Artifact 5: Digital Accessibility Breakthrough

When deciding on a topic for my online module, I floundered a bit (1.1). I had the most experience creating curricular materials for my high school math and science classes, but that was not the direction I wanted to move in my career after completing this program. So, given the problem of choosing an appropriate topic, I had to decide between something familiar or something new. Either one of these choices might not be relevant to my career in the future (1.2, 1.3). I have a lot of past resources for science and math that would save me preparatory time in designing graphics and other curricular content, and this ended up being the deciding factor. I chose to go with what I know because my future is so open and undecided, that anything else I worked on wasn’t necessarily going to be relevant. It made the most sense to me to focus on a course I knew and had some open license resources for (1.13, 2.9). The course I chose to make a module for was an introduction for lab safety in a high school science course.

By the time I started this module creation, I had already done a discrepancy-based needs analysis and proposal for other course assignments (1.6, 1.7). The needs-analysis had concluded that there is a gap between students’ knowledge and performance when they enter the laboratory and what is required from a safety standpoint. The solution was more training, and the module was meant to bridge that gap, and do so in a way that students could access the training online, outside of the regular classroom and not take up too much more instructional time.

In MDDE 604 I studied the complexities of distance education and the need for following instructional systems design philosophy to create effective, relevant, and engaging learning materials (2.2, 2.3). When creating the module, I was sure to section the material in appropriately sized ‘chunks’ for my students, include easy to use navigation, clear fonts, legible graphics etc. My assignments included quizzes that were targeted to my students’ abilities, forum discussions to create meaningful conversations at a distance, and an interactive ‘puzzle’ created using Google Docs Drawing features (2.5, 2.8). The Google Drawing assignment was a new activity that I hadn’t used with my students before, but while collaborating with some of my classmates, one of them had recommended using this program for an interactive student assignment (4.6, 4.8). It took a big of troubleshooting with the program to get it to work properly, but it is something I will likely use again in the future. Aside from learning a new program, this was also a positive cooperative learning experience that showed me the benefit of resource sharing with colleagues. One of the benefits I discovered about using the Google Suite in K-12 is that many schools have student accounts allowing their students academic access to the Google Suite. This eliminates the ethical considerations with requiring students to sign up for an account on their own, which was a consideration when using other software for interactive assignments (3.1, 3.3). Similarly, Google is widely used in the professional world, so it’s a positive way to incorporate learning that will extend beyond the course or classroom. As a secondary teacher, I’ve found students are often surprisingly inept with technology (aside from Snapchat or Instagram), so creating learning experiences where they can be introduced to common technologies in an educational way is vital to their success in our tech-based society.

Overall, creating this module was an enjoyable process. I like learning new technology, such as Canvas and Google Drawings. The process of discovering accessing the features of these programs gave me some great knowledge and resources to use in my practice in the future. Adapting the programs to the specificities of the course assignments was an experiential learning process that also built my confidence in being able to use them to create instructional materials in other courses and instructional design projects (1.4, 1.10). I see this process as another tool in my teacher toolbox for integrating technology in a multidisciplinary classroom and showing my students how to use technology while teaching them about any other subject.

After submitting my assignment, I was shocked that I didn’t score nearly as well as I had hoped! My feedback on the first few assignments had been overwhelmingly positive, so I was surprised and disappointed. I spoke with some of my classmates, and we discovered that we all had the same experience, so we decided to speak with our instructor to find out what had happened. We had all lost marks on the digital accessibility portion of the rubric, which seemed to be unevenly weighted based on how many other components were on the rubric and how many points we had lost on the assignment. For clarity, there were three main areas of evaluation, Coherence & Clarity, Quality of Presentation, and Unit Preparation. Within the last of these three sections, there were eight separate components, including:

• Unit has been completely prepared.
• Shows excellent organization.
• Contains all required elements.
• All digital elements function properly.
• Easy to read.
• Contains appropriate visual elements.
• Complies with digital accessibility requirements.
• No typographical errors or formatting inconsistencies.

This Unit Preparation section was worth 25/30 points for the assignment, and given only one of the eight components was lacking, it seemed unreasonable to lose a whole letter grade. In other words, the main assignment was the unit preparation, not an assignment on digital accessibility.

This brought on some very deep and meaningful discussions between myself, my classmates, and our instructor (4.2, 4.3). We discussed the importance of digital accessibility, and why it is vital to incorporate accessibility opportunities and universal design for learning (UDL) in our instructional designs (2.4, 2.6). When I was creating the module, I was focused mainly on the content, and structuring it in a way that is meaningful, using theory such as Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Design and Cognitive Load Theory (1.9, 2.3). I hadn’t considered that UDL and accessibility are just as important as the other pedagogical approaches I was familiar with. Through the conversations with my instructor and my peers, as well as engaging with the literature on UDL, quality assurance, and accessibility for the remainder of this course (and the remainder of the MDDE program) I saw the need for advocacy and action in this area (5.5, 5.8). For example, some students may not even know that they could benefit from certain supports, like a student with undiagnosed dyslexia who can read and comprehend certain fonts better than others. Without needing to struggle, diagnose or ask for help, simply designing materials with dyslexia friendly fonts could help these students. Ensuring other people in my own context that also have control of curriculum design understand the need for these types of supportive features is one way that I know I can make a difference.

On another note, this was also a lesson in the importance of creating clear rubrics and guidelines for students. If I had seen more about digital accessibility on the rubric, I would have placed more importance on it when creating and proofing my module. For instance, if it was its own main section rather than one small point at the bottom of a list within a section, that would have helped emphasize its importance.

After coming to terms with the value and importance of accessibility in education, I went on to create other assignments exploring some of the issues and solutions around digital accessibility in my other courses, including MDDE 621, MDDE 610, MDDE 611, and MDDE 619. Some of the topics included assessments of other courses in digital accessibility, and how UDL and digital accessibility are change agents for transformative education.

My perspective shift was one that I will carry with me throughout my career, to recognize and advocate for the use of UDL in curriculum design (2.1, 3.4).

After coming to terms with my failure to emphasize accessibility in this assignment, my future assignments included such provisions as alternate text for images, headings stylized into my writing for ease of keyboard navigation and text-to-speech fluency. Eliminating extra line breaks in written work, providing transcripts and closed captions for videos, and offering students options to customize the way they show their own learning are all regular standards of practice for me now (3.2, 3.6). I now regularly share ISD and UDL principles with peers during opportunities for peer feedback (4.4, 4.5), and will continue to use this knowledge to advise those in charge of curricular design within my own context throughout my professional career.