Creating a Pathway for Accessible Course Design

So my name is Mary Loder. I'm the online learning manager for professional development and training at EdPlus, which is a really strange little space at ASU. We do weird things. Like ASU online. So maybe you know that brand. And I'm joined by colleagues from various places.

One is well at at us and one at the College of Health Solutions. I'll have them introduce themselves. But we're gonna be talking to you about, accessible course design, a professional development course that we created, that also uses Canvas badging. We have a colleague who couldn't join us today, so we just wanna highlight her because she's amazing and did a ton of work on this and just couldn't get funding because we're so big that funding's weird. And so Mackenzie, Ramirez is a wonderful human being.

Hopefully, she will take this show on the road at other conferences on our behalf, but we wanted to highlight her. And I will pass it over to Sarah. Morning, everyone. I'm Sarah Hoye. I'm a senior instructional designer as Mary said.

From the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. And good morning. I am Michael Miller, and I'm a instructional designer well as an academic success and retention specialist at at Plus. So our next slide is, the team So as you can see, there's a few of us here, but there's a lot of other people that work behind the scenes on this. So we wanted to start off by giving them credit and kudos as well.

I'm gonna cheat because there's a lot of teams that were represented and I'm not gonna remember them all. But I think one of the things that was really incredible about this project is the way that we worked across the university because a lot of times it's very easy to get siloed. Yeah. A lot of times it's very easy to get siloed, especially in a very large university like ASU and so first, I wanna shout out Mary who brought everybody together and really was the leader of this work. And so she did a great job of managing multiple teams, and wild schedules.

So thank you, Mary. But yeah, from ASU, we have people this, the concept started within our universal design and access technology group. And then from there, we brought in, people from the academic enterprise at Plus, our educational outreach and student services group, specifically our student accessibility and inclusive learning services, enterprise technology, and our learning enterprise. So a lot of different units that were working on this project. But again, I think we did some great things there too.

Yeah. I agree. I think probably the coolest part was seeing everybody's passion and so that's kind of where we're gonna start is like where we started in these conversations because you could just jump in and be like, we know what's needed by because of WIC Ag, right? But really, we wanted to challenge ourselves to think beyond the disability framework, that we all think about around disability resource services. So the desire to promote full access to all of the online spaces to the diverse people that inhabit those spaces. And so, one of our teammates, London Skiles.

She's phenomenal. And she suggested that we take a look at these two resources. So we wanna give you the opportunity to also take a look at them. Now there are probably fifty fifteen QR codes in this presentation. So we are gonna give you the last final QR code to the presentation for the whole thing.

So if you wanna go ahead and scan these throughout, you are welcome to do so. There's some interactive things that you might wanna be involved in, but you don't have to get every single one of them. They're coming to you at the end. You're welcome. Alright.

We're gonna move on from this slide to the next one, another QR code. This is one of the other resources that came from London Skyle's work. So London does identify as neurodiverse. So this is a very specific individual passion that she has. And we have a website at ASU online called teach online dot asu dot edu.

There's lots of things there. Shameless plug. I'm in a podcast. All though on that website if you wanna go there and listen to it, but this is one of the articles on the website. And it actually gives some very specific design principle guides for neurodiverse types, to ensure that we're serving students that are not in the typical framework for disability services, but truly inhabit probably the majority, of the non visible needs.

So a fabulous resource to refer back to later on that site. So for the presentation today, we're just gonna cover what accessible design means to us, how to create accessible design in Canvas. Many of you probably already know that, so we're not gonna go too deep into it, and there are great resources from Canvas, that you can deep dive into if you need it. And then how we motivated faculty and staff. That's an ongoing thing, and then some tips and tricks if you want to implement something like this at your own space and institution.

So when we think about accessible course design and what it is, we can always refer to WIC Ag, right? There's two dot two. It gives us a very good framework for what we need to consider. And very specific actions that we can take. At ASU, we also have a website accessibility dot asu dot edu. It's a very deep resource that created by, again, many passionate people across the entire university.

