Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Una:
good morning, and welcome to our webinar today on the challenges and strategies for promoting awareness of open and
accessible educational resources.
This webinar is part of our open education week, 2014.
Thank you to our presenters, and
Taylor and Gerry
We will do our best to answer questions as we go
along, but we will hold most until the end of the session.
Some of the
information may
be an overview of what you argue no, but because open education is an
outreach effort to move beyond professional educators and focus around the world, I want to start at a basic level.
Moving on, we will have a presentation by and about making the 21st-century campus in model of accessibility.
Our next presentation will be by Gerry Hanley about
>>Anne: thank you very
much. This topic is very important to me because I was once a college student who struggle to get access in my college. The college shall
remain unnamed. I know that the college I attended a strike to do the right thing now;
however, my experience is not one I would wish on anyone.
I was studying computer science and I did
I appreciate your sharing your story about the struggles you had in college as a
student.
next I would like to introduce Gerry
Hanley, the assistant Vice Chancellor at California State University. He is the executive director of MERLOT.
>>Gerry:
thank you. It's great to be on this panel.
We have over
12,000 students registered with the center for students with disabilities, so accessibility needs to be a forethought and not an afterthought for all of our programs.
At the Cal State system,
it really has become a priority for us to ensure that every student
has access to a quality learning experience.
With regards to all camera low, our job since 1997 has been to ensure that all students have access to quality educational
>>Una: thank you, Gerry. Once again, I am Una Daly and I'm glad to be here with and
and Gerry on this topic.
I want to tell you briefly that the OpenCourseWare Consortium has
a core value of expanding access for our students. We want to ensure that we
the
Of the public and private postsecondary students, we enroll the highest percentage of students
who report
Now, I would like to go ahead and give you a brief overview of some of the work being
done at the community college Consortium
[SEE SLIDE] The department of education has
been very supportive of open educational
[SEE
So, an open
license allows materials to be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed.
This is so important for accessibility
because it allows a faculty or a curriculum developer to modify existing resources that may not have
been originally made
accessible.
For instance, if there are openly licensed videos that you want to bring into your classroom but they do not have captions, that open license means that you as an adopter of
that video
[SEE
SLIDE]
Examples of open educational resources really run the gamut from textbooks, open courses, open videos such as
Khan Academy.
Once again, the characteristics of open educational resources really have a lot of promise for being
acceptable to learners who have diverse needs. They start out digital which makes them easier to customize
and they are free to distribute over the Internet. That open license, once again, allows reuse and
revision. Modifications can be made and translations as well if Ling which differences occur. The no or low cost really expands access to
[SEE
But, in fact, we find
that digital resource plus an open license does not guarantee accessibility. It makes it possible, but in working in this
area we realize that curriculum developers, faculty, staff, and students all need to be aware of what it takes to make digital
Sometimes when I do workshops with
faculty, they will ask how necessary is it for their materials to be
accessible. Legally, of course, that is required in the United States under the Americans with disabilities act. But, if you look at the numbers worldwide, approximately 1,000,000,000 people have some form of disability. We know it has a disproportionate effect on their health, education, employment, and poverty level.
In the United States, 11% of post secondary students report
[SEE
SLIDE]
There are many treaties and laws that have come into play in the last 25 to 30
years to support the rights of persons with disabilities.
Probably the
largest, most international one is the United Nations convention on rights of persons with disabilities that was adopted in
2006. Today it has been ratified by 141 countries.
I also mentioned a couple of other ones here. The united kingdom equality act was
recently revised in 2010, of course the Americans with disabilities act of 1990 has had a
huge impact on how we do with learners with
[SEE SLIDE]
These are students with cognitive learning disabilities. This would be a brain functioning
issue. Over the last one he or 30 years, research
The second category would be sensory or motor impairments which
are the ones that often comes to mind when we think about learning challenges. These would
be vision and hearing impairments as well as mobility concerns.
