120. Scaling Accessibility

Adopting a culture of accessibility at an institution can seem both daunting and full of barriers, but movement forward can happen with the right strategies in place. In this episode, Dr. Sherri Restauri joins us to discuss how institutions can progress from providing accommodations for individual students to an institutional commitment to building accessibility into the course design process.

Sherri is the Director of Coastal’s Office of Online Learning and also serves as a teaching associate at the Department of Psychology at Coastal Carolina University. Sherri has served for a number of years on the steering committee for the OLC Innovate and Accelerate Annual Conferences, including serving at the 2020 OLC Innovate Conference in Chicago in the role of Co-Chair for Equity and Inclusion.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Adopting a culture of accessibility at an institution can seem both daunting and full of barriers, but movement forward can happen with the right strategies in place. In this episode, we discuss how institutions can progress from providing accommodations for individual students to an institutional commitment to building accessibility into the course design process.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Sherri Restauri. Sherri is the Director of Coastal’s Office of Online Learning and also serves as a teaching associate at the Department of Psychology at Coastal Carolina University. Sherri has served for a number of years on the steering committee for the OLC Innovate and Accelerate Annual Conferences, including serving at the upcoming Innovate Conference in Chicago in the role of Co-Chair for Equity and Inclusion. Welcome, Sherri.

John: Welcome.

Sherri: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

John: Our teas today are:

Sherri: So, I actually am drinking my favorite iced coffee. I have a salted caramel mocha with me.

Rebecca: That sounds good. Sounds a little chilly for us to have that around here today… it’s a little cold, but… I have a vanilla coconut tea.

John: That one’s new.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: I have a Forest Fruits tea from Epcot… from the Twinings pavilion there, which I picked up at the OLC conference.

Rebecca: How appropriate. [LAUGHTER].

So, digital accessibility is becoming increasingly important, valued, and a topic of focus at many institutions, but really requires a cultural shift to fully implement. You’ve been really successful at directing these efforts at Coastal. Can you tell us a little bit about your efforts and strategy for becoming a more accessible campus?

Sherri: I would be happy to share. One of the things that I feel like we have really been most successful at here at Coastal was trying to change the language that we use, specifically around the concept of accessibility. And my work specifically began when I got here about three and a half years ago, and originally, there wasn’t any kind of workshop or training on our campus specific to accessibility or digital access. And I built the first workshop, which was actually called Digital Accessibility in Online and Hybrid Learning, around the concept of increasing student access to learning. And so the premise of the workshop, in the first five minutes actually, introduces the faculty, staff, and students who attend that workshop to the concept of increasing access to education and educational material, rather than to the idea of accessibility. And so they’re taught the scope of access is something that’s much, much larger than maybe the way that we were taught when I started in the field of education teaching 21 years ago. It’s not about accommodating one student out of 400 in an entire academic year. Instead, it’s about designing from the ground up in a way to make content accessible for all users. And so it is truly taught under the umbrella of a universal design for learning and teaching approach. And honestly, this is many times the first time that faculty have heard that approach. In the past, a lot of times they were instead under the assumption that we were making accommodations to address one specific student. And so instead, we’re actually designing so that all content is accessible and is readily available to all students, even prior to the first day of class, if possible. So, I think our work in the culture shift here on campus started with modifying the language and the vocabulary. So, we don’t actually say accessibility as much as we do instead use the term digital access, because for us, that includes things such as affordable learning, and OER, all of that actually falls into the scope of access on my campus.

Rebecca: How do you recommend allies and advocates nudge or pull or push others to join them in accessibility efforts to actually make for true cultural shift in the organization and institutions that they’re a part of? Sometimes it’s really easy if you’re the person that’s like really excited about it, to make some efforts, but it’s hard to figure out how to get others engaged and really feel as committed as you are.