It's a website that's public. So you're welcome to access it. It has all of the guidelines and strategies that we have for implementing accessible design, not just in the spaces of online courses, but also emerging technologies So it's a fabulous resource that you can also use to model your own website off of, and that's what that QR code goes to. So if you'd like to take that now or later, up to you, a great resource for later. So these are the things that we thought matter, and it's how we modeled our modules within Canvas.

So each module has a badge that's associated it and we'll get a little bit more into badges later. But specifically, we wanted to look at how to find what needs to be fixed. So there's a remediation section. That's actually at the end. We then work our way backwards from those modules.

There's a content curator. So what are you choosing? Are you aware of what your choosing it, is it accessible? And how do you know that? Creating content, right, headings, you know, the basics, teaching people how to write alt texts for images, teaching folks that captions are helpful and beneficial to all. And then we have very specific objectives for each one. So the tools we touch on in the remediator are not only the Canvas accessibility tool, but also also anthologies ally. So if you are a Blackboard user, you probably have heard of ally, It's a great resource for checking files because that's something that the accessibility checker in Canvas doesn't check necessarily, and doesn't give feedback on how to remediate.

So using those two tools, we've covered a lot of ground. Now we do identify that the one thing neither one of them check is captions, and that's a huge piece. So it is something that manually needs to be checked, and that's another piece that we highlight in this module and in the media manager model module. And then, you know, as I just said. So just to go through and read those objectives might be helpful to you.

And again, we're sending these slides out. So we're not gonna spend too much time on each one of these slides. Because I'd like to give an opportunity for the colleagues to talk about the more fun things. When it comes to image, imagery and alt text, even when you use these accessibility checkers, if the image is not described properly, it's really not accessible. So that's another piece that touch on in the course is that, yes, the tools are great.

Yes. You could write alt text, but it needs to be meaningful. It needs to be concise. And you need to make sure that your images are meaningful as a first step. And so those are some of the things that we touch on as a primary theme for that module.

And then when it comes to content creator, because we've already touched on some of the components in the content creator, module, before they get there. It makes it a lot easier for us to talk about all of the different items that go into creating accessible content, accessible pdfs, video, that kind of thing. And then the curator, we're very lucky at ASU. We have access to an amazing librarian team, and access to a library resource organizer. So our faculty and staff can go in and compile all of the resources, video, websites, books, articles, and then the library will actually make sure those items are accessible.

And that's a huge benefit to our university. So if you don't already have something like that in place, I would talk to your librarians. They are amazing resources. I love our librarians. They're so cool.

And they're always dedicated to the success of our students and our faculty. So fabulous resource that we use. They use a system called Lagonto if you are looking for something that can host, these library resource compilation tools, Lagantos, the name of the tool that they use. Alright. So I'm gonna turn this over to Michael for a little bit around creating accessible courses.

Yeah. So the first thing that I want to talk about, and we'll look at a video here in a minute, but at ASQ, our mission statement start or our charter starts by saying that we measure ourselves not by whom we exclude, but by whom we include, and how they succeed. And to me, that's the differentiator, raised. We're not just trying to bring as many people in the door, which, yes, we are. But once they're in the door, we also really care about how these succeed as well.

Right? So that was, I think, again, kind of one of the impetus for us getting started on this as well is, again, thinking all the people that we are bringing into ASU, but then also really being considered about how are we making sure that they can be successful once they're in our doors. So, we're not gonna look at this video, but one of the things that I think is also really great. Mary already highlighted a few of our resources that we have, the accessibility website, our teach online website. So there's a lot of resources that already existed. So when we came together and we started doing this work, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

We didn't want to create things have duplications of things that were already out there that again, we're probably designed by people that were maybe smarter, you know, and more in tune to the work that's been going on in those spaces. Instead, what we try to do is just partner with those different people across university and bring those resources into our course. So this is an example by our learning experience design team that again walks people through how to use the, Canvas accessibility checker and the Ally checker as well. So again, it saved us some time of not having to recreate these things because the beautiful resources already existed. But again, one of the things that we really tried to do is prioritize bringing those resources into one space curating them and making them accessible for, faculty and staff so that it was easy for them to find and locate them.