Language deficits is another one that is considered in the same category. This may be a student who is
studying in a language that is not their native
language.
Finally, lack of engagement. We find that learners with diverse
learning styles, disabilities, there is often a lack of engagement with the
[SEE SLIDE] So at the
OpenCourseWare Consortium our accessibility goals including improving learning for
all. We want to help curriculum developers understand how to design open educational
We went to empower adapters so they can
We went to empower faculty to know what they can do.
Finally, we are building a community of practice. We have many partners.
[SEE
SLIDE]
So very briefly, our design and guidelines around this is the universal design for learning which provides multiple means of expression, representation, and engagement.
From the WC3
Consortium, the guidelines give us a
We use the standards from the web content access guidelines to evaluate textbooks on their accessibility. Those are available through
the college of open textbooks.org
and also through LOW.
*MERLOT
Finally,
we invite you to
Thank you for listening.
Now I would like to turn this over to Anne Taylor from the national Federation
of of the blind.
I would appreciate any questions that you may have a
long the way. Please feel free to ask them.
First of all, I would like to tell you I appreciate the opportunity to be with you here today. As I mentioned early
on, this is a topic I am very passionate about.
I went to let you know that for those of you who are willing
to embrace accessibility in a big way and have every intention to follow through,
We have the blind
Let me talk about the national Federation of the blind because the heart of what I do here on the comes from the support that I
[SEE
SLIDE]
The national Federation of the blind was founded in 1940. We are
the largest and oldest organization of blind people.
We have affiliates in every
state, DC and Puerto Rico are included.
We also have special interest divisions such as computer science.
We have been working hard
on advocating for student accessibility. We want
You can see a continuous theme here. Many of the
campuses across the country have blind
Please reach out to your blind students on your campuses before you decide on one particular educational
Everything else
The national Federation for the
blind drives innovation through the practical experiences of the blind. This is really
important. We want to share our success and our best practices. This is why
the resources are so valuable to reach each and every one of you. After this webinar I am reachable, so please keep the dialogue
As I mentioned early
on, we love to share experiences. We have to have an Institute embodies all of our experiences
and makes it practical in a real way. The
Jernigan
Institute leads to the quest to understand the real problems of
Two important initiatives I want to call to your attention today our research and development and
Improve nonvisual access to and use of information through innovation
We are not afraid of pushing the boundaries and technology development. The national Federation of the blind has been a
leader in technology development for decades.
The reason that we
have a scanner on your desktop to scan photos is because the president of the
NFB -- to some historical perspective here -- the
OCR ready machine was richly created for use of the blind. In that
machine, three technologies were integrated together.
Speech synthesizers and a flat
Right now people have access to handheld
Going to mention this quickly, so don't be afraid because it will not happen anytime soon, but we are
[SEE SLIDE]
How
The national Federation of the blind has been advocating for accessibility in higher education for a very long time. We have achieved
One of them, of course, is access to printed text.
We have walked with the Association of American publishers. We participated in the accessibility and metadata working group.
As a result, the AAP has
released the implementation guidelines
that anyone was to study how to better utilize
should be reading these guidelines.
We believe there is a very serious Between the knowledge and the
know-how that the University procurement officers and the technology developers
EACH Act will go a long
way towards furthering the understanding between these two groups of people.
*TEACH Act
My team and I work very closely with cloud productivity
manufacturers. We provide feedback
with
we have publishers and
[SEE
SLIDE]
I should say one more thing about this. This is really important because we don't work in a
vacuum. We work with others. The reading rights
coalition is a collaborative effort by 30 nationally recognized organizations that
represent those who cannot read print. A member organizations believe
that access to the written word is the cornerstone of education and
democracy and that new technologies must serve the individuals
with disabilities and not impede them. We believe in that as well. We have worked very hard to advocate
for access to printed
text.
