The UK Open University (2006) provide a useful introductory course, called Accessibility of eLearning, that will help you understand how to create accessible e-learning experiences that provide access for all. The course can be completed online, or downloaded in a number of common file formats, including for e-readers and as a PDF.

I would strongly suggest either completing the course, or reading the course materials, but if you don’t have time I’m going to summarise the key points in this post:

1. In 2006, disability affected 10-20% of every country’s population, and this number is growing.
2. In 2006, 15% of the UK population, over 16 years old, self-declared a disability.
3. A disabled person is one who has a mental or physical disability that has a substantial, long term (12 months or more), adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.
4. Around 1 in 10 men and 1 in 200 women have red-green colour blindness.
5. UK Universities are legally obligated to make reasonable, anticipatory adjustments to ensure those with disabilities are not discriminated against.
6. There are two views of disability. The medical model describes the problem of disability as stemming from the person’s physical or mental limitation. The social model sees disability as society restricting those with impairments in the form of prejudice, inaccessible design, policies of exclusion, etc.
7. Accessibility is about both technical and usable access for people with disabilities. For example, although a table of data may be technically accessible by a blind person using a screen reader, they may not be able to relate the data in each cell to its column or row heading, so the meaning of the data is lost in the process, rendering the table unusable for that person.
8. Computers enable even severely disabled people to communicate unaided, giving them independence and privacy that is not possible when they need to rely on human assistants.
9. When communicating online, a disability may not be visible, removing barriers caused by people’s reactions to the disability.
10. Creating accessible learning environments helps everyone, not just those with disabilities. For example, products that can be used by blind people are also useful for people whose eyes are busy*.

*This last point reflects my own preference for listening to academic papers while running or walking to work, when I would be otherwise unable to “read” the paper. As a student and full-time employee, being able to use this time to study enables me to manage my time effectively and merge my fitness routine, with study time. This is only possible because my lecturers, and many journals these days too, provide accessible documents that can be read out loud using my mobile smartphone.

This list brifly summarises the key points I drew from the OU’s Accessibility of eLearning course and demonstrates some of the ways we, as developers of online courses, can make better online learning experiences for all our students, including those with disabilities.

References

Open University (2016) Accessibility of E-Learning. [Online]. Available from: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/professional-development-education/accessibility-elearning/content-section-0 [Accessed: 13 June 2017].

We facilitated ABC LD workshops in UCL, Glasgow, Aarhus (Denmark), Bruges/Kortrijk (Belgium), Santiago (Chile) and Brisbane (Australia). We presented at two conferences and published a paper about ABC LD.
Colleagues from other universities also facilitated ABC LD workshops (with our guidance).
A full list of activities (with nice images!) is available on the ABC LD blog, 2016 summary.

It seems that 2017 will be an even busier year for ABC LD. Our community members and the workshops planned for 2017 are indicated on the map below.

ABC_LD community map

Best wishes for 2017 to all!

ABC LD blog/

STEaPP ABC Workshop

The Department of Science Technology Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) kicks off new academic year with ABC (Arena, Blended, Connected) Workshop, one of the panned activities to enhance the use of learning technology across our teaching programmes.

In the department, our teaching philosophy is that the use of technology in the learning experience must be driven by pedagogical considerations, and not the demands and availability of the various technologies themselves. To enhance the use of learning technologies, we must first reflect upon curriculum design.

With the support from the Digital Education Team, teaching staff from the MPA programme attended the ABC (Arena Blended Connected) curriculum design workshop. We used paper card-based approach in a style of storyboarding to assist participants to reflect on structure, modes of delivery, learning outcomes and assessment methods etc.

Our colleagues loved the simplicity of the approach and the effectiveness of the workshop model. Although learning technologies were not explicitly ‘called out’, it was firmly embedded in all six common types of learning activities during the exercise: acquisition inquiry, practice, production, discussion and collaboration.

Following on the workshop, Dr Ann Thorpe (the department’s E-learning Champion) and I set up a series of meetings with individual module leaders to further explore the use of learning technologies in their teaching programm.

We have been excited to see that the consideration of how technologies can enhance learning has already embedded in their design processes, for example producing videos as part of “Flipped Classroom”, streaming guest speakers to present and engage with students in classroom, and use of audio assessment feedback are some of the ideas currently developing following the workshop.

While providing continuing support for the above mentioned activities, we’re also scheduling some bespoke workshops throughout the academic year. Since the department leads the organisation of How to Change the World (HtCtW) (part of UCL Global Citizenship Programme for undergraduate engineering students), we are interested to explore new ways in presenting engineering ideas during HtCtW. Augmented Reality (AR) has been identified as one of the emerging learning technologies over the past few years and the popularity of Pokemon Go have helped influence us to choose AR as our first lunchtime workshop topic. Watch this space for an update report soon.

Alan Seatwo

Learning Technologist, STEaPP

Following our successful bid to the HEFCE Catalyst Fund, which aims to drive innovation in the higher education sector, Digital Education and CALT launch a new project today called UCL Action for Curriculum Enhancement (ACE).

UCL ACE is one of 67 new HEFCE-funded projects which will develop and evaluate small-scale, experimental innovations with specific cohorts of learners and will run for a period of 18 months.