Cool. So many of you have probably seen the accessibility checker in Canvas. So Mary mentioned that we also use Ally. Ally is really nice, you are trying to, remediate a course that has been in existence, right, because it'll give you everything all at once, but that can also feel very overwhelming. Especially if you are new to remediation or accessibility.

So what I really like about the accessibility checker within Canvas is it's a page by page, bite sized chunk. Right? And so again, if you're remediating any it might take a little bit more time. That's why it's always best to design with accessibility in front of mind. But this is something I think for faculty is really, really helpful. Because, again, from just one page, it's going to be able to find and highlight the things that they need to work on, and it's gonna tell them what to do and how to do it.

So within our course, we have the instructor guide. And again, letting them know about the student guide as well just so that they're aware of how they can also support students who, and they have questions that come up. Okay. And so I'm gonna talk to you. We've talked about kind of the what.

And so we're gonna dive a little bit into, you know, the why. How can we get these faculty members to buy into this take the course and start building these accessible courses. So the first thing that we looked at when we were building this course is Who are we serving? Who are the students who are going to benefit from this course? We wanted to give them names. We wanted to give them faces. We wanted to have faculty see them beyond ID numbers or roster names And so we created this, interactive of student personas.

Each of these students has a story. Each of these students don't necessarily have a disability, but they can benefit greatly from having an accessible course. And I think we're going to Oh, yeah. Let's go to it. Take a look at that briefly.

Yeah. And that QR code also takes you to this interactive page. But just to give you just a a little idea of what this is. So we had, like I said, we have a name. We have their school.

We have a little bit of background, and then we have some considerations how accessibility can benefit that student. And so we try to reach a wide range of students, a wide range of traditional versus nontraditional, trying to get faculty and course takers to think about how accessibility can positively impact all learners whether or not they identify as one who has a disability or not. The other thing that I think greatly helped, the motivation is that we we have a lot of support from our leadership. I wanted to take a minute to just, play this video. It's a brief one minute video from our president, doctor Crow, and he talked a little bit about ASU's commitment to accessibility.

Hi, Michael Crow, President Arizona State. I just wanna thank all of you for being in the presence of this video and caring about how to take learning content and make it accessible to any learner. Any learner regardless of anything. Regardless of their circumstance, regardless of their biological condition, regardless of whatever it is that they're working with, whatever they're working with, Whatever might limit the ability of one to learn, we need to make certain that our stuff is accessible. We need to make sure that we've designed and created things and where we've thought about every potential learner.

We've thought about every potential person that could engage in our learning environments, and we've thought our way through this. This is really, an objective of our institution, this concept of universal learning and the universal learner and us finding a way to engage that learner wherever they are wherever they are physically, wherever they are emotionally, wherever they are pedagogically, whatever that happens to be. How do we engage those learners? And so I just really appreciate you all being here. I appreciate your focus on global accessibility and driving that forward and just hope that you guys can find new ways to engage learners everywhere. Thank you.

Yes. And I think one of the things that really resonated with me that he talks about all of those different planes of where learners are and how But is our responsibility to meet them where they are and we can do this in part by creating these accessible courses and realizing that we have students who come to us from different backgrounds, from different lifestyles. You know, we have students who commute an hour on the bus or the light rail, And so being able to watch a lecture video is not going to work. And so having captions so that they can read and utilize that hour that they are commuting back to work or back to home is really paramount to their success. And so these are some of the things that we touch on to try to pull into that motivation for faculty to take this course.

And so, you know, what would the course be if we didn't also offer a little bit of that extrinsic motivation, right? And so, one of the things that we also incorporated was the badging system. So we have five modules and you saw each of those modules upon completion will earn you a badge and then completing all five modules earn you the accessible course creator badge pathway. And you can scan more. To take a look at that as well. Too far.

Bye bye. Sorry. She said scan. I'm like, never mind. Just kidding.

