UDL – Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Camosun Story #113: Jen G

Jen has been teaching in the Biology Department at Camosun for 20 years and in 2024 was a co-recipient of the Arts & Science Award for Teaching Excellence as well as a recipient of an Accessibility Recognition Certificate. While she tells me she doesn’t really know what she did to earn that recognition, she is always striving to improve the accessibility of her course materials, and to support students with accessibility concerns and challenges. And I wanted to talk to her to find out more.

After Jen completed her master’s degree, she realized that she loved the teaching side more than research. “Even back in high school, I worked as a tutor and a coach, so moving into teaching felt like a natural fit for me.” She wasn’t sure what might be available, so applied at Camosun for a non-teaching tech position. The biology department chair at the time saw Jen’s application but instead of hiring for the tech position, two weeks before classes started, contacted her for an interview for teaching. “I started with term work then was regularized in 2008. So, now I teach a mixture of courses, but mostly human anatomy and physiology (A&P).” I asked Jen what her specialization was for her graduate degree, after she told me it was definitely not A&P. “Both my undergrad and master’s research focused on marine invertebrates, specifically on development and embryology, so, my master’s was basically about baby snails. But I did upper year course work on comparative vertebrate physiology, histology, and development and embryology, much of which is foundational to human A&P.” And while now she teaches solely on the human side, she told me she will pull in A&P stories from other, non-human animals for fun and comparison.

I wondered what Jen has enjoyed most about teaching over the years. “I love working with humans – you don’t get to be in a room with people as much in a research setting. I love that teaching gives us so many opportunities to share and hear stories. And I also love learning. Every time I teach this course, I learn something new, either from a question that comes up, or some new piece of research, or hearing something described in a new way. I also enjoy being able to help students deepen their understanding about what’s goes on inside their body, how things work, and to see them develop their own questions and make connections.”

I imagined the online years during COVID might have been challenging for Jen, given her preference for being in person with them, and wondered what impact COVID may have had on her teaching. “During that fully online year, I tried to find more opportunities to interact with students, because I felt that’s what I needed to do to feel like I was doing my job, and I felt students might need that connection too. That first semester, I used my lab time, because we weren’t in the lab, and met with small groups of students for chunks of time throughout the three-hour block, to ask them questions, get to know them a little bit, and to have smaller group conversations. In the second semester, I had all the students do their labs synchronously. I pulled some material together, put them into breakup groups, and then I visited each breakout group during the lab time. But what got me through that year were my online office hours and I had some great conversations with the students who attended them.” Jen confessed that while teaching online is not her favourite scenario, teaching online during COVID gave her a chance to rethink how she approached her teaching. “I revised the way I organize my lecture notes, and I added comments to each PPT slide so students could work through the material independently to complement what we did together during our synchronous sessions. And I still provide them with that material whereas in the past, I used to hold some of that information back. Now, that content is there for students who are sick and have to miss class – they’ve got extra resources to help them stay up to date – and for students who need to reread things after class.” Jen also feels that she is more flexible now if students can’t come to class on the day an assignment is due, working with them to find another way for them to hand it in and/or at a time that will work for them, while still ensuring she can grade and return assignments to everyone in class at the same time.

I asked Jen about the recognition she received for accessibility. “I didn’t purposefully take on any one big accessibility project. I think the recognition came from that flexibility I try to build in by providing course materials in D2L so students can review content at their own pace. And as I create those online materials, I do my best to make sure they are accessible.” And for content that still isn’t accessible, “it’s on my Scheduled Development plan to change our lab manuals, for example, to make them more friendly to screen readers.” In addition to providing online course materials, Jen also tries to be as supportive for students as she can. “I try to create a safe place for students to talk about what works or what doesn’t work. I also respect the people in the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) who work so hard to support students with accommodation needs, so I try to support the CAL team however I can.” And that includes engaging in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). “I first heard about UDL from Sue Doner and realized how much sense it made that designing content to help specific students for specific reasons benefits other students as well. I know I have a long way before my courses fully meet that UDL ideal, but for now I incorporate it where I can.” One other change Jen has made since COVID which I think addresses accessibility involves her office hours. “I have a walking office hour once a week, because stretching our legs in the fresh air is important. Some semesters lots of people join me, other semesters, I mostly walk by myself. In addition, for each of my classes I book our classroom for half an hour before one of our weekly lectures, so people can hang out, ask questions, and have conversations before class starts. This year I started bringing anatomy colouring sheets (themed for the class topics) so students could also engage in something fun and relaxing, and it’s been a great to provide a more casual space for students.” And the colouring sheets are also used by students during class time. “Students who disclosed to me that they had trouble focusing in class, kept colouring during class – they were listening, but they needed to be doing something else as well which seemed to help them in a way that I hadn’t expected.”

I asked Jen what else she does to keep her teaching fresh. “Every year, I go through my lecture notes and tweak things, sometimes making big changes, but often just adding new information or clarifications. I’ll try different activities here and there, as well, which is fun. And this past year, I started a science book club on campus as a different way to bring people together from across the college, including a mix of faculty, staff, admin, and students, because I wanted to provide a venue where students could engage with faculty and employees as peers.”

