June 2019 WAPL Transcript

Nick Noel: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WAPLcast for June 2019. My name is Nick Noel, filling in for Nate Evans. So different person but the same number of syllables. We do strive for consistency. I'm an instructional designer with the former digital content, now digital experience team. On this episode of the WAPLcast, we are joined by Andy Greger and Adrian Thelen, who are here to discuss their accessibility work in the College of Nursing. We also have a reminder from James Bender about the Year 3 Accessibility Review, and Jim White discusses forming a web accessibility working group.

Nick Noel: So, to recap, same syllables, same team, better name, Andy and Adrian are awesome, Year 3 reviews are due, working group. There is no July meeting, but we will be back in August. Until then, enjoy the episode.

James Bender: Okay, we can start, everyone. Welcome to the 44th WAPL meeting. I'm James Bender. Nate is not here today, he's on vacation. And so today it'll be myself and Jim from the office, we're a team. James and Jim show.

James Bender: Here's today. I'll give you a few minutes to look at the agenda, and we'll talk about it. We're going to get a perspective from nursing. We have two individuals from the nursing area that's going to talk to us.

James Bender: Updates from the RCPD they'll go. Is someone here from RCPD? They sent me a note saying they couldn't make it. We'll talk a little bit about the spring conferences. Has anybody participated, did anybody participate in the IT spring conference or IT summit? You did? Okay, yeah. So yeah, we'll talk a little about the IT next. Good, good.

James Bender: And then the [inaudible 00:01:47] interest. Jim will talk a little bit about that, and then the last thing we'll follow up with is the three year self-review. [inaudible 00:01:55]

James Bender: And the nice thing is, well I guess it's not very nice but, we will not have a July meeting, so I think some of the parts of that planning came into the fact that the holiday is going to fall on a certain date and Nate decided; well we decided as a group to cancel that. So if you're very sad about it, let us know. We could do some one on one things with you. There you go, you're up Andy!

Andy Greger: All right. Well first of all, thank you all for coming to the College of Nursing. We've been fortunate the last couple of meetings have been right in our neighborhood, that we went to radiology and now we're here. Instead of having to drive through central campus. I appreciate you guys coming out to visit us. And I know all you. I've seen your faces as you walk into this room, it can be a little overwhelming. Overwhelming for our faculty and students too. Get a perspective of how they feel, but it's supposed to make the instructor feel a little uncomfortable. A lot of lecturing in here to try to get you more in the active learning areas instead of standing up and spinning in circle.

Andy Greger: So real quick, I just want to go over kind of like, what our roles are here at the College of Nursing and what we do for accessibility. So my name’s Andy Greger, I'm the Educational Technology Manager at the College of Nursing and this is Adrian Thelen and she's the Instructional Media Technician at the college.

Andy Greger: So we're not central ID, we are focused solely on nursing, or we receive a lot of great support from central services so we appreciate all the impact that each of you have had on that support as we reach out and we get dumped and we have to reach outside.

Andy Greger: So as far as accessibility goes, Adrian does the majority of that work. I have to give her a lot of credit for that. She's going to talk about the process, kind of starting our three or our five year accessibility program, the five year plan. We had an instructional designer here who was focusing on reviewing all the courses and working in the faculty, and what we did in the beginning was a semester would finish and then we would go and look at the course and then talk to the instructors about it. Because they were creating content all the way up 'til the end of the course, and then we'd go back.

Andy Greger: But what we were looking at in our data is that they fixed that, but they had already copied their courses over for the next semester. So it didn't make sense to keep going back and fixing the previous courses, and then moving them forward as they were already moved forward.

Andy Greger: So now what Adrian does, I'll let her go into that, but it's been so much more effective. I will say we tried to do about two accessibility sessions with everyone in the college to talk about pediatric accessibility and accessibility in general and individual content. And then we do a lot of, or Adrian does a lot of the one on one with the faculty as we notice the type of content they're creating, she focuses that training on the type of thing they're doing.

Andy Greger: So I'll hand it over to Adrian. You can talk about this. [inaudible 00:04:57]

Adrian Thelen: So like Andy said, my names Adrian Thelen. I'm the Instructional Media Technician. So pretty much what happens is we get, Andy and I get full access to all of the courses in nursing. Once we get that, I kind of go through, check to see who has copied over their courses already or who's put materials in their courses in D2L, and I go through and I use the D2L inventory tool to kind of check off in a spreadsheet how many PF's, how many Word Documents and videos.