Sherri: I totally agree with that, and I think that I’ve seen it be successful, as well as unsuccessful in my own campuses at different institutions. And one of the things that I found that was most instrumental, looking at the three campuses now that I’ve served on, the two that it was most successful on, were ones in which I could launch a digital accessibility initiative, not as a champion myself, but with a committee backing me. And so on the two institutions where I found the most success, it actually specifically was ones in which there was already a designated body that I could bring on board who had perhaps a faculty representative from each academic college. So, when I began initially launching the digital accessibility initiative on the Coastal campus, I immediately presented that my Digital Learning Committee, which is actually what used to be called the Distance Learning Committee, and presented to them initially the idea that “This is coming, I need you to come on board as my college representative advocate, and I need you to be a champion as well within your academic unit.” In doing that I brought allies on board. It’s advantageous that the main technology tool that we were to later adopt is actually called Ally. But, one of the tools that we were to later adopt, it was actually in conjunction with my Digital Learning Committee, where they were able to be an advocate through our budgeting, our purchasing, and instructional needs in order to provide support for me. If I had tried to do this type of an initiative without having a standing committee to support me that I don’t think it would have been quite as successful. So being able to form allies with maybe committees that already are in existence, and maybe even also to strategically reach out to certain committees and/or departments on campus that look like they may be a benefit to use. So we made an outreach directly to accessibility and disability services, to diversity and inclusion, to the university library, to our provost’s office, and then also to freshman orientation, in order to find a way to make sure that access to all students was truly viewed as something much broader than just accessibility.

John: How did you get faculty to buy into the program? And what sort of training did you provide for faculty?

Sherri: I was honestly extremely excited when I took this position to know that there was already what we actually like to call COOL grant. COOL grants are a faculty monetary incentive grant that has required as well as optional elective training opportunities built in with the ultimate outcome that’s twofold. The twofold piece of that is faculty will learn information that will help them to build and administer better, stronger, high quality digital learning courses. But, the ultimate outcome is also specifically that the courses that they are actually building for digital learning purposes will be submitted to my unit for a quality review with evaluative feedback on how to improve those. And so from that particular perspective, there was already an existent grant program that existed. When I came on board, I decided to modify that grant program and incorporate accessibility into it. When I got here, it was focused on quality, but accessibility had not yet been incorporated. And so when I got here in 2016, that was one of our first components that we actually added into it. And we were able to incorporate that as the ninth of our 10 core components. And within our second semester of arrival here, we began offering the digital accessibility as a required component of that training. We do offer additional, I would call them optional electives, for faculty as well, so they just can’t get enough about digital accessibility. Then part of the grant is that they can take up to five elective trainings to learn more and they can take as much about digital accessibility as they want. I think one of the things that really became advantageous to our faculty is, the more they learn… even if they submitted with the intention of one specific class, let’s say, Psychology 425 was a grant program… they learned so much that they initially might have intended to only apply it to that first course, but then they turned around and applied it to every course from that point forward. So, that’s where that cultural shift started was once they learned how advantageous these principles were to every single one of students in every class, they started modifying the way that they taught. And they started modifying the way that they uploaded materials and that they built the course items into their course as well. It was amazing to actually watch that type of a shift for our faculty. It’s like watching light bulbs come on, because they suddenly understand there’s technologies that already exist here that can make it so that my students who have an hour-long commute can learn. It’s not just about a student who may or may not have a disability, it’s about a student who has a long commute, or a student who doesn’t own the software, or a student who can’t afford my textbook. So, their accommodations were for all kinds of students that met all kinds of needs that I don’t think that they had anticipated, but they learned very quickly it could help the students in many, many different ways.

Rebecca: I think it’s one thing to learn about some of the technology related or the strategies you can use to make things more accessible to increase access, but it’s different from making that part of your regular workflow. Do you have any tips for faculty about how to incorporate these practices in the way that they generally approach their classes and prepping for classes and preparing their classes each semester?