When it comes to memories around her teaching experiences, Jen has many. “I was pretty young when I started at Camosun. not much older than some of my students, and I was teaching biology for non-majors. We don’t always think of our students as having life outside of the classroom, but there was a student who was just a little bit younger than me who I discovered later in the semester had a girlfriend who was dying from cystic fibrosis. That was one early reminder that everyone, no matter how old or young, has something going on, and you don’t know how serious it is. Part of being flexible is that I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t need to know why someone might be acting in a different way or missing class.” On the more positive side of memories, Jen recalled a group of nursing students she taught one year. “I was with the same cohort of students for eight months, so we all knew each other well. As I watched them work together over the semester, I experienced how just one person in a group can create a positive force that radiates out through the whole group. They were all so supportive of each other and of me, but there was one specific person who created a positive atmosphere in that class. And I’ve since wondered what I can do to foster that positivity, instead of letting someone who’s a bit grumpy or complaining spread those vibes through the group.” Then, “there are lots of funny stories students share in class related to course content,” which is not surprising considering it involves human anatomy and physiology, “that I share (anonymously) with other students. Experiencing those stories and having permission to share them as well has been great.”

Finally, as our time drew to a close, I wondered what advice Jen might have for new faculty coming to teach at Camosun. “Ask for help when you need it. The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning has people, resources, and workshops to help you out, but don’t forget department colleagues. Biology is a pretty supportive department for when people come on board, and we share lots of resources, so don’t feel like you need to reinvent the wheel, especially your first time teaching a course. The other piece of advice is to be true to who you are in the classroom. Just because one person teaches one way, and someone else another way, doesn’t make either way right or wrong. Being your authentic teaching self comes across to students, and you will feel more comfortable too.”

Camosun Story #109: Dwayne

A recipient of a Camosun College Accessibility Recognition certificate in 2024, Dwayne is currently the Associate Dean of the School of Health Sciences and Human Services (HSHS), but his time at the college goes back about 19 years. “I was a student at Camosun in the nursing program, then went to the University of Victoria. After graduating, I worked in the Victoria area as a nurse mostly in the emergency room, then came back to Camosun in 2006 as an instructor in the nursing program. I eventually became a program leader and then the chair of the nursing program. And for the past two years, I’ve been the Associate Dean.”

After so many years, and so many roles, I asked Dwayne what keeps him coming to work. “I’ve always had an interest in education, even when working as a nurse, I enjoyed working with students completing their clinical practice. But once I began working as a nurse educator in 2006, I haven’t looked back. As my journey continued, I completed my masters, looking more at educational organization and curriculum ultimately taking it to the leadership level. While I certainly miss interacting with students, I hope that by moving into a leadership role, I can have a broader positive impact on both faculty and students.”

Dwayne spoke about how important it is that we understand our role as educators. “Whatever our role, student, faculty, leader, support person, we all have a part to play in a student’s journey, from admissions all the way to the end. What I’ve learned over the years, is that every student has their own story. While it can be easy to make assumptions about students, we need to recognize that we don’t know what their journey has been to get to the college, and we should be mindful of treating them as individuals. This is especially true today, with so many people struggling with food insecurity, high cost of rent, education, transportation, etc. Most students today have to work, they may have student loans, they may be living on their own with no support system. So as instructors, as an institution, even as we face our own challenges, we need to consider how we can assist those students. That doesn’t mean we have to decrease the rigor, but we can, for example, look at different ways of evaluating or providing more flexibility where we can.”

I asked Dwayne if he could tell me a little bit about the work he has done around accessibility. “That’s been a learning journey. Every year, there are more and more students requiring Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) accommodations. For myself, moving into that leadership role, I am concerned as students go out into the community, or into clinical and practicum, looking at how accommodations need to travel with the students. Of course, the classroom is different from the clinical setting, and while some accommodations cannot be met outside of the classroom (depending on required essential skills), some can. It’s been a journey not only educating faculty about accommodations and our responsibilities as an institution but also working with our community partners and health authorities around their responsibilities with regards to student accommodations. This means having lots of conversations to educate and inform, but also to collaborate so that students are not having to advocate for themselves without support.” Dwayne says they have only really been taking those conversations into community for the past four or five years, and that it can sometimes be challenging for everyone to understand the duty to accommodate whenever possible. “Part of it is reminding both faculty and our stakeholders that students are not being employed, they’re being educated, and we are here to accommodate them in their educational journey. What happens after they have completed their programs is out of our control, but for the here and now, we will do what we can to accommodate students, within reason.”

I wondered if Dwayne could share an example of accommodation in a clinical setting. “We had a student who wore digital hearing aids, and they would wear a microphone to amplify sound. They could also read lips, but this was during COVID when everyone was wearing masks which meant it was challenging for this student to understand everything because they couldn’t validate what they were hearing by reading lips. So, we worked with the health authority and discussed options with the staff who were working with the student. It was decided that staff would either wear clear face masks, or they would speak directly into the student’s microphone.” Dwayne had to navigate a few privacy concerns, mainly to ensure that the microphone was not recording, but going directly to the student’s hearing aid. “We had three or four meetings with the health authority, then they met with the staff on the unit, and we worked together to work out the solution, then had to have conversations again each time the student moved to a new unit. In the end, while there was a little trepidation to begin with, we were able to accommodate the student, and she was ultimately able to graduate.”

In addition to accommodations, Dwayne has also been exploring Universal Design for Learning (UDL) strategies to support all students. “Something I’ve advocated for, as courses and assessments are redesigned, is making them accessible for everybody because not only is that helpful for a student with an accommodation, but also for students who can’t get a CAL accommodation. If you build in accessibility from the beginning, the challenge of creating accommodations in the moment is gone. One example I can think of immediately involves our exams. If exams are three hours long and a student has an accommodation for time and a half, what if we just make the exam an hour and a half? Then any students, with an accommodation or not, can stay for a full three hours. This removes any stigma a student may be feeling and doesn’t overload CAL with trying to facilitate these exams.” Then, Dwayne says, they can build on that practice as it becomes normalized. “We could then look at due dates and extensions and ask ourselves if due dates have to be firm or could there be some latitude for all students.” And as they continue to have conversations about accessibility, they can also provide new faculty with guidance and resources around UDL, “making accessibility part of our everyday language, so it’s not something else to worry about, it just becomes part of our work.”