Let's see how fast you can whip those phones out. Right? And so again, We know that digital credentials today more than ever are a great way to kinda highlight or promote some visibility to some specific skills and professional development that staff and faculty are, being a part of to kind of hone their skill and expand their skill set. And so we wanted to honor that and and illustrate that through this collection of badges. And give them fun titles. Right? Exactly.

That was part of the most Alliteration aside. Yeah. I'm an English major, so a lot of that started with me, Emily. Love that alliteration. Alright.

So kind of, I think, last up for our presentation is just gonna be tips and tricks. And this is gonna be on how to integrate badges, pathways into your courses. And again, wide variety of uses. Right? So before I was a instructional designer in this current role, I was also a staff trainer with, at Plus at ASU. And that's where I really fell in love with badges because, again, it's one thing to say you have to do this training.

Right? And that's all well and good, but at the same time, I'm a big believer that what you learn should go with you. Right? And so we have an internal, career system, you know, where take professional development trainings and things like that, and it shows up your HD transcript. But should you ever leave, we keep that. And I don't think that's right. I thought, okay.

What are some ways that we can get around that system? Right? Give people something that's a little bit fun. Right? Because you get like the little confetti when you earn the badge on, your emails and the website and things like that. But again, give people a transcript of their learning and of those experiences that, again, they can take with them wherever they go. Whether it's a professional development conversation, whether it's looking for their next role or job at ASU or if they're a student and they're applying for their first job or getting to another university, Again, I think badges is a phenomenal way to do that aside of just that one piece of paper that they get when they finish their full degree. So another shout out to our learning experience design team within enterprise technology, they designed these things that are called X kits, which stands for experience kits.

Now, again, we love sharing our resources. So if you go to Canvas comments and you search XKIDS, there is a wide variety of different skits that are available to anyone at any institution, and you're able to fully customize those. But what they do is they give you a template so that you're not starting from scratch. Right? So As soon as we knew that we wanted to bring in digital credentials, I'm like, let's get the x kit because what it does is it explains what digital credentials are to our learners and why they're valuable for them. It also talks about how to get assistance, which, again, for, courses like ours where we want to create it, set it, and then let it live and perpetuity.

Right? And though we don't have to constantly go in and check on things, this is a great way to be sure that those learners are getting the support that they need, that they're getting to the right person who can support them. Because again, they can email us. But if we ever move on, get to another role or something like that, again, we wanted them to have that one point of contact that they can always go to. So We use this x get the digital credential introduction in our own course. And again, customize a little bit to make sure that it made sense for our learners in our situation.

But again, we'd just strongly recommend after, you know, this presentation or, you know, later in the day. Check out the EXiscuits and the Canvas comments. They are a phenomenal resource and love them. Okay. So, tips and tricks.

So I wanna talk about kind of three different buckets of ways to use badges thin courses. And again, lots of different, use cases. Right? But the first one is Ottawa warning badges, which is my favorite because again, you can set it. Forget it. Move on with your life.

Go to the next project, and it's always gonna be working. Right? So auto warding badges is best for, you guessed it. Auto graded assignments. You can't use auto award badges if it's a manually graded assignment. We'll talk about that in a second, but Again, if it's something where they have to view a page or they have to score an eight out of ten on an assessment or something like that, you can set those up to be those audit auto graded assignments.

And then what you can do is you'll set a module requirement that'll say, you know, they have to complete this one item or however many items you want them to complete or scores you want them to get on those different types of assessments. And then there is a external tool called the Canvas credentials. You can pull into that module, and it's basically another page. And so, this is what that page looks like. And so what's great is the learner goes through your content.

They go and they take the assessment or do whatever they need to do there to earn the badge. And when they click next, it takes them to this page, which this is what it looks like if you haven't yet earned the badge. Once you earn the badge, you get a green check mark next to it, and then that's automatically going to go into your Canvas badge backpack. So this is a really cool way again. I think instant gratification is another really great way to motivate people rather than, hey, wait for a week, and I'm gonna grade your assignment, and then, like, you'll look for an email by then.

