Accessibility updates

I am back,

It has only been two years - and in my defence the world has been on fire for a year of that. Plus I don't have a large number of readers do I?

No Katie, you do not!

I was very excited to learn that the December update of Articulate 360 included accessibility features that allow a user to modify the text font and size and change colours. I was less excited to learn that doing this through Blackboard when you publish as a SCORM package was not super simple!

But I have done it.

After you have run your Storyline update anything you publish will have the accessibility tools on the player as a default.

 

As default accessible text is set to off (false). You can change this from the variables menu, built in variables. However, at time of writing, I would advise against having the accessible text on as default as it has a minor effect on the formatting.

So far so simple.

If you are publishing your content for the web - all is good now. However, if you are publishing for a VLE using SCORM there are a few things to note.

1. Articulate support were really helpful, and they pointed me to SCORM cloud as a platform for testing - which was actually really helpful as it means you don't have to faff about deploying things in a VLE.

2. Not all accessibility software is created equal, I think I will end up recommending the free version of helperbird, not because it is necessarily better than other tools but this is the one I got to work most effectively in this scenario (and actually with Blackboard in general)

3. And this is the important bit, as far as I can tell it doesn't work if you set your player to open in 'frameset’. The best option I have found is

SCO launch = new window

Player launch = frameset.

(this can all be tested easily in SCORM Cloud)




On the one hand this is good because the default is new window. On the other hand, I prefer to use 'frameset' as it gets around the pop-up window (and it being blocked by internet settings etc)

How learning with technology is like being on Jury Service.

I am a bit behind with my blog posts – my sincere apologies. Curriculum review, Christmas and deadlines. However, I am currently on jury service and find myself in an over warm, unventilated room with a lot of people and nothing to do so I thought I would write you a blog post about it, related to learning technology of course. I have come up with a few similarities between jury service and implementing learning technologies.

• You only have internet on your phone – how can you ever survive the day!

Well for your students, this is probably the norm. They experience most of their life through a hand-held device so embrace it. Be like them. Look for technologies that are mobile friendly, this way your students can work on the bus or while on jury service! Discussion boards are pretty mobile friendly and a good way of getting students to interact. The native Blackboard ones, hideous as they are, will give you the most reliability but other tools like Piazza also have mobile apps. 

 

Podcasts and short videos are also a good way of providing pre-learning information. Anything under 15 minutes and preferably downloadable (for the underground) would be great. You can make these yourself on Panopto or you can direct your students to online sources like TED talks, YouTube or BoB. It is worth being mindful of time as anything that cannot be downloaded will mean using mobile data or being somewhere with Wi-Fi which restricts the places in which students can interact with the content.

• You have no idea what you are doing.

There is an expectation that you will do something. Activate your classroom? Flip it? Digitise it? However, the instructions about how to do it, when to do it and how long it will take are very vague. We can only apologise for this, but things change all the time.

That is not very helpful when you are expected to do something (beware shameless self-promotion). This is why we developed the IMPLEMnT project. It is a community-based tool which collects different technologies and shows their potential uses. It also has a collection of user case studies that allow the community to share practice around what works and what doesn’t. My next project may be to design something similar for the jury service. IMPLEMnT is currently undergoing some upgrades so it not fully functional but we absolutely welcome comments at this stage!

• It’s so boring…. No, it is really interesting…. Oh dear I am so conflicted!

That’s the thing about jury service it could be so interesting, you could learn so much but in reality, you have better things to do and it just gets in the way. Digital learning is like that – you might like to, it might be cool but where are you going to find the time. Not to mention the fact that you have no idea what you are doing. In answer to this I offer my learned friend the long-term view. Many of the reasons people like me advocate for digital is because in the long run it will save you time. Switching that essay to an online peer assessment may be tough the first time around but next time – think of how much less marking you will have to do.

Creating that pre-learning content will take me days!!! Possibly – but once you have done it… you can re-use it as many times as you like. Of course, this is where the likeness to jury service fails. I am not sure there is a long-term benefit (other than lasting damage to my sanity), although I am in a room with no internet catching up on my writing which is a bonus!

Assessment and feedback

I recently went to the Blackboard on Tour event in London which was largely based around assessment and feedback – there was an interesting presentation given by Grainne Hamilton on the topic which regardless of the implications for using Blackboard learn brought up (or more accurately, caused me to revisit) some interesting ideas about feedback and assessment and how we approach it in a HE environment. We were asked to decide which three of the following principles we thought were most important.

My choices were:

• ·         Opportunities to act on feedback
• ·         Develop self assessment and reflection
• ·         Encourage positive motivational beliefs

Not necessarily in that order…

Here is why.

Encouraging motivational beliefs is for me probably the most important on that list as, if done effectively, could be the 1^st step to promoting self directed learning and reflection by fostering  student ownership of their own learning. If, as a marker or assessor, in whatever capacity your feedback isn’t positive andmotivational in the sense that it encourages students to study further, it will not be effective. It may even be damaging as a student who is not motivated is far less likely to succeed. Of course feedback should not be entirely about saying ‘well done you are brilliant’, this will not help them think critically about what they have written and improve on it but equally it is important to balance criticism however constructive with some praise. If you are not told you have done something well you may not necessarily have the confidence to do it again. 

Encouraging positive and motivational beliefs leads neatly into the idea of developing self assessment and reflection, ultimately when they leave HE students are going to be in the workplace and the process of self assessment and reflection becomes a lot more important because there will be no faculty member looking at what they are doing and providing feedback. Self assessment and reflection is not a process that comes naturally to most people so it is part of the duty of an HE establishment to create a positive environment where students are encouraged and helped to develop these skills. 

At the end of the day however feedback positive, motivational or otherwise will achieve nothing if it falls on the proverbial deaf ears. The only way feedback can really enable students is if they are given time to act on it. This is something that is often lacking, especially in HE summative assignments may be marked and commented on and returned to students but there is little incentive to read and engage with that feedback as the assignment has been completed. Giving feedback on drafts and building into the process a requirement for self reflection is one way to help students engage and make allow them to develop self reflection skills. This is something I have been working on so watch this space. 

Making a choice of three important principles, however well justified, is all well and good and saying students must act on feedback and engage with is an excellent theory but on some level as a teaching institution we have to provide them with the skills and a framework which enable them to do that or it becomes a little bit like handing someone three skittles and instructing them to juggle. At the very least they are going to get a headache!