Adrian Thelen: And then I'll go through each individual course you know, module or module, and click all the links and make sure all of the power points, if they're narrated that they have captions. If they don't have captions, we'll convert them to videos or however we need to do that to get them into media space and then send them over to Rev, and then those get captioned. Adding alt text into all of the images or charts or whatever may in there course and, I feel like that's... Yeah, we're kind of making them go away from using PDF's. They're a little bit more difficult to make accessible so we're going more towards Word Docs, but once I've completed every course I'll send them an email telling them what needs to be fixed, how I can help. If they want to set up a meeting and then we'll meet and discuss how we can make their course completely accessible for the students.

Andy Greger: So I think just by bombarding them semester after semester, and receiving those emails and like every time, "We have to fix this, we have to fix this. We need to meet," eventually it's starting to make them really think about every time, creating it accessible from the beginning so we don't have to reach out to them after that.

Andy Greger: Like, 99 percent of our faculty, we've created a captioning process or a voice over power point process to where it's step by step instructions to; basically, for the basic voice over presentation, open up power point, do recordings slide by slide, and then put it in D2L and notify us when it's there. So we will go in, convert it into a video or save it as an MP4, and send it off to Rev and get it captioned. Rev, and then get it captioned. So on our media space account we have a department ID, so all the College of Nursing videos are under one department ID. So we keep the content at the College of Nursing and it helps us know what we have as far as accessibility.

Andy Greger: We also play a really large role in visa's for students for their testing. Anytime they need captioning in class, if they have any hearing impairment and need those kind of accommodation, and testing. So up in the student media center upstairs we have cameras set up so we can remote proctor students who need extra time, and we work with them to make sure their instructors are notified and that they're keeping their instructors notified throughout their entire program of where they're testing, how much time it takes to test. Sometimes they do group exams after the test, so then we have to work with them to make sure like, okay, you need to start a half an hour early, and so we really try to accommodate as much as we can with those students.

Andy Greger: During orientation we talk about how technology and data content is an ongoing process and how content is always being created, so please reach out to us if you see the contents not accessible and we will work with you throughout the entire program, and we'll put focus on your courses if we know there are student specific courses that need it. We'll jump on that one a lot quicker and stay up on the instructors to make sure every piece of content is accessible.

Andy Greger: Any questions on that process, or no? Yeah?

Speaker 5: Can you tell us a bit more about your alt text process? Are you writing the alt text? Are you turning to the faculty to do it? In osteopathic medicine we've sort of, informed the faculty that they need to be thinking about it, but we've sort of put that rhino in the back room and we're saving it for year four and a half or five of the five year plan.

Andy Greger: For the most part, if we know the content enough, like we are not nurses. We don't know exactly every time what they're trying to portray in those images, so if we feel comfortable, Adrian feels comfortable putting in what's in the image, she will do that. But if there's question then we would reach out to the faculty or ask them to maybe put it into a different type of format that maybe a screen reader could capture it. So if it's a table, if we can get it in a cell type format or you know, a format that's legible by the screen reader.

Speaker 6: Regarding the LMS, you guys use the D2L. Do you use anything else?

Andy Greger: We mainly use D2L. All our courses are in D2L. There's nothing outside; no course that doesn't have a D2L component. We do have third party program like ATI, which is a lot of resources and content that the students can access for their [inaudible 00:10:19], which is like the boards for nursing. So there's a lot of content on that website. So in those cases we work with the third party vendors to make sure that all of that is accessible. That's another one of our roles, is working with the third party vendors to make sure that things are accessible, or at least that there's another option for students who need accessibility.

Speaker 7: This is going to sound like kind of a crazy question, you guys are making content accessible, you're putting in D2L. D2L is totally accessible, right?

Andy Greger: Well, no. No. [crosstalk 00:10:50]

Speaker 7: Well, meeting our standards.

Andy Greger: There's definitely a lot of levels in that question. But I'd say if we link it, link outside of D2L then we need to make sure the third party vendor meets accessibility standards. And then anything that get put into D2L, like if their putting images of a table and all that, that's what we're reviewing.

Speaker 7: So this questions for Adrian, how many people on campus are like you? Your teaching type, I know we have one in our office like, I just sent her an email I was like, "Hey, I found another one like you." [crosstalk 00:11:28] I just don't know if you guys have a groove, I just don't know how to quantify it.

Andy Greger: That's a great - that's actually something we've been trying; cause sometimes we get stuck in our silo here, you know? We're on the outside of campus, we don't get a lot of chance to get out cause we're supporting everything here. You know, instructors are always popping by our doors because they know that we're here.

Andy Greger: So, there's things that central could probably help with, like central IT, but since we're here and we're techy people like, if it's plugged into the wall they come and ask us questions. So we have trouble sometimes getting out in the larger community to see what resources are out there and see what other people are doing the same things that we're doing.

Andy Greger: So I think we just joined like the ID, there's a Team, Microsoft Teams that kind of, some people are on and maybe some of you are on, but I'm not familiar with it at all, I just happen to be in a meeting and people said that, "Oh, there's this,"; You know about that, right? You might be able to speak. Do you want to speak on to this at all?