The project links to our commitment in the UCL Education Strategy 2016-21 to the development and implementation of the Connected Curriculum and the ABC learning design process. It aims to develop and evaluate UCL’s innovative rapid-development approaches to blended curriculum design, which focus on a framework for research-based education (Connected Curriculum) in order to make a curriculum development pack available to all HEIs interested in improving programme design and engaging students in research-based learning.

The project will evaluate the impact of our ABC rapid-development approaches to programme development on student outcomes and experience via case studies, produce an online and downloadable pack which can be adapted and used by any higher education institution and establish a supportive community of practice around its implementation.  

Across UCL programmes of study are being re-designed and developed to engage students much more actively in enquiry-based learning with the Connected Curriculum (CC) framework introduced to facilitate these changes. In parallel we have seen growing use of digital resources and approaches to support new modes of study such as blended learning.

UCL aims are to ensure that educational intentions, outcomes, activities and assessments are aligned to form a cohesive, connected and effective learning experience for our students, and that programmes of study enable students to connect more effectively with researchers, with the workplace, with each other, and with local and wider communities.

However we recognise planning rich and complex learning environments requires a structured, dialogic approach to effecting change in programme and module design. UCL has therefore piloted an integrated set of ‘light touch’ but focused learning design approaches, including workshops, CC guides, digital benchmarks and online support.

One key component is ABC, our effective and engaging hands-on workshop trialled with great success over a range of programmes. In just 90 minutes using a game format teams work together to create a visual ‘storyboard’ outlining the type and sequence of learning activities and assessment and feedback opportunities (both online and offline) required to meet the module’s learning outcomes. ABC is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format. This approach generates high levels of engagement, creative informed dialogue and group reflection about curriculum design among even time-poor academics. This is a highly transferrable methodology already trailed at Glasgow and Aarhus (DK) Universities. There are versions in Spanish and Dutch following other workshops run in Chile and Belgium.

In addition, we are introducing workshops to enable programme leaders and teams to work with students to benchmark their programmes in line with the descriptors of the Connected Curriculum framework, using a published Guide.

For this project, we aim to continue to deliver this range of dialogic workshops but track their effects and impacts carefully, using a combination of focus groups (with staff and with students), individual semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, and analysis of programme-level and module-level metrics. We will use this focused analysis to develop a resource pack to enable these developmental activities to be scaled up, both with and beyond UCL.

Clive Young (UCL Digital Education), will lead the project team which will include ABC co-developer Natasa Perovic (UCL Digital Education) and CALT colleagues.

HEFCE Press release HEFCE supports experimental innovation in learning and teaching

Wikimedia UK held a Wikipedia Course Leaders event on the afternoon of July 19th. The meeting brought together academics who use Wikipedia in their modules, Wikipedians in Residence, and other Wikipedia and higher education enthusiasts (like me) to exchange their practice and think about some of the challenges of working for assessment in an environment which is very much alive and out in the world.

As you can imagine, we were all in agreement about the potential of Wikipedia in our respective disciplines, which included Applied Human Geography, Psychology, Law, World Christianity, and Research Methods for Film. As you can see from the notes we took, we discussed colleagues’ and students’ reservations, tensions and intersections between Wikimedia and institutional agendas, relationships between students and other Wikipedians, assessment which is fair and well-supported, and Wikipedia tools for keeping track of students. There are plenty of ideas, solutions, and examples of good and interesting practice. There is a new and developing Wikimedia page for UK universities.

If you are interested in using Wikipedia to give your students the experience of public writing on the Web and contributing within a global community of interest, there is plenty of support.

UCL staff and students have access to audio and video content from free-to-air TV and radio channels through UCL’s Box of Broadcasts subscription. Staff can also make clips and embed this media into their Moodle courses without worrying about infringing copyright. And unlike YouTube, the clip will remain indefinitely.

On 1 August 2016 the new Box of Broadcasts (BoB) went live with a fresh look, enhanced video quality and more powerful searching capabilities. The search now returns ordered results in a much easier to follow format.

From September, BoB will deliver a whole host of improvements:

• A platform working across desktop, iOS and Android devices.
• More powerful searching capabilities (using TRILT metadata).
• Better programme coverage and a permanent archive of content from nine channels:
  • BBC1 London.
  • BBC2 .
  • BBC4.
  • ITV London.
  • Channel 4.
  • More4.
  • Channel 5.
  • BBC Radio 4.
  • BBC Radio 4 Extra.
• Better thumbnail previews on search results.
• Preview clips before saving.
• Label your own clips.
• Personalised email alerts when programmes are ready to view.
• More detailed citation data.

Limited content and functionality during upgrade period

Throughout August some of BoB archive content and some functionality won’t be available during the upgrade period.

On 1 August you won’t be able to access your saved clips and playlists, but don’t worry these will be accessible again in September. Also, you may not be able to access some archive content broadcast before 1 July 2016. There will be some programmes in the archive available before this date but not everything.  The archive content and enhanced functionality will be restored in September, along with all the exciting new features. We apologise for any inconvenience caused during the upgrade period.

Find out more

You can now find Box of Broadcasts on their new Twitter handle @OnDemandBoB. All followers and previous tweets will stay attached to the new handle, so if you’re following us you don’t need to do anything. Just make sure you tag @OnDemandBoB in your BoB tweets, as the old handle will no longer be active.
To promote the BoB upgrade to staff and students here’s a short video highlighting all the exciting improvements.

Check out the new Box of Broadcasts

The new link to BoB is learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand.

However, bobnational.net  will redirect here so you can still use that.