Need accessible course content? One vision led to hiring a small team of student workers who format documents, stakeholders developed self-service and hands-on training, and others are transforming an engineering program right down to the documents students create in class. Come to learn our processes, and leave with a plan.
What if accessible learning content were in every course? That was the appreciative question that kept rolling around one instructional designer’s head. She looked around and saw even though access was everyone’s responsibility, dramatic improvements were needed in helping faculty and staff create such materials. The biggest pushback was not over the “not my job” mindset, but lack of time. As luck would have it, there was an opportunity to write up a strategic funds request and see if there could be money to train student employees to assist in making course content accessible. The funds were approved, and the journey started.
In this session, attendees will gain insight and materials needed to:
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Draft their own strategic funds requests based upon concrete measures of number of documents and hours to format them for each course.
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Replicate the systems and processes used by the formatting assistance team to run your own instance.
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Train faculty and staff at your institution using self-paced content located a static web page.
Presenters will include both a student formatting assistant who will highlight how work is prioritized, what each student formatting assistant does during his/her shift. In particular, attendees will receive a copy of our daily work manual, the formatting step-by-step documents, copies of actual formatting logs with concrete numbers of how long each job took us. You will also see how we manage our workflow using Trello, MS Office 365 and Google, learn how often we meet, when and why, as well as what on earth we talk about.
Attendees will be given guided questions to create their own plan, and encouraged to discuss unique challenges in their own backyard in small groups prior to the reflection and Q&A portions of the session. It is our aim for everyone to benefit from the positive experiences of other attendees.
Reflection
This time will be used to write your own strategic appreciative questions, and identify anything we can assist you with while we are gathered together. Attendees may use the guided questions provided to further their individual thought processes, or use the time for their own institution’s cultural considerations.
Q&A Session
In addition to any questions attendees identify during the reflection time, everyone will be encouraged ask the presenters and other attendees what works, what does not, and how we have overcome obstacles.