HGTC's Accessibility in OER Implementation Guide
Overview
In this section, you and your team will engage in a Landscape Analysis to uncover key structures and supports that can guide your work to support Accessibility in OER. You may or may not answer all of these questions, but this is an offering.
May 11 - Section One: Landscape Analysis for Accessibility in OER in Local Context (Work on during May 11th implementation)
In this section, you and your team will engage in a Landscape Analysis to uncover key structures and supports that can guide your work to support Accessibility in OER. We exnourage to explore some of the questions from each category. You may or may not answer all of these questions, but this is an offering. We ask that you complete Parts One, Two and Six.
Part One: Initial Thoughts
- What is your team's initial goal for this series?
- We have some confusion over what we are expected to produce.
- Update: We are developing an Accessibiliity workshop series for faculty -- it will have multiple assessments and activities and will be housed publicly so anyone can use it (therefore making it an OER as well).
Part Two: Introductory probing questions:
What does accessibility look like in our organization? How do we measure accessibility?
We don't have a specific department or person that oversees accessibility, and we don't measure it from an objective perspective. Faculty are asked to make materials and documents accessible, and we provide some training/support (from folks who are self-taught on accessibility), but it is not thoroughly addressed/overseen in the way it should be.
What does OER look like in our organization? How do we measure access to OER?
We have a better grasp on OER in terms of developing/implementing them, but we don't really measure the accessibility of these materials in many cases... so far, we haven't had many people create their own OERs, so we're using what is already out there, much of which is already accessible -- but it's something we need to be checking for on our end anyway.
Part Three: Clarifying questions for accessibility:
What is the organizational structure that supports accessibility?
Who generates most of the accessibility structures/conversation in our organization?
Where do most educators get support with accessibility?
What content areas might have the largest gaps in access to accessibility?
Part Four: Clarifying questions for OER:
What is our organizational structure that supports curricular resources?
What is our organizational structure that supports OER?
Who generates most of the curricular resources in our organization?
Where do most educators get support with curricular resources?
What content areas might have the largest gaps in access to curricular resources/OER?
Part Five: Clarifying questions for Faculty learning and engagement:
What Professional Learning (PL) structures have the best participation rates for our educators?
What PL structures have the best "production" rates for our educators?
What incentive do we have to offer people for participating in learning and engagement?
Who are the educators that would be most creative with accessibility and OER?
Who are the educators that would benefit the most from accessibility and OER?
Part Six: Final Probing questions:
What is our current goal for Accessibility in OER and why is that our goal?
We weren't sure initially, but we landed on building an accessibility workshop series for our faculty/staff that demonstrates all these tools and defines accessibility... this will start with the basics of the checker in Word, etc., and build to looking at websites for those who may want to create their own OERs moving forward or may be using websites for instruction.
Who have we not yet included while thinking about this work?
disability services for the student perspective, additional faculty/staff for support/buy-in, students (understanding their needs)
What barriers remain when considering this work?
resources, as there is no department for accessibility (or even OER for that matter) at our institution... this is why we're looking for a pre-built, self-paced Accessibility workshop, but we'd like to offer actual training sessions on the topics as well
What would genuine change look like for our organization for this work?
For accessibility, just a general awareness, buy-in, and effort to make documents and materials accessible for students
Section Two: Team Focus (Finish before May 25th to share during Implementation Session Two)
Identifying and Describing a Problem of Practice
The following questions should help your team ensure that you are focusing your collaboration.
What is your Team’s specific goal for this series? You may consider using AEM Quality Indicators for Creating Accessible Materials to help add to or narrow your work.
Implementation Goal: Create an accessibility workshop training series to offer internally (and share as public free resource [OER])
What other partners might support this work?
Library, Academic Services, faculty, disability services, tutoring center
What is your desired timeframe for this work?
Possible timeline: create over summer and begin offering during Fall semester (later in semester, October/November + PD in December)
How will you include diverse voices and experiences in this work?
Reach out to disability services and the tutoring center to get their thoughts/perspective. Survey the faculty as well as the students to get a better idea of what the needs are. Select certain faculty to be representatives for the initiative and loop them in to the conversation.
Please create a Focus Question that explains your goal and provides specific topics that you would like feedback on. This is what you will share in your breakout groups for feedback.
How should we consider breaking our series into multiple workshops? What topics go first, what can be combined, how much time should we plan for in-person sessions... for the OER version, how many assessments are needed and should anything be given at the end like a certificate? (And if so, who will manage and oversee this?)
(Save for during May 25th's session.) What feedback did you receive from another team during the May 25th Implementation Session?
We worked with our other HGTC team, so we discussed our projects and how to combine them to make effective change at the college... we also discussed some of the topics and outline for our workshop series.
Section Three: Team Work Time and Next Steps (Complete by the end of Implementation Session Three)
Sharing and Next Steps
What was your redefined goal for this series?
It took us a while to determine what we really wanted to do for the project, so we started with no real goal at all and ended up with a solid project of a way we can share accessibility internally and also as an OER.
What does your team want to celebrate?
We're proud of the libguide we put together for now and are glad we chose the libguide format -- we originally planned to do it here in OER Commons but found the libguide easier to navigate and use since we were already familiar with it... and our librarians are whizzes when it comes to updating them, etc., so it works really well for us internally but also allows us to share it publicly.
What did your team accomplish? If you have links to resources, please include them here.
Accessibility Workshop (LibGuide)
It only has resources right now, but once we figure out the full outline for our workshop series, we'll reorganize and add it here -- the idea is to have separate modules/tabs for each topic and create an assessment of some kind for each. We'd like to have it built so there's a self-paced aspect but also some activities for when we have our in-person workshops (and we will have an "instructor's manual" of sorts to share with facilitators of these workshops so they have guidance on what to do any how).
What are your team’s next steps?
As a starting point, we want to offer a "crash course" Accessibility Workshop at our next required professional development day.... starting to expose faculty to some of the basics is the goal with this, and that way, when we introduce an entire workshop series, it (hopefully) won't be so overwhelming.