It’s summer in Chicago, and with the abundance of fun activities to engage your attention the last thing you may want to do is think about how to improve the accessibility of your online course. Relax. I’m not here to harsh anyone’s summertime mellow. But the fall term is approaching, so step into Dee’s Course Spa® for a refreshing and therapeutic summer break course makeover. Your course will feel sparkly-new and ready for the next term!
When I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.
Now? “I was just listening to a podcast about that…” is something I say with annoying frequency.
Thankfully, I’m not alone, as I notice many other people parroting back something they’ve recently heard in a podcast. But even though it feels like most of us are listening to podcasts, and most of us are learning interesting things from podcasts, I still don’t see podcasts as a top option when faculty are designing online courses. Why might that be?
Recently I purchased a wheelchair for my mom on Amazon. I love shopping on Amazon. It’s quick, easy, and my packages come straight to the front door. I read the reviews to see what other buyers have to say about the product, and usually make up my mind whether or not to buy based on those reviews. Generally, I never have an issue.
This time, however, was different. As I usually do, after I placed my order I repeatedly checked its status to see when my product would arrive. But now, every time I clicked on the tracking number, a page would come up invalid tracking number. I thought to myself what is going on?
The first time I read the expression “life happens” was in a syllabus of an online course that I was reviewing. The professor indicated that he understood there would always be reasons for students to not complete course work, because “life happens.” In the case of “life happens,” he asked students to communicate with him: “No response, no explanation, or showing no sign of life will result in an F!”
Over the years, the strict yet humorous tone of that syllabus stuck in my mind. And so did the notion of “life happens.”
Life happens. As much as you try to take control, life sometimes just takes its own course of action.
Then, on January 29, 2018, life happened to me.
Without setting out to do so deliberately, I’ve developed a strong interest in accessibility and universal design over the last year. Last June, my buddy in the ELI/Penn State ID2ID program suggested that we collaborate on an accessibility project for a faculty audience. Then, in July, I attended the annual Distance Teaching & Learning conference in Madison, which had an unofficial “accessibility track.” After returning from the conference, I started talking with my colleagues and found that several of us were on the same page, so we have formed a working group to begin exploring how we might support implementation here at DePaul. Over the next two posts, I’m going to give an overview of the work our group has been doing.
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.
“What if they find out who I really am?”
Every quarter, I meet a new group of (mostly) freshmen students in my First Year Writing courses, and every quarter, there’s one conversation I can’t wait to have. I always make sure that we have a discussion of “Discourse Communities” and what it means to become a “professional” within any of the fields the students might be studying.
I recently stumbled across a blog post about the 7 habits of highly ineffective developers and couldn’t help but see direct connections to the challenges people encounter when thinking about using educational technology. Like developers, instructors (and instructional designers) face all types of challenges. Understating yourself and being aware of these challenges can help make the most of your time, energy, and resources—as well as lead to better results.
In fall 2017, DePaul upgraded our installation of our learning management system, D2L, to the “Daylight” interface. One of the primary reasons D2L underwent this design overhaul of the entire system was to implement a principal called “Responsive Design.”
Responsive Design is a method of web design whereby developers build one version of a website that is designed to adapt and scale to whatever device it is accessed from. This is in contrast to the early days of smartphones, when developers would create a separate “mobile” site, which you would be redirected to if you were accessing it from a smartphone or tablet. Instead, there is only one version of the site, but the elements move, resize, and adapt depending on the size of the screen the site is viewed from.
I dropped my oldest son off at college in August. Man, that was a tough goodbye. So many unknowns and questions, like, will he survive? Of course he will. However, one area that I probably overcompensated for in high school was reminding him (fairly often) to talk to his teachers, go to the writing and math centers—basically utilize all the academic resources possible. Did he? Not really, unless he was desperately trying to climb out of a hole.
So, would this continue in college? It couldn’t. If it did—well, he might end up back at home.