OpenEd 2015 Debrief Notes

Owned by Jonathan Hung
Last updated: Nov 25, 2015
2 min read
Goal of the booth was to engage people with ATs and content. Help people with their content and strategies. Create ah-ha moments.
Conference catch phrase: "Come for the swag. Stay for the WCAG."

Attendees

  • BCCampus - toolkits and publishing platform
  • CAST - UDL for learning, scaffolding for learning, our buddies from Boston!
  • CaperBC - direct accomodations for BC students
  • ATBC - Bruce + Vince, brought ATs for people to try. Head trackers, single switch, screen readers, other ATs.
  • Students with ATs who worked with CaperBC.
  • Lots of librarians. 
  • Community colleges with little resources and therefore interested in open ed resources. 
  • Institution stakeholders (i.e. accessibility services, instructional designers, etc.)

Challenges


LMS
  • Learning management systems that were not under their control
  • Learn how to better integrate Floe in their technology
  • would be interesting to look at integration points and plugins with LMS  

Content Accessibility:

  • here is my content, how do I make it accessible?
  • landing page of handbook could be better
  • people who are adapting or converting existing resources - other depts responsible for converting into accessible forms (e.g. how do I add captions?) - a lot of technical questions

Motivation

  • Some educators do not have incentive to create accessible content 
    • ATs are provided, so you don't need accessible content 
    • none of my students need ATs, so I don't need accessible content 
    • CAST pointed out that most students in higher ed don't disclose that they have a disability or specific learning need
  •  People are looking for strategies for managing their accessibility projects

Barrier to entry with Floe
  • People were concerned about cost of integrating our tools 
    • how much time is it going to make use of it 
    •  stability, number of people using it

Better authoring tools
  • Authoring tools are creating issues in accessibility
  • Accessible vs. Usable

Limited / unreliable access, low bandwidth OER, cultural diversity
  • Can we address OER with respect to cultural diversity and variable access to Internet (example: India, Africa, Alaska).

Feedback

  • Tested chart sonificaiton with 3 AT users (JAWS, ZoomText), all had very different responses to the experience. 
  • ILDH, ppl were happy it existed.

Areas of Interest
  • PUB101 - student-centred approach to creating content  - referred to DS106 digital storytelling course http://ds106.us/ 
  • Badging - how do you represent quality, authenticity, importance 
  • Distributed Content platform - Federated Wiki
    • creator of Wikipedia came up with a distibuted content system (like Github) which allows anyone to branch content and anyone can see the history across the web.
  • CAST's UDL Editions and other learning tools: http://udleditions.cast.org/