They've forgotten about it. Right? So Having that auto word badge, I think is one of the easiest ways to incorporate this in two courses. Now, oh, sorry. Will you go back one? Sec second up is the manual wording of badges. So there are times where you'll want students to, you know, have like an essay response type question or upload something that you do want to go in and verify that they actually did the thing that you want them to do.

Right? So there's certainly use cases for that. The best way to do that is within Canvas, if you click into the digital credentials, there's a way to click export to CSV. And what that does is it automatically makes Canvas talk to the batching place so that they push out those badges for us. If you don't use that export to CSV, sometimes it can take four hours, forty hours. There's no real science to it quite yet.

And I'm a little bit of a control freak. So I like to know that, hey, if they did the thing and I've graded it or done whatever I need to do, that that badge has gotten to my learner. And so that's why I always recommend using that export STS V. Again, it's really easy. It's a one one button click.

It'll run that CSV. It'll email it to you from whatever your Canvas email, it's connected to. And then again, that's gonna give you the CSV of all the learners who have earned that badge. And it'll mainly push it out to them. And then the last use case is the claim codes.

So this I think is really, really good for surveys. Another thing that can be challenging is getting people to fill out a survey. Right? And so especially, from the training world where we think a lot about how do we measure, you know, learning and things like that. Survey is sometimes it's really hard to get people to fill those out unless you have a prize at the end. And so what we do a lot is, you know, at the end of the survey, We use Google forms quite a bit as well there.

So when they click to submit, you know, it takes them to that final thank you page. It'll give them that URL code where they can again go and claim their badge right away as well. So that's been a really effective way, especially in the training world, if you are using surveys, excuse me, to make sure that you are getting the feedback that you need. But then again, you know, letting the learner know that, hey, thank you for doing this. Here's your badge.

You've completed it. Cool. Yeah. So these are our final slides. So if you'd like the entire slide deck, this is the one to take.

Also, please rate our session. We gave you Schwag. We hope we get these good surveys. But we're also here to answer any questions that you have. We've do badging and lots different spaces.

And I know that's a focus for a lot of folks, so we'd be happy to share. Yeah. Here, let me come around with the microphone so it came back on the recording for you. Okay? Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry. I was just curious. I've been to some other sessions this week that have talked about micro credentialing for students And I know at our university, we had this badging initiative. And then when we got everyone in a room, it became the state legged monster where HR was thinking, oh, we're gonna do this for professional development. And as instructional designers, we were thinking we can do this for micro credentialing for students.

And and it it took on a life of its own to the point that we pumped the brakes on it. I wonder if you can speak to Do you do micro credentialing? Do you use the same system with your students as you do with your faculty? Michael's the right one to talk to. Yeah. So we, again, there's lots of different enterprises within ASU. And so, yeah, I mean, it's right now it's an enterprise wide so anyone can use it.

And I, again, when I was a trainer, that's I kind of found out about it through, I think attending one of our teach online webinars. And I was this is a really cool thing. And then me and my friends started competing to see who can get the most, PD badges. Right? So I was like, I can use this, I think. So it was one of those things where once we started to see success from it, my leadership was like where else can we put this.

Right? So it was one of those where we had to be really, really strategic about rolling it out and the management that long term management. Now that I think is the other thing that's really, really key to think about. So we have someone, Doctor. Allison Hall, who is the director of our learning experience design team within enterprise technology. And she is the one that really kind of set up our enterprise wide governance.

So within each one of our colleges and each one of our professional development stations, and once you use them, training, things like that, we have one person that is the go to person. So if anyone within that college wants to start using badging, they have to go to that person and get permission. And again, it's not because we want to gatekeep a tool or anything like that. But these are, you know, our badges are public facing. Right? So anyone see them.

And so we wanna make sure that it's a high caliber. Right? So we have a template that we use to make sure that our badges have fairly consistent language throughout that we're using our graphic design team and not just, like, you know, going on and designing one of the, like, auto ones that are awarded for you there. So I think that was one of the key things to make sure that it was successful across all the different use cases, setting up that governance and then having that one point person within each one of those apartments. That we had that go to person to make sure that there was consistency across all the groups. Absolutely not.

