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almost half of the students who reported having no difficulty hearing use closed captions sometimes or more often, compared to two-thirds of students reporting difficulty with hearing. Further, the majority of frequent caption users find closed captions to be considerably helpful, regardless of their ability status.

closed captions are being used by a wide range of students, perhaps wider than one might guess.

on the two institutions where I found the most success, it actually specifically was ones in which there was already a designated body that I could bring on board who had perhaps a faculty representative from each academic college. So, when I began initially launching the digital accessibility initiative on the Coastal campus, I immediately presented that my Digital Learning Committee, which is actually what used to be called the Distance Learning Committee, and presented to them initially the idea that “This is coming, I need you to come on board as my college representative advocate, and I need you to be a champion as well within your academic unit.”

faculty monetary incentive grant that has required as well as optional elective training opportunities built in with the ultimate outcome that’s twofold. The twofold piece of that is faculty will learn information that will help them to build and administer better, stronger, high quality digital learning courses. But, the ultimate outcome is also specifically that the courses that they are actually building for digital learning purposes will be submitted to my unit for a quality review with evaluative feedback on how to improve those.

two instructional designers for a campus of over 10,000 students.

expedite the administrative struggles that they were running into. And a good example is, when a faculty member submits a course for a grant review, we end up looking at it for every single component. And so one of the biggest red flags that we would see is our faculty were spending hours and hours and hours creating wonderful lectures, but none of these had closed captions. They couldn’t pass a grant without having accessible courses. And so one of the very first things that we were able to do was implement a component by which faculty simply alert us of all multimedia, and my unit, in my department of online learning, actually complete the closed captions for all of them for everybody on the entire campus. So, we’ve taken the workload off of them. We actually, through a training program, have trained our graduate assistants and student workers to do closed captioning to standards. We utilize a third party program called Echo 360 for our lecture capture. And starting in the fall of 2019, we enabled what is called ASR for automatic speech recognition, so that there is a component in place to begin the captioning to standard, and then our student workers and graduate assistants pop in and make the modifications. The faculty actually have no administrative responsibilities for that, unless they choose to caption themselves. So, one of the pieces that’s heaviest lifting for compliance, specifically, was just simply the time to make those modifications. And so I immediately started looking at what are the heaviest lifting pieces and what can we do as a unit to lift that for the faculty so that they don’t have to make those accommodations.

an Ally drop spot.

we use the Ally drop spot, not just for academic classes, because the culture has changed so much on our campus that administrative documents, things like announcements about upcoming movies on campus that are going out via email, everything that is now distributed digitally must be WCAG compliant, which makes my heart very happy.

having an Ally drop spot, having a centralized technique in which faculty can batch upload or staff can batch upload content to be checked and corrected immediately, again, with administrative heavy lifting that we built into simplify the process for them.

Ally, for example, scans all documents that may exist in your learning management system and inadvertently one of the after effects of that is that happens to alert you to the age of your original file creation. So for example, if I’m teaching a spring 2020 psychology class, and Ally scans my file, it may alert me that that file was originally developed in Microsoft Word 1997.

we used to be taught that the best way to make files accessible for everybody, because everybody doesn’t have the same software, is just save it as a PDF and everybody can access it… and actually, that backwards now…

Our campus is not one that has a significant technology budget. And so most of the items that I’ve mentioned today in your episode are things that we developed internally. We don’t send off for closed captioning for third parties, we simply don’t have the funds for that.

using the resources you already have. They’re using the personnel you already have. Again, we retrained and retooled our graduate assistants and student workers to make sure that they can assist that with doing a ton of heavy lifting.

attend all formal meetings, all informal meetings, all staff meetings about visioning and planning

out of their 20 hours, only about five of that is actually closed-captioning. They will do the edits. And the edits are actually super easy to do through the vendor that we actually have as well. They allot about five of their 20 hours to closed captioning. The other 15 are spent in doing other types of work such as conversions within the Ally system, helping our faculty to make modifications to improve the digital accessibility of their courses. Two of our student assistants, the part-time workers, also directly assist us with the open inclusive education process so that they help our faculty to locate OERs that can be implemented into their courses. We only launched our OER initiative about two and a half years ago, and we already have over 60 faculty. So, we’re very proud of that particular access work. And so we’ve been able to make a tremendous amount of headway super fast, partially because of the assistance of our part-time staff. We’ve been doing a lot of the legwork to locate really high quality, open and inclusive materials for our faculty.

