How do universities rise to the challenge of making their courses accessible? This charge requires an ecosystem of support and institutional resources: course reviews, document remediation, captioning, individual accommodations, assistive technology support, and more.
One of the key pillars in this ecosystem is education – faculty teaching courses need to be informed and passionate about accessibility. While education is nowhere near enough on its own, it is a key driver toward purposeful action.
To help meet this need, I developed a self-paced training course in Canvas course accessibility for my institution, called Make Your Canvas Course Accessible. We have found that faculty appreciate self-paced professional development opportunities, since they can fit them organically into their busy schedules.
The course is designed with those two goals in mind: educating faculty about accessibility and helping make faculty advocates for accessibility. While the course is focused on Canvas (and digital) accessibility, there is content related to other areas, such as cognitive accessibility and Universal Design for Learning.
The course includes 6 modules: Accessibility Overview, 8 Steps to Make Your Canvas Course Accessible, Special Topics, Beyond Digital Accessibility: How to Use Universal Design to Engage All Students, Accessibility Resources, and Want Help? I am currently working on developing a new module covering WCAG 2.1 and the new Title II ADA rule. If you choose to adapt this course, the Accessibility Resources and Want Help? modules will likely require editing, since they include institution-specific resources and information.
Designing an engaging asynchronous professional development course can be challenging. To make the course as useful as possible, I’ve implemented a variety of strategies:
- All course content is available in both text and video format, so faculty can learn in whatever way works best for them
- There are “recommended pathways” for accessibility beginners and more experienced faculty
- The Special Topics module includes information that isn’t relevant for all audiences, such as math accessibility and alt text for complex images
- The course includes a glossary, which links to relevant content, and an index page for users who want to look up something when returning to the course
- All pages include quick recaps and further reading for those who want to skim or dive deeper
- Short quizzes are integrated throughout the 8 Steps module as quick knowledge checks – if you want to distribute a certificate to course participants, these can be adapted for that purpose
This course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, meaning you are welcome to share, copy, redistribute, adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the materials in the course in any way you wish. If you do, you must give appropriate credit to the Division of Online and Strategic Learning at Ball State University. If you build upon the materials, you must redistribute your creation under the same CC license. If you want to adapt the course for your institution, it’s available in Canvas Commons.
I’d love it if you found something useful in this course. I’d also love to hear what other folks are doing to help educate faculty about accessibility. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