One thing I was curious about related to the many lessons learned about accessibility during the COVID pivot. “The silver lining for me is that we’ve now learned that the traditional way of delivering content isn’t the only one, and when we all work together, we can do things differently.” Not that everything should be online, but we have the opportunity now to consider what the best delivery option might be for various courses. “It may be a hybrid course, or asynchronous, or maybe it has to be face-to-face. It could even be Hyflex, although we know this mode also creates challenges around workload and technology. And having flexible options helps our students fit their learning in around outside responsibilities.”

And related to these lessons learned, I was also interested in learning more about a new program HSHS is running soon, a bachelor’s degree in dental hygiene, that is designed to be completed online. “As we explored the audience for the program, we realized that most dental hygienists work full time, so we wanted a program they could access outside of working hours, as well as create both full time and part time options for the students. All the dental courses will be fully online, as will many of the electives, or they could take electives face to face if they chose.” And as Dwayne noted, this is a great example of how we can provide flexible educational opportunities for a diverse population of students.

This program especially interested me as a potential model for future new program development in HSHS. “As many of our programs go through program review and renewal, we need to examine if the courses could be designed to be more flexible, whether through a blended delivery, or moving it completely online. We want to encourage that exploration wherever possible, but ensuring we choose the most appropriate delivery method for the particular content or course.” And I also wondered about port-time options. Because of life’s complexities “more and more students may be looking for part-time pathways, so we need to build those in from the beginning as we look at course design, and pre- co-requisites, as opposed to trying to adapt everything after designing it for full-time.” But Dwayne notes that we also need to consider our institutional financial responsibilities. “If we create part time options, we have to be able to operationalize it as well.”

Turning back to his experiences, I asked Dwayne, after all these years, how he keeps his work interesting and fresh. “Part of my master’s work was looking at organizational change, organizational culture, so part of keeping it interesting is looking at our systems and how we might improve them. That doesn’t mean that we have to do anything differently – change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good thing. I’ve also learned that change can be tiring. Sometimes we need to stick to the status quo for a period of time, because people need time to breathe and get grounded again before we can move on. It can be a delicate balance when we have a lot of people who are very enthusiastic to make change, but maybe not everyone is as enthusiastic. So, we try to work with everyone around what can be done, and what can’t be done, and while I never want to stop change, sometimes we have to prioritize which can be challenging because everyone’s feels their passions are priorities.”

I asked if Dwayne could share any specific memories that have stuck with him over his years at Camosun. “There are students that I taught years ago who are teaching with us, and I hope that maybe I played a small role in them coming back. And sometimes new people coming on board comment that I was a role model to them as an educator. Those moments provide some validation. I try to do a good job and I try to be a mentor, but I make mistakes. I have my good days, and my bad days, but overall, I try to keep things moving in a positive way.”

As we came to the end of our conversation, I asked Dwayne what advice he might have for a new instructor coming to teach at the college. “I’d say that it can be very overwhelming when you first start teaching, when you have to learn the technology and the language of the college. And if you haven’t taught before, it can be a very steep learning curve, so try not to do everything at once. Also, know that we’re here to support you, and will try not to overwhelm you with too much information at once. In addition, think back to when you were a student. What worked for you? Who was your favorite instructor? Who did you learn from? And then apply those examples to your own teaching. And finally, remember whether you have eight students or 40 students, each one of them has a different story.”

Camosun Story #98: Chris, Kristina, and Sue: STEM Accessibility

Today we have a story of STEM Accessibility. What is STEM Accessibility, you may ask? Well, to give you an example, what happens if you’re teaching an online math class and want students to look at a formula, but they are unable to see it and have to rely on a screen reader to access the information? Sounds simple enough, and it would be if it were a sentence in English, but for mathematical formulas, it’s not that simple. So, I wanted to talk to Chris Avis, Kristina Andrew, and Sue Doner about a recent project they worked on to create more accessibility in STEM courses, to see what they found was possible and what work still needs to be done. But first I asked each of them to tell me a bit about themselves and how they came to this project. (Note that this work received an Accessibility Recognition Certificate in 2024)

Chris has been a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences for 15 years, primarily teaching physics courses. “First-year students often take our courses. But when physics is not their preferred discipline, they sometimes have a hard time with the course material, so I try to do whatever I can to make things easier for them. During COVID, I began looking at the resources we were creating for online learning and wondering how we could make those resources accessible, not just to those students who have identified accommodation needs, but for any student who may have to miss class due to life getting in the way.” Chris admitted to being both intrigued and intimidated by making physics resources accessible. “It’s a lot of work to get even one lecture designed for accessibility because physics is highly visual and mathematical, with a lot of text, jargon, equations, graphs, sketches, etc. So, finding ways to present content so that it is accessible without creating a massive workload issue is a challenge.”

Kristina has been at the college for 20 plus years, working primarily as an instructional assistant with students which is where she first began learning about accessibility. “When I was in lab with students working on statistics, we had a couple of students who had difficulties seeing information on the computer screen. I was shocked by how much effort it was for the student to access the material – they had to zoom in on one single number to see it, then zoom out and zoom in again on the next number, and so on. Whereas, had the material been accessible, the student could have just listened to it.” More recently, Kristina has been a term instructor in the Psychology Department as well as an instructional designer in eLearning where one of her roles is supporting faculty to make their courses more accessible for students. “While doing this work, I have heard from faculty in engineering, math, physics, about the barriers to creating accessible course materials, and how they have found that students will self-select out of those programs when materials are not accessible.”

