Michigan State provides a type of professional development for faculty and academic staff called Faculty Learning Communities (FLC). These are small groups that meet monthly and focus on specific topics like academic integrity or enriching the international student experience. Last spring, I joined the FLC on accessibility through creative innovation. We are dedicated to creating and revising accessible materials for the online learning environment. By examining and implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) standards, we focus on not only how to improve our own courses, but also how to help other faculty wrestling with these same issues.

Starting last spring, the FLC took on the task of creating a self-enrollment course on the university’s course management system, Desire 2 Learn (D2L). We worked with the MSU Web Accessibility Team to design a course that provides resources to faculty to help them navigate creating a new course, remediating an existing course, managing a VISA request, or learning more about the theories behind ULD and accessibility. If you’re an MSU faculty or staff and would like to check out our course, log into D2L, click on the “Self-Registration” tab in the top right corner, and then choose the Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning course. In addition to resources for accessibility, faculty can also request new tutorials if you have a need we do not address. We recognize requirements and resources change, so we plan to continuously update the course.