Sherri: I do, and one of the things that I think is important to understand is every single university, campus, or school environment is configured and structured in such a very different way. Some of us have centralized units that support faculty and some campuses do not. I’ve served on both types of campuses. And so it’s important to recognize that faculty may be coming at this from a very different perspective. Some have more support than others. We have a very small unit. We have two instructional designers for a campus of over 10,000 students. And so with that in mind, to make this successful, we actually invested as a unit all of our time in building very well structured templates, both course templates as well as material templates… and by material templates I mean accessible syllabi, accessible course modules, everything that we have is already compliant with WCAG standards, so that all they have to do is make modifications and adapt it. In addition to the template materials and the template courses that we generated, I think one of the things that we also found most exciting for faculty is we started looking at ways to expedite the administrative struggles that they were running into. And a good example is, when a faculty member submits a course for a grant review, we end up looking at it for every single component. And so one of the biggest red flags that we would see is our faculty were spending hours and hours and hours creating wonderful lectures, but none of these had closed captions. They couldn’t pass a grant without having accessible courses. And so one of the very first things that we were able to do was implement a component by which faculty simply alert us of all multimedia, and my unit, in my department of online learning, actually complete the closed captions for all of them for everybody on the entire campus. So, we’ve taken the workload off of them. We actually, through a training program, have trained our graduate assistants and student workers to do closed captioning to standards. We utilize a third party program called Echo 360 for our lecture capture. And starting in the fall of 2019, we enabled what is called ASR for automatic speech recognition, so that there is a component in place to begin the captioning to standard, and then our student workers and graduate assistants pop in and make the modifications. The faculty actually have no administrative responsibilities for that, unless they choose to caption themselves. So, one of the pieces that’s heaviest lifting for compliance, specifically, was just simply the time to make those modifications. And so I immediately started looking at what are the heaviest lifting pieces and what can we do as a unit to lift that for the faculty so that they don’t have to make those accommodations. One of the things I think that we got such positive feedback as well about during the 2018-2019 academic year was when our campus learning management system integrated the Ally accessibility tool. I was looking for ways for faculty to best understand how to use that tool to convert their files. And the tool itself is fairly simplistic, but it can be implemented in different ways. So, the technique that I actually created, and I’ll be happy to share with your listeners, is we actually created what we call an Ally drop spot. And in that particular drop spot, faculty simply mass or batch upload all files at one time, check all files at one time, and then move content around once it’s corrected. That’s not something that’s actually taught by the vendor. It was just a creative idea that I came up with because I too am a faculty member, and was trying to figure out a way to save time. And so that seems to be something to celebrate. And so we use the Ally drop spot, not just for academic classes, because the culture has changed so much on our campus that administrative documents, things like announcements about upcoming movies on campus that are going out via email, everything that is now distributed digitally must be WCAG compliant, which makes my heart very happy. And so from that perspective, having an Ally drop spot, having a centralized technique in which faculty can batch upload or staff can batch upload content to be checked and corrected immediately, again, with administrative heavy lifting that we built into simplify the process for them.

John: So, the focus has been on new development and redesign. Have faculty started to go back and redesign or re-tool some of their older materials as well?

Sherri: Yes, is the short answer to that. I think that one of the things that, and I’m going to point at Ally but it wasn’t necessarily because of Ally, that having that particular type of tool on our campus helped us realize is: Ally, for example, scans all documents that may exist in your learning management system and inadvertently one of the after effects of that is that happens to alert you to the age of your original file creation. So for example, if I’m teaching a spring 2020 psychology class, and Ally scans my file, it may alert me that that file was originally developed
in Microsoft Word 1997. And so it will alert faculty, through happenstance, that it might be time to update the version that they have been using to create their files. And so I think one of the things that’s been really interesting to watch is even though the intention was “let’s make content more accessible,” the answer, John, is that actually the tools that we’ve given them, whether it be Echo 360, or whether it be Ally, they started using these to improve all courses all the time. I had a conversation just this morning after our “welcome back to our campus” presentation with a faculty member. And we were discussing how when we started teaching more than two decades ago, we used to be taught that the best way to make files accessible for everybody, because everybody doesn’t have the same software, is just save it as a PDF and everybody can access it… and actually, that backwards now…

