You
now have an excel file with a list of your students that are registered for
your course. You can format it to your
liking and print it out. This can be handy if you want to have a hard copy for
taking attendance in areas where you may not have access to internet or do not
wish to open Blackboard.
This is an easy way to create portable class lists.
Now that truth is out, we can rest easy and get back to what is important – teaching.
When developing a course in Blackboard, or any learning
management system, you should ensure that every image has an alt-tag, or
description. This is vital for ensuring that everyone benefits fairly. With a
description, those with visual assisting software, or screen reading
technology, can make sense of the image. Without a description, visually
impaired students will only be presented a meaningless string of characters.
(For example: you could hear this instead of this)Since increasing accessibility is key to inclusivity
and student success, as we as the law, it is vital to add a description to each
image.Luckily, doing so is relatively
easy.
You just need to follow these steps:
In the Content Editor, select the third button from the far left on the third (bottom) toolbar. This button has a picture frame with a mountain and sun in it.
A new window will open. An image box will be starred. Just underneath the box is a button that states “Browse My Computer”. Select this. It will allow you to search your computer and select the image file you want to use.
Now, make sure give the image a meaningful Title and Image Description. This is important because this is how screen readers can access the image and translate them for the visually impaired. This will make the image more accessible, which is good practice, and ADA Compliant.
Select the “Appearance tab”. Select an alignment for the image. In general, if the image is not too large, you should select “Right” alignment and place it on the top of the page. This will give the image visibility while not drawing away from the users navigation ability or the primary text. For manageable whitespace, consider have a Vertical Space of 7 and a Horizontal Space of 11.
Select the “Insert” button
Congratulations, you have added an accessible image.
Many times teachers are challenged with new or
non-traditional students who are not familiar with how online discussion work
in education, as well as, some students who struggle within the online
environments. Naturally, when some students do not make the most of the
discussion sections, and this can impinge the overall effectiveness of the
forum for the class.
Like most aspects on teaching and learning, a little
preparation before the lesson can save the instructor a lot of work after
student falter.By offering tips to
students in advance, you can assist them in better contributing in class
discussions.Alternatively, setting up
an adaptive learning system, these tips can be set to assist students who first
demonstrate that they may not understand how to maximize the discussion forums.
Below is an open set of tips (included in the video playlist
above). Feel free to use these to assist any students you have that could
benefit from better discussion participation.
Imagine that you have a template that could assist you in course creation and allow you, as a developer, to focus on course content and learning activities that will effectively assist students in meeting the learning outcomes of the course. This could save you time one developing webpages and formatting them according to best practices. Instead, you can focus developing assessments and learning activities to promote students easily meeting the courses learning outcomes.
The course model supplied offers a linear course design that implements a course information documents pack that meets over 20% (11) of the OSCQR standards. Using best practices this model template, when areas are completed, allows the course to meet over 40% of the requirements of the OSCQR rubric, or 21 of its standards. This is true regardless of the subject matter used. A content free model cannot ensure that the course will meet all the standards, such as:
Standard 31: Course provides activities that emulate real world applications of the discipline, such as experiential learning, case studies, and problem-based activities.
Nevertheless, it can offer a template that ensures that several standards are met while saving the developer time and, if regularly adopted thought a school, offers a uniform environment for easier navigation and less cognitive load for students. The numbering system also offers a convenient navigational system that is lacking in many conventional learning management systems
Doesn’t this interfere with academic freedom?
No, of course not. The course model offers a structure that conforms to best practices in instructional design. Just as in logic in philosophy, there is a difference between content and form. Thus Modus Ponens is a valid argument form regardless of the content. Moreover, the model is just that – it is a template to help in the design and development process. It may offer a linear format, however, this does not preclude that you can modify the model to meet pedagogical needs of the course. Provided these modifications do not run contrary to best practices in instructional design, there is no reason why the designer cannot add them. For example, adding a course long discussion forum intended for students to share and evaluate external references related to course content is an excellent idea to build a community and promote information literacy.
Remember to work smarter and not harder. There is very little reason to spend time working on recreating course structures, when instead you can spend the time working on developing assessments that map to student learning outcomes and great learning activities that promote student success.
You can download a Blackboard Package of the Course Model here so that you can upload it to any course that you plan to develop. You should note that some of the features are college specific, and will require further modification for use at a school other than SUNY Schenectady.
You want accessible content because it increases student success. Luckily there is software that is common on most all campuses that can help. Microsoft Word, and most all MS Office Programs, have an Accessibility Checker that will allow you to create accessible documents. With both you can also convert your documents into PDFs so that they work better of online courses.
Here is how to create accessible PDFs in MS Word in 4 simple steps (and this can also apply to PowerPoint).
Create a word document that is accessible with the “Accessibility Checker"
You simply have to save the document as a PDF.
Saving a word document as an accessible PDF is easy. To save a file with the PDF file extension, either:
select “Export” and then choosing “Create PDF”, or
Select “Save as”, or “Save”, and changing the file type to PDF.
Choose the “Options” button.
In the “Option” pop-up window be sure to select the option, “Document structure tags for accessibility”.
If you use more accessible fonts, such as Verdana, you should be fine. (You may consider selecting ISO 19005-1 Compliant PDF/A option if you have a non-standard font. It will ensure fonts can be read by a screen reader and not represented as an image (or bitmap). This option is preferable for creating documents that you would like to archive.)
Save the file as a PDF.
If you follow these simple rules, you can ensure that your documents are accessible. You did this with only Microsoft Office using Word.
Help spread the word and increase the accessibility of content! Please feel free to share this information and end inaccessible documents.
