Learning and Helping Quality Matters

If you've been following this blog you know I was doing one of the concurrent sessions at the 7th annual Quality Matters conference in San Antonio.   And, you may have also noticed that early registrations showed there was a lot of interest in my session.  And, when the webcast registrations came in there were some 130 folks registered. The recording of my session can be downloaded here.)  My session was Tuesday morning (second day of conference) directly after the general session.  On the schedule there was no time between the two sessions, and the fact that the general session ran over by 5 minutes meant I had less time.  But, I had not planned to talk for the full session, and wanted time to interact, so though I don't like to start late, it seemed the prudent thing to do.

I did have a standing room only crowd.  I enjoyed it and got some very positive feedback.

Here's one comment:

"These Resources slides are worth the time expended for the entire conference. Thank you.”

One issue I've had with QM got resolved in part at the conference.  QM has a set of standards -- which you can only get by paying a membership fee.  Standard 8 is their Accessibility Standard.  I had looked at it when I was doing the iNACOL publication.  I knew it was inadequate in relationship to meeting Section 504/508 requirements and communicated that with the QM folks.  Their first reaction was: 

Given the widespread lack of compliance with Sections 504 and 508, and recent court cases involving prominent institutions such as Harvard and MIT, this is still an area of law that is in dispute...

I pointed out it was not in dispute and pointed to the iNACOL publication.  (I suspect that's why I was greeted by all the QM folks so nicely at the conference.  

BUT, most importantly, shortly before the conference QM put out a disclaimer:

Disclaimer: Meeting QM's accessibility Standards does not guarantee or imply that specific country/federal/state/local accessibility regulations are met. Please consult with an accessibility specialist to ensure that accessibility regulations are met.

I take that as a win.

Here are the slides from my session.

Its all in the design the importance of making courses legally accessible from Raymond Rose