Rebecca:: Yup. [LAUGHTER]

Sherri: …and we were talking about how important it is to understand that the times have changed. And if you started teaching like I did two decades ago, the things we were originally taught have changed so drastically, and I think faculty coming to a 90-minute digital accessibility workshop, that sounds so short. But, that one 90-minute workshop gives them enough information to understand times have changed. “Wow, here’s these 18 tools that are available. And here’s these five processes that exist. And I thought that I couldn’t do these things because I don’t have an extra 100 hours available this semester to add captions, but I have services that are provided by my institution to allow for that.” Our campus is not one that has a significant technology budget. And so most of the items that I’ve mentioned today in your episode are things that we developed internally. We don’t send off for closed captioning for third parties, we simply don’t have the funds for that. Most of the types of things that we’ve done have all been in-built. The quality metrics that we use for evaluating our courses to make sure that they’re compliant and that they meet standards are all in-built. We are not using a third-party for quality evaluation, we instead built our own. And so many of these are actually using the resources you already have. They’re using the personnel you already have. Again, we retrained and retooled our graduate assistants and student workers to make sure that they can assist that with doing a ton of heavy lifting. And I feel like one of the things that I think, if I could communicate to other campuses who are looking to implement something like a digital accessibility initiative, is this isn’t really about having to have an extra $300,000 per year or having to have an extra 10 staff. We don’t. [LAUGHTER] We didn’t actually purchase really anything additionally, minus one extra product. Past that it was just finding ways to make this fit into and enhance our current processes so that everybody was compliant, and really bringing the whole campus forward alongside of us.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your student staff team and their role? You mentioned it a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about the scope, the kind of training that they received, and what tasks they actually help your team with?

Sherri: So, as a student worker myself 20 plus years ago, one of the things that I remember feeling is that I never really felt like part of the team. I was given small tasks and I never really understood the mission, or the vision, or how me putting computer parts together in a computer lab ultimately helped the mission of the university. And so, for my office in digital learning, when we bring our staff on board part-time or full-time I tell them during the orientation it’s the last time they’re going to hear me call them a student. After that, they’re simply referred to as staff or part-time staff. With that in mind, they are asked to, expected to, attend all formal meetings, all informal meetings, all staff meetings about visioning and planning and they go through all levels of training, including they are required to go through the same level of digital accessibility training as our faculty. They spend about the first two to two and a half weeks learning what digital accessibility is and why that’s important… the mission of not just my department, but also to the campus. After that, we have a standardized set of trainings they go through focused on quality enhancement, and also on best practices for digital learning. And then they go through a set of training relating specifically to closed captioning and what we typically call WCAG compliance for the web accessibility. So, they’ll go through those processes. They’re also trained on very specific technologies specific to my campus, like Echo 360, Moodle, and all the other tools that we use here internally. By the time they end up graduating and leaving us, they are truly experts. So they learn a tremendous amount about the technologies, but what we actually ask them to do because we only get to have students for no more than 20 hours a week. I don’t know if any of you have ever had to sit down and try to do closed-captioning or closed-captioning editing…

John: Every day.

Sherri: …but nobody can do that for 20 hours a week. So, I would never ask anybody to do it for more than about five hours a week. So, out of their 20 hours, only about five of that is actually closed-captioning. They will do the edits. And the edits are actually super easy to do through the vendor that we actually have as well. They allot about five of their 20 hours to closed captioning. The other 15 are spent in doing other types of work such as conversions within the Ally system, helping our faculty to make modifications to improve the digital accessibility of their courses. Two of our student assistants, the part-time workers, also directly assist us with the open inclusive education process so that they help our faculty to locate OERs that can be implemented into their courses. We only launched our OER initiative about two and a half years ago, and we already have over 60 faculty. So, we’re very proud of that particular access work. And so we’ve been able to make a tremendous amount of headway super fast, partially because of the assistance of our part-time staff. We’ve been doing a lot of the legwork to locate really high quality, open and inclusive materials for our faculty.

