Course Review Teams

Digital course materials are one of the most important types of digital content at MSU. They also change frequently and can be difficult to maintain in compliance with the Digital Accessibility Policy. The Spartan Ally course scanner allows faculty and other course creators to identify digital accessibility issues inside D2L/Brightspace. To assist them, a college can also establish a Digital Accessibility Course Review Team.

A Digital Accessibility Course Review Team typically consists of at least one full-time employee capable of managing a team of students and at least 2-3 student employees, but it can be larger depending on a unit's needs. These individuals are usually provided with digital accessibility training and evaluation tools. Then, they are provided access to the D2L course pages for all courses in the college. This is the basic process they follow:

• Check the course using the Spartan Ally course scanner.
• Depending on the team’s mission, they may be allowed to remediate some types of accessibility issues.
• Record what types of digital accessibility issues remain.
• Email the instructors with a summary of the issues in each course, along with information on how to fix them. This can consists of links to tutorials, short videos, or other resources.
• Typically, there is also an offer of assistance such as a meeting or video call.

Although it can be challenging to provide this type of feedback to instructors in a timely way each semester, some colleges have managed to provide feedback to ALL instructors in their college each term. This has method has been shown to dramatically boost digital accessibility compliance scores in a unit, with practitioners scoring among the top MSU units for digital course material accessibility.