Accessibility

My co-facilitator and I will be presenting for our learning community at MSU's Spring Teaching and Learning conference on incorporating equitable pedagogy into the classroom. We will cover practices from the readings we have done over the spring semester. Abstract:...

Over the spring semester, our equitable pedagogy learning community will be diving into educational research to examine the outcomes of different practices. The plan is to cover syllabus language, course structure, class activities, and assessments and grading.

I'm staying on Twitter even as it becomes a dumpster fire. I've tried out Mastodon, but I just don't love the disjointed feel. I also have a Post account, but I haven't had time to learn that app yet. I have a few Discord communities that are great, but again,...

So excited to be co-facilitating a learning community called Equitable pedagogy: Removing barriers to learning. We will meet once a month throughout the academic year, and hopefully bring in a diverse group of faculty and staff to discuss inclusive classroom...

I am excited to share that I have taken on the role of Digital Accessibility Coordinator in the College of Natural Science. My responsibilities will include managing academic accessibility needs for NatSci courses, providing guidance on digital methods for teaching,...

Since I created and have been using an open education resource (OER) in my class, I was asked to participate in a faculty panel hosted by the MSU student government, ASMSU, yesterday in celebration of Open Education Week 2021. It was a great panel with multiple...

Last week, as an add-on lunch event at the Making Learning Accessible conference, my FLC did a brown bag presentation on accessibility, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and our D2L training course for faculty. We easily had 100 people attend, which was amazing, and we were able to share our message with a number of MSU faculty that we had yet to reach. Additionally, since we piggy-backed on the conference, we had a number of non-MSU folks in the audience as well, and we received really great feedback and discussion points from both populations of attendees.

Today I participated in a Lunch and Learn event at the Center for Language Teaching Advancement on designing accessible course materials. It was run by Kate Sonka and Dustin Defelise. It was a very interesting group because members ranged from undergraduates with little knowledge or experience in accessibility to those, like me, that have spent a decent amount of time creating accessible content to others that have a detailed knowledge of the WCAG 2.0 standards. I love when discussions involve a wide range of experiences and backgrounds.

I spent the morning at the 33rd Annual MSU College of Education Technology Conference. The theme of this year’s conference was equity in STEM, Computer Science, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The first talk I attended was presented by Nate Stevenson from Kent State on designing accessible learning with UDL. We discussed the principles of UDL and about how to think about if content creates barriers to learning for your students. For example, for some students get overwhelmed by the simple length of an assignment. This hit close to home because I tend to combine multiple assignments into one in my online classes. I am now going to reevaluate this decision. He also mentioned the book Design and Deliver by Loui Lord Nelson, which is a book I’d like to check out.