One of the things that we found with our particular students is once they have learned about all the different principles that they’re being taught to use to assist faculty, they’ll turn around and start using those to improve their own learning in their own courses. So that’s actually something that again, wasn’t planned. But students start learning study strategies based on alternative formats. So, a good example is they learn about the Ally tool which provides alternative formats to a PDF, which may have MP3s, and all of a sudden, our student workers may start using that as a study technique, which changes the entire course of how they progress in their own programs, too. We had one particular student who served as a part-time staff member specifically focused on digital accessibility. And she enjoyed it so much, she built an entire website for pre-service elementary education teachers who would benefit from learning more about digital accessibility. So, I feel like bringing students into this couldn’t have been a better choice. It’s actually directly impacting not just our student workers in the way that they actually study, but it’s impacting their careers as well because we recruit students and graduate assistants from every academic college.

John: That’s great training for those who might be doing some of this work in the future. And everyone’s going to be doing more of this as we move forward, so I think it’s a great program.

Rebecca: How many students are on your team?

Sherri: We just had two graduate, which is, of course, what they’re here for. But it’s always so sad that we have to have some of them leave. So currently, we have two student workers and two graduate assistants so that’s four, they’re 80 hours a week of part-time staff.

Rebecca: Great, that’s exciting. Can you talk a little bit more about the faculty grant recipients and their role in onboarding some other faculty to get them excited about accessibility as well?

Sherri: Absolutely. So, you’ve heard me say the term COOL a couple of times, like our COOL grants, that COOL is the acronym for my unit the Coastal Office of Online Learning. These grants which are called COOL grants, there’s actually two different formats of those. One is a year-long, and the year-long course development grant is focused on building brand new courses that have never been placed into an online or a hybrid program. And we give them an entire year to do that. A lot of times what I found is as they’re going through a series of trainings, the thing that they benefit most from, in addition to the 10 trainings that they take along the way in a year-long grant program, is physically being in the same space with other faculty here also going through that grant program. So, we don’t necessarily tell them that they’re going to be put together into a peer group, but they are. We call it a cohort. And so for example, cohort eight ran throughout the 2019 year, they’ve just submitted their grant for review on January 6th. We have about 40 who participated in that program, and they have truly formed a cohort. What will happen is once their courses are reviewed, evaluated, modified and completed, those courses become what are called COOL certified and so those certified individuals from cohort eight all stay on an individual listeserv. And then they also get grouped in with previous cohorts. We have recently formed what we call a Digital and Open Learning Faculty Learning Community. And that particular community pulls from these faculty who have previously completed COOL certified courses. And we’re actually taking this full circle so that not only “Are they learning the material, are they building a course? Are they offering the course?” But the faculty learning community is pulling all of those individuals together, so that we can do research and write manuscripts together. So, that’s our final step: “Wow, we’ve learned so much together. What if we collaborate as a group who successfully completed a certification and a grant and actually pull this together into a journal, or a web article, or a blog, or whatever it might be?” So we’ve already been blogging, our very next step is this faculty learning community is going to start doing some of the outreach regarding manuscripts and presentations as well.

Rebecca: You mentioned universal design for learning a little bit earlier as your approach to accessibility rather than using the accessibility term. Can you talk a little bit about pedagogy and how accessibility and universal design for learning overlap but also where they diverge? And what role you see these initiatives playing in our approach to student learning?