There's a lot of things. Yeah. It's just one of the many things that that are Yeah. The question was, was that a full time position? So Doctor Hall she yes. But, that was a tiny part of what she did, and it's a tiny part of what each one of us do within that as well.

So setting it up was a lot of work. We met once a week. We co created what the governance documents would look like. So all of us had that buy in. We got our directory, you know, like, we we built all the things.

And now it's just living. So I think that's, again, that setup and really having someone that can lead across all the different silos and then setting up that point person within those silos into that way. Again, if people do get excited and want to bring it on, you can still maintain brain consistency. And Sarah's group actually does student badging as well. So if you wanted to touch on that as well.

Yeah. We, it I'm that person that Michael was describing for our college. And so what it is nice to do is that there is just one person who is issuing the badges that, helping them to come up with a design that, like Michael said, kind of follows ASU brand. I mean, can't stray from ASU branding. Right? So we use things.

We have a set, a badging pathway for some of our degree certificates. We have some in some of those smaller, undergrad and graduate programs, but it works out really nice because it all funnels, like Michael said, to one person, we don't have, you know, faculty and different units going rogue, so to speak. That it all comes in and it all looks the same and and it also allows us to make sure that there is the appropriate level of rigor. For, you know, are they just reading an article and then they get a badge? Like, let's get badge happy here. We, we wanna make sure that, like, Michael said that the badges have that high caliber and that they stand for something so that if if If they end up leaving the College of Health Solutions and going to get a badge at another college, then they still stand up to one another.

Cool. Any other questions? So Stagic is completely do to me. You know, very excited. So two questions if I can. Well, the first one is what you were just talking about.

Is it easy for a week at Adiatrics and roll on and roll off? It's a community college. So I really like that carrot. And so is it easy for them to x rays that they export it to the point? Is there a a a one step I export all my badges? Or do they just have to keep up with every badge, print it off, and tuck it in a folder? Yeah. I'll let Michael, you can So are you asking for the learner or the person that is, giving the badge? Are I'm sorry. Are you asking, like, for the learner? Or For the learner? Like, for the learner.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm an adjunct. I just earned some accessibility stuff. Yeah.

And I wanna nod And I I work at three other colleges, that's my address. Yes. Yeah. So, came to the spot, Badger, I think, last year, And so what they've done now is consolidated all of those into one space. So if you go into the Canvas credential's backpack is what they call it, the top left, you can navigate between different accounts.

So let's say, yeah, you know, I have one for ASU. I have one for the Canvas badges that we've been earning this weekend. You know, and a couple of different other ones as well. So it is all in one digital space. And then some of those you can if you want to print off on a certificate or something like that, you can do that.

Again, all of them are digital and they're all stored in one space. And what's really great about that as well is they make it really easy to share it in other digital spaces. So every one of my badges that I'm really proud of is also on my LinkedIn page too. Right? Because again, it's I think it shows the work that I'm doing step by step throughout my entire career. So that for me, I think, is the biggest value.

I haven't seen a lot of people get really excited about printing off certificates, but I have seen them be really excited about bragging on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, know about the badges that they've been earning and especially on LinkedIn as well. Yeah. I would say the only exception to the certificates is our master class at ASU online. People like to have the paper so we intentionally send them their certificates. So there is a process through a CSV form, and they give you a prefab preformatted like Excel CSV.

And you just plug in all the names and then it will automatically put the names in each certificate and send them off, to their email. So there is a way to do it en masse. But also most of them just use the digital ones and put them on their LinkedIn. Yeah. That's really common.

Michael, there's another question right back here. Oh. I mean, but this is just a quick one. Another one is they use Canva to create their flow charts, is do you use something similar? So the question was, she was saying that some, course have used Canva to create the flow chart. Did we use something similar? K.

It'd be K. Right. Right. I we do use Canva. I think our graphic designer uses the Adobe suite.

Yeah. Okay. Adobe Illustrator is where most of our badges are created. Yep. I'll come around this way for you.