Sue has been at the college for 11 years and involved in online education for over 20. “My interest in web accessibility was lit 20 years ago, when I attended a conference and discovered that the bespoke websites that I’d been proudly building were pretty much unintelligible for anybody who was blind. But I learned that you can make websites accessible to someone who is blind, which was an amazing gift.” Sue notes, however, that her background is in English and history, not math, so making equations, etc. accessible was still a challenge. “I went to a conference several years ago, where even folks who speak math and programming couldn’t agree on which markup language was best to use to represent equations allowing students to access them using assistive technologies. It is so much easier to make text and images accessible digitally than any equation in math. So, I needed to work with people who speak the language of equations to help me understand what an equation should sound like through a screen reader, as well as what markup languages would work best for different equations.” Her own challenges helped Sue understand the challenges faculty, who may not be comfortable with digital tools, might face trying to create accessible materials for STEM courses. “We can’t have the same expectations of STEM faculty creating accessible materials as we might of faculty teaching art, history, English, or business courses. This is a niche area that requires more competencies and more support to develop those competencies.”

And this is where, Sue said, the three of them came together. “Kristina and Chris already worked well together, and my role was initiating the project, working with Kristina on the D2L templates, and working on the question if we’re trying to promote accessibility for other people teaching in these disciplines, how do we create a process that people could adopt and adapt without it being a crushing burden?”

The project scene set, I asked Chris to talk about the problem he encountered and his connection to CETL. “Kris and I have talked a bit about some of these pieces, and I knew that Kris had also been working with Stephanie Ingraham in our department on an e-book for one of the radiography courses. We started by looking at the WORD templates Stephanie was building to see how they were working. But the challenge I was most concerned with was understanding how instructors use equations and the limits of text to speech technology in terms of capturing how they’re being used in the classroom.”

“Take this simple equation y equals mx plus b. When we work with students in the classroom, we have to take them from reading those letters literally to understanding what that equation means. What this equation tells you is that there are two things you are measuring: there’s a variable that you plot on the y axis, and there’s a variable that you plot on the x axis. The letter “m” is a number called the slope, and the letter “b” is a number called the y-intercept. So, while text-to-speech software would read this equation as “y equals mx plus b,” really what we’re saying it that one variable is slope times another variable plus y intercept.” And, of course, most equations in Chris’ physics class are much more complicated than this. “They are not only challenging to typeset but doubly challenging to get text to speech software to read them properly.”

An equation which states that the sum of force x-components is equal to the mass of an object multiplied to the x-component of acceleration

What you would get if a screen reader were to try to read this first line, is something like Sigma F subscript X equals M A X subscript. But what this equation tells us is that we’re going to add up all of these pieces of forces, and that is equal to mass times acceleration. So, when I discuss this equation in class, I don’t say Sigma F x equals M A X, I say sum of forces equals mass times acceleration. So, we knew that it would not only be challenging for the existing technology to read the equation coherently, we would still be missing what the equation is meant to communicate. To emulate the in-class experience, we would need to translate these equations verbally, not just have them read out by a screen reader as you would for English materials.” So, they decided they would need to provide multiple modes of access for students, meaning “typed notes for people who had no eyesight problems, and videos or audio notes where you could engage with the equations in a way that that would make sense of what you’re trying to communicate.”

Kristina jumped in here to speak to some of the complexities she and Chris began to uncover. “We were also catching anomalies, for example the letter “m” can mean mass, or meters, or minutes so Sue and I reached out to ReadSpeaker and discovered that their development team had already identified scientific terms and jargon as a limitation in the tool and were compiling a database so it could begin to interpret these terms accurately, which the developers admitted would be a long project.”

But, Chris, Kristina, and Sue wondered, what could they do for students now? “I started contacting faculty across the college, in engineering, physics, math, and chemistry, to find out what they were doing in classes that was working (which we could share with other faculty), but also that wasn’t working and where there might be gaps. Out of those conversations a few things happened. Larry Lee in chemistry found a publisher resource that he’s now piloting to help with the atomic structures. And the three of us discussed ways faculty could present information to students. For example, if they were recording a video, rather than saying here when referring to an equation, they should talk about the equation they are describing. However, this created more questions than answers and we still have a long way to go.” In addition to talking to people at Camosun, Kristina explored what other institutions were doing. And what she discovered was not a surprise: “this takes time, a lot of work, and training to learn the technology, and there are no resources we can point people to because they have not been created yet.”

Chris then spoke to challenges beyond the classroom, namely college structures. “It is very hard for a single faculty member to create accessible resources, both in terms of time and skills, and we may need to explore a model where faculty are primarily delivering course materials, but instructional designers are primarily developing those materials. Sharing resources also becomes important, and with multiple sections of one course, the expectation should be that these resources are all shared within a department, including with new term faculty, rather than having five faculty members developing five separate sets of resources on top of an already backbreaking workload.” And the ultimate goal, Chris believes, is for post-secondary institutions across B.C. (and beyond) to share the resources they create, especially since science course curriculum is fairly standard across institutions.

Kristina also added that they brought in the Centre for Accessible Learning to find out more about what assistive technology tools were being used to support students taking STEM courses. “There are some tools that can support math accessibility, or that can take images of handwritten documents and digitize them using Optical Character Recognition (ORC) (with the help of AI), but there are financial and digital literacy barriers for faculty and students who don’t know how to use these tools, meaning someone needs to provide support – both in terms of money and expertise.” But if faculty and departments work together, then it’s not on one person’s shoulders to make a course accessible. “And if those resources are shared with people in other departments, they can build off of that work where the content overlaps.”