Sherri: That may be my favorite question yet, actually. [LAUGHTER] So, interestingly enough… universal design. I like to ask that question when I begin teaching my digital accessibility workshop, that’s actually one of the first things that I say, Rebecca, is I ask them “How many of you have ever heard this term?” And it shocked me. I am a former instructional designer, so I honestly thought, “How would a history professor know this? How would a math professor know this?” Most of them know. And I don’t know how that has occurred, but most of them have heard it. But, in practice, they’ve never been taught it. And so once I realized about three workshops in that they had conceptual knowledge of what universal design was, I started actually flipping the script a bit on that and saying, “Explain to me, what kinds of workshops fit you’re learning needs better. Let’s start talking about how, if instead of me teaching this workshop face to face, what format would be better for you and explain to me why.” And once I began actually putting into practice for them, from their own learning needs, because my COOL grant recipients are required to take 10 trainings, and with children and with work duties, it’s very difficult for them to fit that in. So I like to give them the opportunity to explain to me what they perceive universal design to be, as it fits their learning needs. And once they grasp that and they personally apply it, then we actually start working on “Let’s talk about what universal design actually means when we build content. Let’s talk about what universal design means when you’re teaching a hybrid class that only meets four times a semester.” And one of those meetings is for an international trip with the class. So, let’s discuss all of these different pieces and how interaction and how accessibility all intersect. I tend to find that, because I do distinguish for them the difference between Universal Design for Instruction and Universal Design for Learning, that seems to actually create a pathway for them. And the way that I tend to distinguish that is UDI, Universal Design for Instruction is what we do. That’s us. That’s the faculty. We provide instruction. Universal Design for Learning, that’s what our students do. That’s how they learn. And so I feel like giving them the two pathways of “Let’s see what you do, and let’s see what they need to do and let’s focus on both of those pathways,” that actually feels like a wave that helps our faculty to best understand how to make adaptations. When I do teach the digital accessibility workshop to our faculty, I think one of the most challenging concepts that we faced prior to the year 2018 was having to individually go through one software program by the next. “Let’s check your document in accessibility for Excel. Let’s check your document for accessibility in Word.” After 2018, once we introduced our newest software purchase, and that’s the Ally tool, We had like a one-stop-shop, and I feel like helping them to understand you don’t have to do all of the legwork, but you can rely on a product that we’ve been able to bring on board for you to help teach you how to do those things. I think that actually relieves a lot of the stress. We have over 10,000 students here, and I truly believe all of our faculty are here for the right reasons. Their hearts are in the right place, their motivations are in the right place. A lot of this is “I don’t understand the steps. I don’t understand this technology, and it’s going to take me too long to learn it. And I don’t have that time available to me.” So, I view my role and my team’s role as being advocates for finding the right technologies and the right techniques. And then again, like I said earlier, doing that heavy lifting. Universal design, then, I think, interestingly enough, ended up applying not just to how our faculty develop their classes for our students, but it also applies to how I teach those classes to our faculty. I have to design my training, my support, in a way that is also universal. I made modifications by the second year I was here so that many of my face-to-face workshops were converted into an online webinar instead to accommodate the learning needs of our faculty. And that, to me, is the epitome of universal design. I didn’t just change my own classes, I changed my training classes for our faculty.

Rebecca: We’ve heard you say a couple of times about the heavy lifting done, in part, by your staff. Not all institutions or campuses have a staff equivalent to yours to do some of the heavy lifting or the student groups set up. How do you suggest individuals get started when they might not have the time resources or the funding resources or the staff resources, and it just seems, like, impossible?

