My Persepctive on: The Center for Innovative Research in CyberLearning

Meet Raymond Rose 

CIRCL perspectives offer a window into the many different worlds of various stakeholders in the cyberlearning community–what drives their work, what they need to be successful, and what they think the community should be doing.

 http://circlcenter.org/meet-raymond-rose/

January 25-26 I'll be at the CyberLearning 2016 conference in Arlington VA. The keynotes will be live streamed, and  you can register for them here.

The slides for my session will be up on this site later this week.

Useful Paper: A step-by-step guide for making online classes accessible

A paper,  Applying Universal Design for Learning in Online Courses: Pedagogical and Practical Considerations in the Journal of Educators-Online is a good resource.  It was written by Cindy Ann Dell, Thomas F. Dell, and  Terry L. Blackwell, all from  Montana State University.

The Abstract:

Inclusion of the universal design for learning (UDL) model as a guiding set of principles for online curriculum development in higher education is discussed. Fundamentally, UDL provides the student with multiple means of accessing the course based on three overarching principles: presentation; action and expression; and engagement and interaction. Guidelines are also provided for incorporating UDL into an online curriculum for teaching both general and diverse populations including students with disabilities. 

Is one of the better pieces I've seen on the issues of making online courses accessible.  They only miss in not stating that all online courses must be accessible even if the instructor is unaware of any students in the class with a disability.  They still reference the Disability Services Office -- which is appropriate -- but don't explicitly state that all online courses need to be accessible as has been OCR position on this matter, as I've written before.

Looking for specific guidance for designing accessible online courses using UDL?  This article is a good place to start.

http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume12Number2/DellDellBlackwell.pdf

Equity Matters: Digital and Online Learning for Students with Disabilities

The national Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities (COLSD) recently released their 2015 annual publication Equity Matters: Digital and Online Learning for Students with Disabilities

While the PDF does not currently have an Executive Summary, I'm hoping they will produce on soon  The 150 pages include some very interesting information,which some COLSD staff have analyzed and hopefully will be included in the Executive Summary.  Almost half of the publication includes State and Territory Scans that look at policy questions related to online learning activities and students with disabilities.

(I'm a member of the COLSD Technical Working Group  but we had nothing to do with the publication.)

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