Chris, Sue, and Kristina all reiterated that creating accessible course resources is a workload issue for faculty, one that is not easily definable given that there are no guidelines at the college around how accessible course materials need to be. Chris reiterated, “if this is to become a college priority, we have to properly resource people to do the work; it can not be done off the side of people’s desks. We need to find a way to articulate how much time it takes to create or revise one module or lesson so that it is accessible for at least 80% of students, and also so that it is accessible for every student. We could be looking at ten plus hours of work just for one lecture and there has to be recognition of the resourcing required to do that, and a desire to invest in that.”

Which of course led us to Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Kristina pointed out that “while there might be one student in a class of 40 with low vision, that doesn’t mean that adaptation of the materials would be just for that one student. This is bigger than one student, and students may not realize how much they benefit from accessible content until they are using it. How many students in a math class would appreciate an equation being read to them in a way that’s not symbolic? We won’t know until the instructor has the tools, the resources, and the support to be able to convert their content into a more accessible format.”

Sue built off of this by saying, “we started with digital accessibility of STEM equations, an impossible goal. But the project and the approach nestled more into a Universal Design for Learning mission because Chris has created materials using multiple modes of representation, including videos to describe things, described images, breakdown in text format, using HTML templates, etc. and throughout, he has been both making his content inclusive and accessible, and discovering all the work a faculty member has to do to make this happen.” And Chris added that we need to engage in discussions with our unions and administration as to how we can support ALL faculty to do this work, even faculty who have Scheduled Development time, because they may need to use SD time for other work. “If our vision is to make accessibility a priority, how do we work together to be fair to all union members, and to encourage and fund this kind of work so that we’re making life better not just for students, but for all the faculty as well? If we released a faculty member for a term or a year so they could focus on making the most accessible course possible, then they reported out on how it worked for them, that would pay dividends over time. I hope there is an investment in this kind of research and development at the college because I think it will have profound implications for workload and sustainability for projects like these going forward.” And as Sue pointed out, “now that we have provincial accessibility legislation and expectations on post secondary institutions, wouldn’t we want to be proactive by having someone fully released to help us move towards those expectations as opposed to reacting in a panic later?”

I wanted to bring the conversation back to something that had been mentioned earlier in our conversation: D2L templates for creating accessible content. Kristina started us off but saying “When I worked with Stephanie, I discovered that many of the documents she was providing to students were PDFs. So, we talked about the barriers PDFs present because they aren’t typically formatted in an accessible way. We explored WORD documents as well but discovered that the WORD extension that supports equation writing wasn’t doing what we thought that it should be doing: the equations looked better, but they were not being translated from text to speech accurately.” After exploring a variety of options, the team landed on HTML as providing the most accessible format, albeit the most labour-intensive for faculty to learn to use. But choosing a solution that would not work for faculty, was not a feasible solution, which was where the templates came in – creating as much digital accessibility as possible while recognizing that the STEM piece of it was still a work in progress. But also sharing the HTML templates across departments so faculty don’t have to reinvent them all the time.

I wondered what was next in this project, and Kristina said using Generative AI! “A faculty member and I worked with handwritten material, because one of the things that’s unique with STEM is that information is usually presented step by step, with faculty writing out equations or solutions as they unfold. We took a picture of the material, fed it into Generative AI and asked it to spell out each of the steps of the equation. And it did a pretty adequate job, at least to the point to allow a faculty member to describe what is going on without having to spend 2 hours explaining each step.”

Chris also had a great idea to make this work more manageable. “You could have a project for students, perhaps in lieu of doing a lab report, where they could take a piece of material from the course and experiment with tools they are already using, to make that material accessible, then have them critique the results for accuracy. You could then feed that material back into the class, in that circle of courage idea of generosity and mastery – students create a resource their classmates (present and future) will benefit from, develop their proficiency in using GenAI in a good way, and work together to assess the reliability of their work.”

In terms of how to bring accessible course design to the attention of people at the college who might not know about it, Chris says, from his experience on curriculum committees, “when curriculum is brought forward for review, they have to have an Indigenization statement and an applied learning statement, but I think there needs to be an accessibility statement as well. I’m hesitant to add more to the curriculum development process itself, but these three priorities could run in parallel.” And in addition, Chris notes, wouldn’t it be an amazing opportunity for Camosun to lead collaboration with other post-secondary institutions given the budgetary crises we are all facing right now.

As we came to the end of our time together, I asked Chris, Kristina, and Sue what final words they had for me. For Chris, this project has pointed at cracks in our foundation as an institution. “I think a big part of the problem is that, even pre COVID, faculty didn’t have the bandwidth to make significant changes to their course materials. The culture of the institution needs to be in the right place around sharing and realigning what we should be doing as faculty, instead of everyone trying to do everything all at once and having no time to do anything. So, I hope there’s an empowering way for us to take down some of those silos a little bit, recognize that we’re all on the same team, and realize that we need to do things differently. I don’t know how to have that discussion, but I do feel like a time of crisis sometimes highlights why we need to do it because we cannot keep doing what we’re doing without burning out.”

Kristina wanted to thank all the faculty members who answered her call for help. “I reached out to people during SD and vacation, Pat Wrean, Susan Chen, Stephanie Ingraham, John Lee, Benji Birch – not one person turned me down which I think highlights the special faculty that we have at Camosun, who are committed to creating environments in which everybody feels welcome and doing anything they can to support the students at the college.”