Sherri: So, that particular question is one that I hear at most presentations that I’ve had the opportunity to share our successes with digital accessibility. I think one of the things that stands out for me the most is, both at this campus and another campus that I’ve served at, is we are not a heavily funded campus, most of the resources that we utilize are free. The development that we did with both our quality metric that we use for evaluating our courses is free. And I’d be happy to share that with the listeners as well afterwards that they’d have access to evaluate their own courses to determine the accessibility. We also have many online webinars that we share with our faculty are actually those that are offered for free because we don’t have the budget to actually purchase many of the higher cost ones. And so we utilize, a good example would be many of the free webinars and free downloads, specifically related digital accessibility come from the R&D sector of 3Play Media. And a lot of times we share those with our faculty members as an opportunity for them to self learn. Many of the templates that are available that we actually share with our faculty came from state level consortia. So a good example of that is, in my state, in the state of South Carolina, we have a new initiative called SCALE, which is South Carolina Affordable Learning Initiative. And South Carolina was actually one of the last states to come on board with that type of an initiative. So most states within the U.S. actually do have a state-funded initiative, but many faculty don’t know that it’s there. So one of the things I would definitely encourage them to do is maybe reach out to their library and ask what the state level initiative is. And I also would be happy to share information specific to SCALE because though it is specific to the state of South Carolina, all resources are freely available to anybody outside of the state as well. And it’s one that we like to promote here at Coastal. I would definitely say also, Rebecca, one of the things that I found, because I was one of those faculty members at one campus that had to serve independently without a tremendous amount of support, and I did a lot of my own research. And I found most of mine, interestingly enough initially through some searching, through MERLOT. MERLOT, a lot of times people think is just specifically to OERs. But a lot of times what I actually found was, in my discipline of psychology, I actually did just a direct outreach to other faculty who were members of MERLOT, but in the psychology discipline, and many of them freely share all of their available materials, and that includes things like accessible syllabi. So, it’s really interesting to see where things like OERs and accessibility have intersected in academic disciplines.

Rebecca: Those sound really great and helpful. Can you talk a little bit about the training that you’ve been doing for your faculty? You mentioned a little bit that there are webinars or what have you. Are they structured as full-fledged courses or one-off training opportunities?

Sherri: Yeah, so we actually do offer a number of different training opportunities, some of them do fall directly under the COOL grant initiatives. With the COOL grant initiatives, faculty do have a set of both required and elective courses, and examples of those would be quality assurance. The quality assurance teaches the faculty 10 different core principles and again, I’d be happy to share that information with your listeners. The other one that I think is probably my personal favorite, of course, is the digital accessibility. That one is actually taught in a face-to-face, 90-minute format and we usually offer it anywhere between six and eight times a semester. It usually is part one for our faculty. They learn a lot in that 90-minute workshop but because they were so interested in learning it we had to build a second part. And so they typically take digital accessibility face-to-face and then part two is what we call Ally intensive… and so it’s a hands on work specifically with the Ally tool. We also specifically, of course, teach face-to-face as well as self paced workshops specific to our learning management system, which we use Moodle here on our campus. We also teach both OER I and OER II. OER I, I specifically teach on our campus. And again, it’s taught actually as open and inclusive education. And so I teach the face-to-face one so that faculty learn how to include things that might already have been paid for out of our students tuition and incorporate those into their classes so that there’s no additive cost. And the OER II is a self paced that faculty progress through on their own in order to complete that one. Probably one of my favorite ones though, Rebecca, is actually a little bit different. This is one I get probably the most positive feedback from faculty about is what’s called a hybrid blended workshop institute. That particular workshop is 10 weeks long. And because hybrid is something that maybe, is just a different thing for faculty, is something that sometimes they maybe have already been teaching hybrid but they didn’t understand really, the functionality of what that is. What we decided to do, my co-instructor and I actually built the hybrid blended so that the faculty complete between 60 and 70% of that online, and the other workshops are face-to-face. So, by the time they finish, they have successfully taken as a student, their first hybrid class. I think that has the most impact on them. Being able to actually go through 10 weeks as your own student is so impactful. And that particular course has had a tremendous impact in a positive way. We also teach courses specific to academic integrity. We teach them about not just academic integrity principles for building content, but also about different types of tools that they might employ in order to enhance academic integrity in their courses. And then multimedia… that we teach about like personal lecture capture and utilizing multimedia for learning and those types of things. And my unit actually works hand in hand with a sister unit on our campus, which is the Center for Teaching and Learning. And they offer many of the offshoot classes that have to do with pedagogy as well. So, we’re not all by ourselves, we actually have a sister unit who helps to supplement a lot of what we do by teaching specific pedagogy classes.

John: That’s a nice, rich mix of workshops that you’re providing.

Sherri: Thank you. Yeah, we work very hard. We actually have just done a complete overhaul and have modified all workshops during the fall break before we came back for spring. So, we’re excited about the upcoming offering.