We have also worked with the American Library
Association. The library has passed a resolution to require that library
materials and services provided through the library websites will be equally accessible to people with
[SEE
SLIDE]
I would like to present you with three angles for looking at this. We
Procurement is one of the most important things we need to
I am trying to finish up so I
don't feel Gerry's time.
Accessibility standards. You are probably familiar with the standards, but I thought I would go ahead and
[SEE
For us, for people with print
disabilities, AA is the minimum
compliance.
Procurement. As I said, the German is truly
procurement
is truly important.
I would suggest that people who are in charge of procurement do not purchase any technology that is not
CSU has done this well, especially with the Sacramento
campus and we also have pretty decent procurement language
from Penn state. You can look up an example of procurement language
[SEE
Professors at all
levels are creating accessible content. The content needs to be created in an accessible
manner. Document accessibility is extremely important here. Something as simple as marking a Word document appropriately, or
marking and HTML document
with appropriate heading structures. If you do that and enforce it as a good
practice, then you are guaranteeing that your students can gain access to the content.
We are not just talking about web content and word content, PowerPoint content, and Excel content
-- by the way,
that content has accessibility guidelines. Microsoft has done a pretty good job laying it out.
We are talking about new types of instructional material content like
graphics. The braille Authority of North America has come up with pretty
great graphic guidelines. We should be taking a look at
that. Multimedia accessibility is also important these days. NCam
has done a very good job of helping to create guidelines.
I want to quickly say here that we also need to be paying attention to content and display on
Microsoft, Google, and Apple have
You must realize that having accessible
out-of-the-box is not good enough. You must ensure
that all the apps used with the PDA are accessible as
[SEE SLIDE]
If you have any further questions for me, these reach out to me.
Gerry, I hope I didn't steal too much of your time.
>>Gerry: Thank you, Anne.
I want to reinforce some important points that she made and then continue
on. NFB
What I will try to highlight both what we are doing in the California State University system and also what we are trying to do in
Basically we have laid out that sensibility is everyone's job. Anne's
point about procurement as a critical area for an institution to develop the policies and
When you begin to look at where are the high impact areas, it
is like you are buying as a baseline set of technology, so the procurement process really becomes important. So I'm just reinforcing what we are doing in the California state
You need to consider how you will continue to assess and then connected to the
people, consider what you have learned, and then go back and change
[SEE SLIDE] This third framework that we put
together is really important, beginning with the idea of a continuous process improvement
strategy. That is wherever we are we acknowledge where we are and consider how we can make things better. I want to
thank Cindy Rawlings and the goals folks who enabled the
CSUs the ability to put it
into act is.
Every year we go into an institutional assessment and
[SEE
Our framework is available up on our website and is free for anyone to use. The key aspect that we layout here are our major areas are Web accessibility
and, as pointed out by Anne,
procurement is essential, and instructional materials. Content
creation is essential. With these 22 goals across these different areas, it is easy for
With the context of institutional responsibility to ongoing improvement of accessibility, MERLOT has been around since 1997
providing an open library for anyone,
I am showing you here what is our
student site which is
merlotx.org.
The other thing I want to highlight here is we have tried to create a
specific election around where you can find the free materials that also have some excess ability information about those
materials it is important when you begin to look for those materials to know where there is information that lets you
understand disability on a whole variety of features. I will talk a little bit more about that so you can understand how to make sure every student has a quality educational
experience.
When
Una talked about the sport for evaluating textbooks for accessibility, you will see the
link and see where you can find open textbooks that have accessibility reviews with
[SEE
SLIDE]
The other thing we have been doing with the Cal State system and MERLOT is emphasizing universal design
for learning. This is a point that Una made early
on. We have the Cal State system along with
MERLOT
[SEE SLIDE]
One of the things that can be a challenge is where you can find all of the documents to help you build accessible power
If you don't know where the list is, where could you go to try to find a library
of all of these types of materials. Una gave a screen shot of this
earlier. We went
to build a one-stop shop and a community so if you are looking for
OER,
and are wondering where you can go look for it, I can find how to create materials and how to author materials. I can find out where to go to find
organizations who can help me do some evaluation
about my accessibility.
