As post-secondary educators, we know that one key aspect of creating inclusive learning opportunities for all our students is ensuring that our course materials are “accessible”. But as the saying goes, the “devil’s in the details” and many of us struggle with the practical implementation of accessibility standards and requirements. For example, how do we make complex visuals like graphs and charts accessible to all students? Or how do we make closed-captioning in video materials available if we don’t know how to actually create and add those captions?
This session will focus on collaboratively confronting these and other fundamental challenges associated with accessibility in post-secondary education. We will employ a Community of Practice-type format with the goal of identifying strategies or processes we can all use to address some of the most common challenges we encounter in making our online learning experiences accessible to all students.
Facilitators for this session will guide this Community of Practice to create strategies and processes that are:
- user-friendly ,
- practical/applicable, and
- sustainable (& cost-effective)
All ideas and outcomes generated by this pop-up Community of Practice will be shared openly with the broader BC PSE community after the event.
Goals for this Community of Practice
We hope to collaboratively brainstorm options, approaches and processes we can all adopt to address such accessibility-related challenges as:
- CLOSED CAPTIONING –
We all know we need to include closed-captions in any educational video materials we create but what do we do if we don’t know how to add these or if we don’t have a ready captioning service available at our institution?
- INFOGRAPHICS –
Graphs, charts, maps and other complex visuals can be a great way to make a lot of information easy to digest but what do we need to provide for those who can’t see these infographics for one reason or another? And how do we provide that?
- ADOPTING NEW EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY –
When your institution is considering adopting a new educational technology, is accessibility one of the “showstopper” issues considered?
- “OTHER” –
Challenges put forward by the participants in this Community of Practice.
