Senior Accessibility Strategist, Learning Technologies
The accessibility of learning materials is often a topic reserved for serving students with disabilities. But there are simple ways you can increase engagement and satisfaction for all students by providing accessible, universally designed materials. Here are Brian Richwine's top tips:
A PDF’s fixed-layout means the reader often must choose between the unappealing experience of either a view that is too small to read comfortably or the experience of repeatedly adjusting the zoom and scrolling side-to-side.
When students have more choices for how they can consume instructional content, they also gain more flexibility in settings for studying. Consider how the PDFs appear when viewed on a smartphone.
When supplying a PDF, consider providing the content in a more flexible format like a web page or Canvas module, or as well. Just adding a link to an article’s original web page along with the PDF can provide a better experience—many journals offer multiple formats, including a responsive web view.
Here is how the same paper looks to smartphone users on the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s website. The included table of contents provides a quick overview of the content and navigation of the document.
Other formats that work well on mobile devices include Pressbooks, IU Blogs, and content authored in Canvas (see How can I use Canvas on my mobile device as a student?).
Hundreds of studies explore how Video Captions Benefit Everyone (Gernsbacher 2015) – by increasing students’ attention, comprehension, and retention of information delivered in video lectures.
Do you use Kaltura to have your course videos captioned? If so, consider providing a link to the videos in Kaltura MediaSpace. The video player inside of Kaltura’s MediaSpace includes the Kaltura Interactive Transcription Widget, which lets students view and search a video’s text transcript, quickly navigating to any desired subject in your videos. Student engagement with your online videos will increase once they learn how easy it is to find and review particular topics.
You can also create a channel inside of MediaSpace to make it easier for students to find all of a course’s video content.
Hopefully, the above ideas have piqued your interest in how universally designed course materials can boost student engagement and satisfaction in your courses. The best part is that you neither have to be an accessibility expert, nor spend days making significant changes.
And it is not just the students that will benefit. The techniques for creating documents with accessibility in mind can save document authors time too. Here are a few resources that can show you how to make a difference with as little as one hour of investment:
Are you worried about a performance gap between online and face-to-face classroom learning? Looking for ways to engage and motivate online learners, while minimizing the effect situational and personal barriers have on their success? The following books discuss how to use the UDL framework and guidelines to support student persistence, satisfaction, and retention in online courses:
Prefer to watch a video? Watch Thomas Tobin speak at the University of West Georgia on UDL as a Secret Retention Tool (6 video segments, 10-15 minutes each).
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Visit Mosaic Initiative, Teaching.IU, Teaching for Student Success, Digital Gardener Initiative, IT Training, IU Knowledge Base—not to mention your campus teaching and learning center—for more on topics related to this issue.