And for Sue, “there is no ‘we’ll just do this and take care of that’ when we talk about creating more flexible opportunities for students. Because if you want to create more opportunities for STEM programs, these are just some of the barriers and challenges that will just become bigger if we don’t begin to address them now.”

Camosun Faculty Story #47: Sue

Sue is an instructional designer and one of my colleagues in eLearning (part of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) at Camosun. I wanted to speak to Sue so she could tell me, and you, about her experiences supporting faculty when we all moved to online teaching in March 2020. On a personal note, going back in time to when we in eLearning were working long hours helping faculty and students navigate this new world brought back feelings not just of exhaustion but also of the excitement we felt as our faculty colleagues began to see first-hand the benefits of online teaching, something we have known for years.

One of Sue’s passions is accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In fact, she was a co-author (2015) of the BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit. Sue tells me that while eLearning had offered some workshops on accessible design and had some accessibility tools available in D2L (namely ReadSpeaker) prior to March 2020, when everything moved online “challenges around accessibility hit people like a brick wall and I think we had one of our greatest teachable moments possible for digital accessibility. We saw more awareness around issues students were having enhanced by the fact that faculty themselves didn’t have the right infrastructure to teach online. That shared lived experience, of a sudden lack of access impeding your ability to do something, well you can’t manufacturer that.”

Sue also reminded me that we had enabled another online accessibility tool just prior to the pandemic, BBAlly (aka Ally) which we turned on across D2L in June 2020. “We were barely through wrapping up the pivot term when we turned BBAlly on across the system and as a result, I have had way more interest in accessibility workshops and learning about UDL skills since 2020.” But the accessibility tools we had incorporated into our D2L system turned out to have a broader impact, beyond, for example, simply converting text-to-speech. “We learned that Textaid was also a great asset for our language programs. Faculty teaching Japanese, Spanish, and Korean were able to use TextAid to support some spoken and written assessments that they had struggled to do even before COVID.”

In addition to accessibility tools, our streaming media service, Kaltura, had only been enabled for a year or so and “we went from barely having started to use it to an exponential production of videos, which quickly shone a light on the poor quality of auto-captioning in services like these. While many faculty recognized that this bad video captioning needed to be fixed and wanted to do that work, they were overwhelmed, sometimes to the point of tears, by the work this added to their already heavy load. That was the motivation to rattle the cage for some professional captioning support.” And now, we have access to a captioning service, REV, to assist faculty with their video captions in Kaltura. And as Sue notes again, good video captions are not just useful for people with hearing impairments. “You can watch videos in locations where you have no sound capabilities, students have access to a searchable transcript for study purposes, etc.”

In terms of assessment, Sue recalls faculty struggling with assessment methods that would not work in a fully online environment. Instead, they needed to ask “what if I provided more options for students to be able to complete the assignment? What if instead of a time-based test it was a take-home exam? Some Faculty were looking at their assessments with fresh eyes for the first time in years. Coming up with alternate assessments exemplifies UDL by exploring flexibility in the way we get students to show they’re engaged. I think that this focus on alternative assessments, in one of the biggest shifts to UDL we’ve seen.”

While Sue wonders how much less stressful the move to online teaching would have been if content had been built with accessibility and UDL in mind, she says, “there is no going back from the spotlight on accessibility and the awareness that’s been developed around the tools to support accessible design. I think we raised the baseline a bit, and while we’re still going to have new people who are not there yet, I’m confident that most faculty can, and will, use these tools without the trepidation they may have had before.”

When talking a bit about rewards Sue has seen over the past two years, she tells me “I am more aware of the multi-dimensional challenges each individual student is dealing with because I’m dealing with them more myself too.” This also means that while she had to press pause on the UDLProject she was working on pre-COVID, “these past two years have provided much additional material for that project that I couldn’t have even imagined.” And building from that awareness of what overwhelmed students were experiencing, well she found herself supporting faculty who were similarly overwhelmed from trying to support those students. “I had to meet faculty members where they were at, trying to make things work for that individual in the moment realizing they were just keeping their heads above water. So, if I can help you to achieve this thing that’s more important than even you know at this moment, let alone how you would do it in the future, well, like any new language you learn the vocabulary, then you put the words together, and then start to build sentences. When you talk about accessibility and UDL, you can find a point of entry and then build thoughtfully from there. I think the way we were all meeting faculty where they were at was in many ways a UDL model of support.”

If there was one shining moment for Sue, “I think coming out of this we have forged a tighter bond with our colleagues in the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) and that we now have the foundations from which we can continue to build a model of collaboration in our teaching and learning community. We are all committed to creating good online learning experiences for students and faculty, and because we work with so many different groups, we’re in a position to influence change. So having CAL be more of a partner, for me, that’s amazing and is a model other Post-Secondary Education institutions should take note of.” And what really resonated for me was Sue’s comment that, as a result of increasing online options at the college, “we’re a three-campus college now and we in eLearning sit mostly on this third campus. We need to make sure that we are supporting students and faculty fulsomely and accessibly in this third campus environment.”

When I asked Sue what some of her biggest lessons learned over the past two years were, she tells me “What I have gotten out of the past couple of years is confidence that in our team we have a range of skills and experience. There are so many skills we need to be current with: technologies, pedagogy, inclusive education, accessibility, decolonization, open education, etc., that each of us alone can’t possibly know it all. So, it’s a huge asset to have, say, a colleague who is deeply focused and committed to bringing open education practices, examples, and opportunities to the college. I can both participate in those and continue to develop my expertise so I can work with faculty, but I don’t have to be the expert in everything to recognize expertise and to draw on it.”