We want you to join our community. You can identically blue have accessibility
expertise. If you want to contribute your expertise, we have mechanisms for doing that. The
OER newsstand
is the place to find out what is new in accessibility and OER.
Again, we are trying to make it easy for you to find this information
Again,
this highlights where you can find resources, experts, organizations. One of the things we started building into
MERLOT is a mechanism where you can share your knowledge
of open educational resources.
What I want to highlight here is that within the MERLOT library we have added a whole set of
So our goals include how to promote the use of accessible information when you are looking at OER.
So we have a metadata or description
framework. We enable experts who do have that expertise to contribute it so that collectively we can build more accessible OER
[SEE
SLIDE]
I want to highlight some easy ways for you to begin to check some critical features
of accessibility using tools. On Firefox there is a wave toolbar and a web developer toolbar.
Again, that just highlights some simple things if you are using open educational resources, check for those accessibility aspects and contribute it back so everybody else can take advantage of that in your OER
[SEE SLIDE] So, if you have
some material, you can ask if there is any policy or statement about accessibility or support that is on that website. So, if a student is
having problems, where can they go to get their questions answered?
Other
aspects, is the text available in assistive
technologies? Pushing the envelope regarding assistive technologies is essential. You want to make
sure resources are actually readable with assistive technologies.
Simple navigation is essential. Tables are a huge accessibility issue. Is the market on those tables
useful?
So, at MERLOT people
with expertise can add comments
about the color, images,
multimedia and interactive elements. So within our database, when you find materials you can do accessibility reviews
and contributed back to the collection so that we can all
benefit from the knowledge of the accessibility of OER.
[SEE SLIDE]
I'm going to give you an example. At the bottom you can see there is a toolbar from Firefox. There is
[SEE SLIDE]
Here is example from ARE
low. Here is an example from DNA from the beginning.
There are headings in the website [CIRCLED] that will
allow a student with visual impairment to navigate through the headings quickly to find the information that they want in a much more
efficient way.
You can see in this case there is no structural markup. So in this
case a blind student would have to listen to all of the different content
here to get to what they want, say they wanted to look into the Tatian
[SEE SLIDE] Another example is
images. With the web developer toolbar within Firefox, I will show an example here once
again --
DNA from the beginning -- from the beginning you have images in here and you have alt
tags that describe what the images are so a student who is blind can gain an understanding of
[SEE SLIDE]
Other images, for example here is one about cell metabolism. This has no alt
tags so a student who is blind really would not have access to this material.
So these are some of the simple things that you can check for the accessibility of
OER.
MERLOT provides you a mechanism to check it and then you can provide
[SEE
SLIDE]
Many of us often feel like, how can I change the world of digital content? The way we can do that is what we try to do in
MERLOT is create a mechanism where collectively we can work
together to build a collection of resources that are
>>Una: thank you, Gerry
and Anne for
the wonderful information about accessibility and the need for that and also your invitation to our audience today to participate with us in supporting learners
with disabilities and diversity.
We are open for questions now. One question that was asked a little earlier by Rick
Tools such as LTI
that you found to be best. The example he gave here was Read
Speaker.
Anne, are you familiar with Read
>>Anne: I am not. I do not have extensive knowledge with it, but I would be glad to look into it.
>>Una: Anne,
you work with a lot of learning management developers to ensure that they are accessible. Would you mind telling us a little bit about your work? I think would be of interest.
>>Anne: I would be glad to. I work with two
companies. They are blackboard and desire to
learn as shown in the previous lights.