I have a question from the faculty perspective. So we've had some pretty in-depth conversations out of our institution about the way that we're designing modules and the length of things that are put into each module, which is causing some learning or concerns for students with high anxiety or students with ADHD. Do you have resources for how you can better whether it's design your module or set up your course or design the flow that will help with those students who might be struggling with a module that has too much content in one area. Yeah. I think cognitive overloads a concern that's actually addressed in the neurodiversity PDF and article.

So I would definitely go there. It's difficult because we don't always have control over how things get built or how much content gets put into those spaces. So, yeah, it's kind of like learn as you go, honestly, from the faculty's perspective. Like, that was overwhelming. I read my surveys and people were dropping out the second week.

That's an indication that there's a cognitive issue. Right? But I think also you can get really creative with how you use pages that are not visible in modules and publish. So you can link them inside published modules so they can actually go out to these spaces, but they don't end up as like the stacked never ending things that they have to do. So that would be one thing that we utilize at ASU online. It's just very intentionally creating published pages that don't live in modules, but are linked within the page of the module, like an overview page or a content page, things like that.

How about you, Sarah? I would say we use the same thing as well. We also, as we can, we will leverage you know, chunking the material out. We also we have quite a bit of control over when faculty come to us to build a course. And so that's one of the things that we take into consideration, and we have them we work a lot with alignment. And so a lot of times what we'll find is that you wanna throw everything in, including the kitchen sink, but you're not necessarily assessing on those things.

And so we take a look at that from the alignment perspective to see where we can pare down or to at the very minimum separate from required and supplemental. Yeah. And I would just add on too. I think asking students is a great way to find out what is and what does not Right? And I know for us at ASU online, we have, you know, the standard survey. What did you like most? What did you like least? But sometimes faculty don't even get access to those responses, which That's a whole another conversation for another conference, but I'm in, of course, now where the instructor literally emailed us and said, hey, How do and it was a survey, but asking us, you know, what do you think about the tools that I've used in this course? What do you think about the layout of my course and other modules easier? And I have I've taken a lot of online courses, and I had never had a instructor ask me how I felt about the way that the course was set up and the tools that they were using.

Right. Yeah. And we often, if it's a big project like that, we'll do a scaffold approach in the modules. Absolutely where they turn things in. But we do give them an entire overview instruction page the first week that then links to those individual pages.

So it's almost like a road map for them to follow beyond the actual module layout as well. And we use a lot of visualization mapping as well. So if you're gonna be having them do things in parts, having those individual images hyperlinked to those spaces where they can go and get deeper instruction or where they turn things in. Those can all be little ways to help students orient themselves in a rather overwhelming space. We do have webinars that cover that, around designing for large enrollment and design in general, I.

So you're welcome to come to any of our ASU online webinars. All of our webinars are advertised on Eventbrite. So it's Event, I think it's ASU online, dot eventbrite dot com or something like that. If you Google ASU online event, right? It'll come up. And those are also advertised on our teach online sites.

You can anybody's welcome to come to those. We've opened those up to the public since prior to the pandemic, and we have lots of folks from all over the world that attend them. And it's a really lovely learning community that you're welcome to join. Hi. Thank you.

So How do you engage faculty in these trainings? Would you speak a little bit more about that, please? Sure. I I will say that What I do is only one component of faculty training that exists at our university. Our learning experience team, couple of them are sitting up here. They do fabulous webinars that are primarily closed to ASU faculty and do a lot around, like, how to use the educational technology, how to access Canvas and leverage it properly. And then there's the professional development that we offer at ASU online.

We have, the webinars that I just about. We have our teach online site that anyone can go and use as resources. We have our master class that typically is for ASU faculty only. And then we also do quality matters training, at the university to assist with certification in that space. And then all of the other departments also do training.

And we have a really lovely instructional design community. I love you guys. I love that we all got to come here together. And we're all friends. And so we share what we do, and we invite others to collaborate and have these opportunities to share in the experiences that we have.