Advice Sue has for anyone faced with moving to online teaching echoes what so many other faculty have said: “Work with peers, connect with folks who have been where you are, so you are not recreating the wheel, try something small and build your confidence in lower stakes moments, and don’t feel afraid to reach out and borrow ideas from people.” We reflected a bit on how learning to teach online is similar to training for a marathon: you do it gradually, upping your mileage as you go. “Of course, March 2020 was like running a marathon with no training, multiple times. But in normal times, take it slow. Oh, and get a good chair at home for all your online classes and meetings!”

I wanted to end with Sue’s reflection on where she feels we, as eLearning and CETL, are now as a team. “We as a unit no longer face concerns about feeling left out because of being on different campuses, because we have a more universal place for us and faculty we work with, in this new, third campus. I also have deeper relationships with faculty, some of whom I had worked with very little before, and I feel like I have a much deeper awareness of what’s going on in different parts the college than I ever did before. Even amongst our CETL community I feel like our communication and collaboration is stronger.” Our third campus has enabled and supported this enrichment, so we need to respect and nurture it going forward.

Please Stop Creating PDFs that Aren’t Accessible

Do you create your PDFs by photocopying the source material? Do your PDFs have any handwritten notes on the pages?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should know that many students can’t read these PDFs at all.

A photocopied PDF is just a picture of the page. It is 100% inaccessible for any student who uses text-to-speech tools to access course content.
Handwritten notes in PDFs present challenges for ALL students, and are also unreadable for text-to-speech tools.

Before you spend hours at a photocopier scanning your course readings into PDF files: STOP!

Take your clean (i.e. no handwritten notes) source materials to Printshop Services and ask them to scan your course readings as OCR’d* PDFs. (OCR is a scanning process that extracts the text from the source material; PDFs scanned for OCR are readable for most students.)

For more information about accessible print materials, see:

*OCR = Optical Character Recognition.

eLearning Tutorials Site Updates

Good morning all! As I return from a nice long vacation, the eLearning Tutorials site is calling my name, asking for some overhauls. Yesterday, thanks to colleague Sue Doner, I got started, revamping the Accessibility tab with new resources created and curated by Sue, so I invite you to have a look.

The four main topic areas you will now find are:

Assistive Technology Tools Available in D2L, where you will find more information on BBAlly, ReadSpeaker, and TextAid, as well as information on how to add these tools to your course. Tutorials are available for both students and faculty on how you can use these tools to support your teaching and learning.

Tutorials for Making your Digital Content more Accessible is where you will find links to the Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit (BCcampus) and a variety of Accessibility Checkpoints materials (created by Sue Doner) to help you make your WORD documents, images, audio, and video files more accessible for your students. There is also information for you on how to use BBAlly (in D2L) to support you in fixing accessibility issues you might have in your Content files.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Projects at Camosun is where you can find information on some of the UDL work people at the college are working on. We would like to keep adding projects to this page, so if you are also working on a UDL project (or working on ways to support your students using UDL principles) and would like to share that with us, email Sue Doner at doners@camosun.ca.

Finally, Academic Accommodations at Camosun is where you will find information and tutorials around accessing and implementing academic accommodations through the Centre for Accessible Learning at the college.

If you have any questions about the information or tutorials on these Accessibility pages, please send me (Emily Schudel, schudele@camosun.ca) or Sue Doner (doners@camosun.ca) and email. We hope you find the resources useful!

NEW!! Setting a Student’s Quiz Accommodations from the Classlist in D2L

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previous experience using the various tools in D2L and will cover the steps involved in setting a student’s Quizzes accommodations through your D2L Classlist. While you can set accommodations for students from the Quizzes tool using Special Access (to add more time, etc.), you can also set Quizzes time limit accommodations for an individual student so that you don’t have to change this in every quiz. Note that this feature is ONLY for setting a student’s time limit accommodation for Quizzes at this time (May 2021 – this tutorial will be updated as new accommodation features are added to D2L).

For further information, please contact elearning@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps

Go to the Classlist in your course.
Click on a student’s drop-down menu (the down arrow) and select Edit Accommodations.
In the Edit Accommodations pop-up box, select Modify Time Limit and then either set a Multiplier of original quiz, or the Extra time (in minutes – for example, if the quiz is an hour long and the student needs time and a half, add 30 minutes). You can also select Always Allow Right Click, for example if a student needs to be able to access accessibility tools in order to complete a quiz. Then click Save.
An icon appears next to the student’s name indicating added accommodations. A student will also see this icon in their view of the Classlist and will be able to check their accommodations.

Instructor View of Classlist Accommodations

Student Views of Classlist Accommodations

Classlist icon and drop-down to View Accommodations

Specific accommodations information

Things to Remember

You can still use Special Access in a quiz to overwrite an accommodation on a quiz-by-quiz basis. Note that when you overwrite an accommodation using Special Access, you will get a warning describing the impact of overwriting an accommodation. Further accommodation options and enhancements are planned for this year, so this tutorial will be updated as needed.

Captioning for Teaching & Learning Video Resources

What are Captions?

Captions are the text that is synchronized with the audio in a video presentation. Captions are important when people need to see what is happening in the video alongside a text-based alternative to the audio information.

What should you include in captions?

ALL speech content
If there is speech that is not relevant, it is usually best to indicate in brackets that it has been excluded from the captions. Example: [A & B chatted while slides were loading]

Descriptions of relevant non-speech audio are also usually provided in brackets in your captions.
Example 1: [doorbell rings]
Example 2: [example of music by XXX plays]Background noise that doesn’t have any contextual relevance can be left out of your captions.