Rebecca: That’s great. So we usually wrap up by asking “What’s next?” You’ve already said so many things that you’ve been doing. But what’s next?

Sherri: So, part of what we’re doing is we’ve been working, we’re trying to figure out a way to bring all this full circle, and so the development of the Open and Digital Learning Faculty Learning Community is brand new. It has just been formed. It hasn’t even formally been announced. I’ve been talking about it for about two months. But, it hasn’t even been formally announced to our campus yet,… with the rollout of the faculty learning community, so that all of these previous cohorts can come together. And for those that are interested, we can conduct research. We can write manuscripts and here’s my most exciting part that I’m actually looking forward to, I can actually collaborate with faculty members on grant proposals. And we have not been able to do that together yet. So being able to sit down and work together and bring all this to fruition in a way that will actually move our campus even further forward by being able to write grant proposals and publish about some of our positive outcomes. I think that will be fantastic. Up to this point, we’ve offered what we call three different exemplary showcases. And the way that those work is we evaluate our COOL grant faculty recipients and to even graduate you have to become COOL certified, their courses have to hit or exceed at least 80% in quality criteria. Some of our faculty who are incredible superstars end up hitting or exceeding at 100%. And so those faculty get nominated as what we call exemplary showcase presenters. We’ve now hosted three of those, and our fourth one will be actually hosted this year in 2020. So, the exemplary showcase will be an opportunity for this next round of faculty to continue to present about the best practices. It will be our first showcase where we have individuals presenting who have implemented OERs in classes that fall outside of the scope of just digital and online learning. So, these will be classes that were taught in a traditional face-to-face environment that have converted to OER for affordability and inclusion reasons. So, I think that’s important because you mentioned, Rebecca, at the very beginning of the interview, “How is this a cultural shift?” I began here with only really being able to do my outreach to just online classes. By year two, I rolled that out to hybrid. And so in year four, which starts very soon, it will have been rolled out to all formats, all classes, all faculty, all students. And so that’s a cultural shift. Being able to find a way to show people that access is for all people, and affordability is for all people, all course formats is important. So that, to me, is the biggest thing that is coming is this cultural shift is going to continue to expand, because we’re opening up so many of these grant opportunities and these faculty support initiatives to faculty here teaching face-to-face, or hybrid, or flex, or flipped, or any variety of format that you might want to teach because access is supposed to be for all learners. And so I think that was our ultimate goal. It’s just taken us a few years to get there. And this will be our first year to actually see it open up and be totally inclusive to all formats as well, and having a faculty learning community as a target goal for how to showcase all of these best practices and all of this incredible hard work and dedication that our faculty have had in converting their courses and making them available, that will be fantastic. In the 2019 academic year, my team first started tracking the success of students based on their GPAs and their drop, fail, withdraw rates in order to see if there was any kind of correlation between those and the courses that had successfully completed quality course review. And I’m so pleased to actually tell you that, for the first time, we were able to actually see decreased drop, fail, withdrawal rates and increased GPAs in classes that had complied with and excelled in all of these quality initiatives there. So, for the 2020 year, we’re going to do a much larger research sample on that and start continuing to investigate quantitatively, “Are we able to track and even predict students success relating to GPAs and drop, fail, withdrawal rates when the faculty have successfully implemented this?” At this point we’ve seen it in undergraduate, graduate, and across all academic college disciplines. So, I’m hopeful we will continue to see it in the 2020 year as well, so we’re excited and this is one of the things that the faculty learning community is going to be helping me with, is tracking the student success metrics. And hopefully seeing some improvements across all the disciplines as well.

John: Were the results statistically significant?

Sherri: They are significant. However, one of the things, John, is the sample is still quite small. So yes, the answer is they are statistically significant. I am not comfortable publishing them yet until we have a much larger sample. So in the 2020 year, we will be working towards a much larger sample, so that I will feel more comfortable in promoting that.

John: Excellent.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing your insights and strategies today.

Sherri: You’re very welcome.

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Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.