COOL grants, there’s actually two different formats of those. One is a year-long, and the year-long course development grant is focused on building brand new courses that have never been placed into an online or a hybrid program. And we give them an entire year to do that.

What will happen is once their courses are reviewed, evaluated, modified and completed, those courses become what are called COOL certified

I tend to find that, because I do distinguish for them the difference between Universal Design for Instruction and Universal Design for Learning, that seems to actually create a pathway for them. And the way that I tend to distinguish that is UDI, Universal Design for Instruction is what we do. That’s us. That’s the faculty. We provide instruction. Universal Design for Learning, that’s what our students do. That’s how they learn.

We’ve heard you say a couple of times about the heavy lifting done, in part, by your staff. Not all institutions or campuses have a staff equivalent to yours to do some of the heavy lifting or the student groups set up. How do you suggest individuals get started when they might not have the time resources or the funding resources or the staff resources, and it just seems, like, impossible?

we are not a heavily funded campus, most of the resources that we utilize are free.

online webinars that we share with our faculty are actually those that are offered for free

Many of the templates that are available that we actually share with our faculty came from state level consortia.

With the COOL grant initiatives, faculty do have a set of both required and elective courses, and examples of those would be quality assurance.

The other one that I think is probably my personal favorite, of course, is the digital accessibility. That one is actually taught in a face-to-face, 90-minute format and we usually offer it anywhere between six and eight times a semester. It usually is part one for our faculty. They learn a lot in that 90-minute workshop but because they were so interested in learning it we had to build a second part. And so they typically take digital accessibility face-to-face and then part two is what we call Ally intensive… and so it’s a hands on work specifically with the Ally tool.

We also specifically, of course, teach face-to-face as well as self paced workshops specific to our learning management system, which we use Moodle here on our campus.

We also teach both OER I and OER II. OER I, I specifically teach on our campus. And again, it’s taught actually as open and inclusive education. And so I teach the face-to-face one so that faculty learn how to include things that might already have been paid for out of our students tuition and incorporate those into their classes so that there’s no additive cost. And the OER II is a self paced that faculty progress through on their own in order to complete that one.

This is one I get probably the most positive feedback from faculty about is what’s called a hybrid blended workshop institute. That particular workshop is 10 weeks long. And because hybrid is something that maybe, is just a different thing for faculty, is something that sometimes they maybe have already been teaching hybrid but they didn’t understand really, the functionality of what that is. What we decided to do, my co-instructor and I actually built the hybrid blended so that the faculty complete between 60 and 70% of that online, and the other workshops are face-to-face. So, by the time they finish, they have successfully taken as a student, their first hybrid class.

We also teach courses specific to academic integrity. We teach them about not just academic integrity principles for building content, but also about different types of tools that they might employ in order to enhance academic integrity in their courses.

And then multimedia… that we teach about like personal lecture capture and utilizing multimedia for learning and those types of things.

a sister unit on our campus, which is the Center for Teaching and Learning. And they offer many of the offshoot classes that have to do with pedagogy as well. So, we’re not all by ourselves, we actually have a sister unit who helps to supplement a lot of what we do by teaching specific pedagogy classes.

we evaluate our COOL grant faculty recipients and to even graduate you have to become COOL certified, their courses have to hit or exceed at least 80% in quality criteria. Some of our faculty who are incredible superstars end up hitting or exceeding at 100%. And so those faculty get nominated as what we call exemplary showcase presenters. We’ve now hosted three of those, and our fourth one will be actually hosted this year in 2020. So, the exemplary showcase will be an opportunity for this next round of faculty to continue to present about the best practices. It will be our first showcase where we have individuals presenting who have implemented OERs in classes that fall outside of the scope of just digital and online learning.

In the 2019 academic year, my team first started tracking the success of students based on their GPAs and their drop, fail, withdraw rates in order to see if there was any kind of correlation between those and the courses that had successfully completed quality course review. And I’m so pleased to actually tell you that, for the first time, we were able to actually see decreased drop, fail, withdrawal rates and increased GPAs in classes that had complied with and excelled in all of these quality initiatives there.

They are significant. However, one of the things, John, is the sample is still quite small.

We also believe that disability is an identity marker for many students and, as such, deserves respect, dignity, and acknowledgement of value.

Disability can positively reshape the conditions and spaces in which students learn and can work to generate new ideas, new understandings.

This myth is the most insidious of all because it is presented as a matter of common sense: that disability is something to dread. Now imagine students who see disability as a part of their identity.

Disability is not something to dread. It just is. We, too, should recognize, value, and (automatically) validate the experiential knowledge of students