Who Needs Captions?

Captions provide comprehensive access to the audio content in videos for students who:

Are deaf or hard-of-hearing
Are in a noisy environment and can’t hear the audio
OR
Are in a very quiet public environment and can’t play the audio
Are not a native-English speaker and need written-word format to support understanding

“As a student, I need captions when I watch videos from my instructor because…”

“They use a lot of scientific terms and/or proper names that I haven’t heard or seen before”

“The audio in the recording is fuzzy/muffled/poor and it makes some of the material really hard to understand”

“They have an accent and I don’t always understand what they are saying”

“I have to share my space with other people and I can’t always play or hear the audio when I need to watch the content”

“They speak too quickly for me and I miss important information”

“I have a hearing disability and captions are the only way I can get the content my instructor is talking about”

Types of Videos Faculty are Creating & Uploading to Kaltura (My Media)

Faculty creations include videos of:

Introduction to instructor
Demonstrations of course concepts (how-to, hands-on, practical examples, etc.)
Mini-lessons / mini-lectures
Presentations (e.g. narrated PowerPoint)
Interviews / Guest Speakers

Commonly asked question: “Should faculty upload recordings of live-class Collaborate sessions to My Media?”

It is not necessary for students’ review purposes to upload recordings of your live-class Collaborate recordings to your My Media. Students can access class recordings directly from the Collaborate section on your course site or via a direct link to the recording.
Suggestion: only upload the recording of a class Collaborate session if you need to provide an improved version of the recording by adding captions – and can commit the time to editing any major errors created by the auto-captioning.

How Do I Provide Captions with My Videos?

Always Available: Auto-captioning in Kaltura (My Media)

When you upload video files to Kaltura (My Media), Kaltura’s captioning algorithms automatically generate captions for your videos.

However, it’s important to know that components like background noise, proper names, specific terms/jargon, and variations in pronunciation can present challenges for these algorithms. Sometimes those challenges result in errors. The auto-captioning in Kaltura is approximately 70% accurate, which is comparable to the auto-captioning in YouTube.

You will need to edit your auto-captions. Because auto-captions may include errors that will negatively affect students’ comprehension, you should be prepared to review and edit the auto-captions before you publish your video to students. This is especially important when your video is the primary or sole means by which students get this particular content; they will have no other text-based representations of the concepts or terminology to refer to for comparison.

Available in 2021: (Some/Limited) Captioning support through eLearning

If you are creating teaching & learning video resources for your course(s), you may be able to access some professional captioning support through eLearning.

The budget we have to pay for this service is limited, so we will begin by considering teaching & learning projects that meet the following criteria:

Video is a re-usable and/or shareable learning object; video is not limited to one single course offering. For example:

Demonstrations of course concepts (how-to, hands-on, practical examples, lab demos, etc.)
Mini-lessons / mini-lectures / presentations (e.g. narrated PowerPoint, Kaltura Capture video; max. 30 minutes)
Presentations (e.g. narrated PowerPoint)
Interviews or Guest Speakers

Video is authored by the instructor.
The audio quality of the video is reasonably high. e. the spoken word can be understood without having to work too hard to hear it.

Additional consideration will be applied to teaching & learning videos created with the assistance of Camosun’s Audio Video Services.

Out of scope: We will not be able to provide professional captioning support for recordings of live-class Collaborate sessions, or student assignments.

Wondering if your videos might be eligible for some professional captioning support?

If you are creating teaching & learning video resources for your 2021W course or are planning to develop video resources as part of your Scheduled Development plans, you may be able to access help with creating accurate captions.

Please contact Sue Doner [doners@camosun.ca] and Bob Preston [prestonb@camosun.ca] with your inquiries.

Introducing the new ALLY tool in D2L course sites.

As you prepare for a more digital Fall 2020 term, wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that was always on hand to help make to your online course materials more accessible?

We are happy to share some welcome and exciting news with you, in the form of a new tool we will be launching in D2L on Monday, June 29. The name of this tool is ALLY, which is entirely appropriate because it’s going to be one of our new best friends.

Here’s a snapshot of why we are excited about ALLY:

Support for all students.

Many students actually need or prefer to access their text-based content on different devices or using assistive technology. ALLY makes it possible for students to download alternative formats to the Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and HTML files you added to the course site.

ALLY generates the alternative formats as soon as students select the option they need; alternative formats include such options as HTML (web page), MP3 (audio file), ePub (for e-readers), Electronic braille, or Tagged (formatted) PDFs. Any student in a D2L-based course can access these alternative options in Course Content.

Support for all instructors.

ALLY provides instructors with immediate feedback and guidance on how to improve the accessibility of their course content. By extension, this improves the quality of the alternative formats students access through ALLY.

Note that you can gradually work on improving the accessibility of your content; you do not have to do everything ALLY recommends all at once.

General institutional support.

ALLY also provides in-depth feedback through its administrator tools (Course Reports and an Institutional Report). These reports provide data on how technically accessible course content is across all courses in D2L and what we could be doing better as a whole.

When will you be able to meet this new Ally?

You can email the Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning [CETL@camosun.bc.ca] to request a copy of the recording from the 1-hour information session Thursday, June 11.
ALLY tutorials and tips will be added to the eLearning Tutorials site over the summer.
ALLY will be enabled across D2L on Monday, June 29.

UDL and Moving Online

I am re-blogging this post from Seanna Takacs at KPU, as I think it is very important in this world of sudden shifts from face-to-face to online. It is not just about putting everything into D2L, but about how to engage with your students and looking at various and flexible modes for doing so.