D
Three things must happen to improve
accessibility. There needs to be support. That leadership needs to come from the top. The CEO of
Desire to Learn is very committed to accessibility. He and I just made a presentation
together on higher education accessibility. It is really flashing to me to see the CEO
embrace excess ability so much. So much that he hired a blind individual to
be part of his product development team. That says a lot about the company.
Another thing to keep in mind is
that not only do the CEOs of the companies need to be supportive in this, but the people within the
company must be passionate about it. And guess what --
Gerry this next question is for you. Participant is wondering if you use an
OER
and discover an accessibility issue and fix it, do you need to make a note of that?
>>Gerry:
I just backed up a few slides. There are two aspects.
One is
simply, if you have done in evaluation of and open educational resource, simply putting that
evaluation and if there are no alt
tags in the images -- or if there is -- you can use these check
boxes to include information about
the accessibility as the item is.
The second point you are making is that if that open education
resource -- if you go in there and actually change the
content, then yes, it would be great after you create that new version if you catalog it
version if you catalog it in
MERLOT and indicate
There really has not been in evaluation of
the accessibility elements of digital
Again, what we try to do is provide a mechanism for you to share what you have
[SEE CHAT
WINDOW]
>>Una: we also had a
Thank you, Rick, for sharing a link in the chat
window.
We had an interesting session on this about two hours
ago about dyslexia in modern language learning. You can check it
.
>>Gerry: I don't have any information myself, but the
URL that you put in the chat window, one of the things we want to
do is say, if you have any information about -- and it could be about
authoring materials or using tools, or it could be information about materials that are good
for students with dyslexia because they use certain tools, or whatever it might be, I
think contributing into the communities library so you can all go find them easily.
That is my encouragement for you to think about, if you do have that expertise
around dyslexia and accessibility and digital resources, please find a way to contribute it into
the
MERLOT collection. If you can't figure out where it fits, shoot me an e-mail and we will figure it out.
>>Una: thank you,
Gerry. Also, I will post a link to the webinar that we did a few hours ago that dealt
I'm not seeing any other questions at this point. We will be here a few more minutes. I want to give Anne
>>Anne:
I think that all of
us must believe that accessibility is achievable. I
think we do or we would not be having this conversation. I appreciate your willingness and your attention to pursue this. I again want to
repeat that we are not working in isolation. We have people who are truly committed. We have the blind community behind us and we will work along side
you to help you achieve accessibility.
One point I may have missed in my presentation concerns volunteer
product accessibility template. Some people use it
as a foundation to evaluate
accessibility. I would encourage those of you who make procurement decisions to go beyond that. If there is anything at all you get from this presentation is that I hope you
realize the significance of real
usability testing with real people using the
technology. If the products are not usable by the blind, it doesn't
matter how well written
>>Una: one question is how can we promote accessibility when budgets are so tight?
>>Gerry: I'd be happy to respond to that. Let me just
say that for the last four years the
CSU has lost 30% of its state operating expenses. It has been horrible. The recession has greatly impacted our budget. Yes, we implemented accessibility and we continue to improve
It is not more expensive.
When you think about the total cost of what it takes to serve these students, it becomes essential to
build accessibility into the procurement process.
I put a link in there to Cal states accessible technology initiative. There is some information
about procurement. The key is how to
build accessibility into your procurement guidelines. And
also ensuring that when your vendors present you with the product that they actually demonstrate the accessibility.
I want to reinforce Anne's
point. You have to make sure
that when you do procurement give the burden to the vendor to
demonstrate the accessibility using your procurement process. The procurement
The other aspect is that there are a lot of things, especially within the CSU, where we can leverage our size to
get
But I think that accessibility does not mean more
expensive. That is kind of the issue you want
to understand.
>>Una: thank you,
Gerry. I think Gerry's point was that if you take the
long-term view of accessibility, being accessible up front is always less expensive and
it doesn't open you up to various litigation.
I want to thank everyone for coming today. I hope that you found this useful. I want to
thank Anne Taylor from the national Federation of the blind and GerryHanley from the California state