So I think also building community and talking to the diverse sectors that support faculty is another way to help your own institution develop their own framework for that. Yeah. Oh, and you'll get badges if you come to the ASU online webinars, we we'll give you a badge. Any other questions? Excuse me. Michael's coming to you right now.

For you, I'm a professor at University of California Riverside, and we're starting to put together courses in DEA and accessibility. But our big issue is getting faculty take these courses when Totally. And I was wondering if these badges are certificates are enough because it doesn't seem to be for our faculty. So we have teaching and research faculty and the teaching faculty are willing to take these classes, but they are also the ones who are always taking these classes. Right.

Sure. So when you take a class to make a small improvement upon what they're already doing, but the research back when you probably need to take these courses the most. It's just they don't care enough because they wanna publish high level journals more so than, you know, quality teaching. So what do you do to get Yeah. Motivation is an issue.

I'm not gonna lie. We rolled this out as a soft launch on global accessibility day this year. Global accessibility day happens every year in May. And this is our second, like, awareness or action actual course around accessibility. And we don't have a ton of people who sign up for it in that space, because it's not required.

Right? So of the credentials we've offered for this, only twenty people have made it through the path And most of them are instructional designers. Right? And then of that, there's like a tapering effect. So they get into the first two modules. They've done pretty well. We had sixty people come sixty ish people complete the first module with badging about forty on the second one, then it drops to twenty seven.

Then twenty eight than twenty one. So what we're also finding is that there's a point of need so they only access it when they need it, which is not bad necessarily. Right? Like, they're also avoiding cognitive overload that's probably why your research faculty are like, no. I have other things that have to take priority. So I think that's another strategy is like create a point of need strategy.

If you can advertise that it's there when they need it, that's helpful. We also are gonna be redoing this course. So nothing we do is ever done. So we get feedback and we make more. So we're gonna launch this in a more intentional way at a ASU conference.

So there will be a larger audience for it. We'll have more people, then we're gonna use the announcement service because there were hundreds of people who registered for the class. They just got in and got busy or got distracted. So we'll be able to re engage them through the Canvas announcements as well. So if you can get them to sign up, now you've got them in a communication strategy loop.

So that's another space. Just get them to click the enrollment, right? That's an easy lift for them. And then you got them. I'll also add one of the things that our unit has been working on is we've been having some really great conversations with our leader up with the Dean's office and having the Dean and her team communicate the importance for both the research and the teaching professors that that teaching is valued. We've seen an uptick in the number of faculty coming to us who are not just teaching professors, but who are also on the research side.

But I will say that's been a very slow process, but it is something that we have seen impact the number of faculty who reach out to us for our services. As a whole. And we actually will be getting Provost approval soon. We're hopeful. So we'll get even more through adding this to career edge, which is our intentional form for professional development and training at ASU.

Hi, Ruby Bichesteria Alst with, ASU. I struggled with the same problem you're having. When I started when I used to handle training, Just drawing people into the accessibility class was near impossible. What we changed was we just build accessibility into everything we do. So any workshops we do, any conversations we have, if we are integrating a tool into Canvas, it has to re partner with our, what's, accessibility? Universal design access and technology work group.

Thank you. You're welcome. It's a mouthful. And so we test every tool for accessibility, and we'll go back to the vendor and say, look, yeah, you meet the law, but this is incredibly difficult to use. With the screen reader and push people to change their product.

So not making it a separate course by itself, but part of the normal workflow, and if anyone has had to change and and retrofit a course, Oh my goodness. You have to do that. This is designing from day one to make it accessible. I will say we're very lucky to have awesome partners in what is likely known in your area as your disability resource center ours as student access and inclusive learning services. We have individuals that work in that space that have physical disabilities.

And they are more than happy to do testing, to give experiences. And when vendors hear from those users, they're more likely to change things because it's not like they're trying to avoid it. They just don't know. Like, if you don't have firsthand experience, and I think that's true for all of us, You wouldn't know what to change in the first place. Any other questions? Alright.

Well, thank you so much for coming. Please give our session a rate. We'd love it. Hope you guys have safe travels back home and enjoy Deepak Chopra. I know I will.