Nick Noel: How many people there are?

Andy Greger: Or just, yeah. And maybe how to get in contact?

Nick Noel: Yeah. Hi everyone, I'm Nick Noel, instructional designer. I wasn't planning on speaking, but yeah. So centrally in IT we have a few instructional designers. Some are dedicated to kind of all colleges, kind of whoever comes in, we meet up with them, that's my role, and then a few others are kind of situated within either, within the medical colleges for instance. I think at this point there's two that are, one's in [inaudible 00:13:02] on is [inaudible 00:13:04] of human medicine. And then there's also several instructional designers who are at the hub, up for innovation and learning technology, so contacting them would be through their website. Contacting us would be like a service request. In terms of when you should contact who, probably if you're looking to do course level, course design, course reviews, that'd be IT stuff. If you're looking for technology training, it'd be an IT job. If you want to design a whole program or if you want to do something completely radical or weird or different, that'd be contacting the hub.

Nick Noel: Then there's several other places that, so Road and Cal and [inaudible 00:13:41] have one or two instructional designers. So, there's a group of us around that do kind of like, teaching technology, online stuff.

Andy Greger: All right, thank you. Yeah, there's one other thing to mention, it is difficult for us to get out sometimes, and we don't know everybody who's doing other things I can't miss, but if anybody is interested in just sharing practices or talking about that, like we are totally open to that, and we're trying to get more out in the MSU community and try to get in touch with people who are doing jobs similar to ours. So absolutely willing to connect.

Speaker 9: So my question is how do you help shift the culture in the nursing area?

Andy Greger: How do we help shift the culture in the nursing area. Yeah.

Speaker 9: [crosstalk 00:14:28] How have you been doing that?

Andy Greger: Well from the beginning, it was before the five year plan, but when I first started, there was another instructional designer in place. They were going to have the faculty all caption their own videos, and that did not go well. It didn't happen and it did not go well. So, we've talked at like faculty meetings about, we understand that expectation is not going to happen, but this is what we are going to do for you, but this is why accessibility's important.

Andy Greger: Cause in nursing too it's very difficult, cause we've run into the question, nurses, you can't have nurses with certain disabilities go through, [inaudible 00:15:18]. And there is some truth to that, but continuing education and hearing impairments? We've had students with hearing impairments who need this accessible content, so we've just really had to have those kind of power points when those come up. Because when I first started and they were talking about captioning and I heard those arguments, so over time we kind of, we've listened and then we have come up with our real like, counterpoints, so when that comes up it's not an argument, it's just like, "Oh, as a matter of fact these students are gaining a lot from having these things captioned and having everything accessible cause people learn differently."

Andy Greger: We have hidden disabilities that we don't see in our students, so we try to stress those things and I think that's made a difference instead of just saying, "You're going to do this and this." So taking the way of captioning alone was enough to make them happy, to say, "We're going to pay for that. The college pays for all the captioning." So our department, they pay for that out of our budget and we say, "Hey, we're going to do that for you. All you have to do is tell us when you put it together, caption it with videos that need captioning, and we'll do it for you."

Andy Greger: So I think that's a big win on some parts. And then when we do have a student who has an accessibility needs, we set up meetings with all their instructors the semester before they are going to be going through their courses, so then we all sit down and we're just very open about it and we tell them, as long as the student's willing to meet with us, so we ask them, "Would you like to sit down with your instructors to have this discussion before you go through the class?" Typically the answer has been yes, and then we have that conversation about what type of captioning is better for you? Do you prefer transcripts? Cause in one case we actually, they preferred transcripts, but we didn't plan on doing transcripts. We planned on just captioning the videos. So in this case the student liked transcripts, so we just had transcripts made. Which is actually cheaper than doing the video captioning.

Andy Greger: So having those discussions up front actually saved us money and was better quality for that specific student. I feel like that was five minutes, right?

James Bender: So thank you. I appreciate that. That was great. You guys don't have to leave, so stick around and you're going to participate in our activity we're going to have.

James Bender: So we do not have any updates from RCPD. I mean from me personally, we got more visa's than we've ever gotten before that. We got 29 for the summer, which just if you're in an instructional area and some of the things you need to be aware of and I think, I was trying to figure out why. Why do we have so many? We have like 11 students, however they're taking more credits now. So one student maybe taking four or five classes where in the past they may have only taken one class. And so that's something that you want to start looking at, strategically how's that going to impact your courses.

James Bender: Everybody know what I'm talking about here now where you can do this locks credit? You sign up for 12, but you can take up to 20?

Speaker 10: 18.

James Bender: 18 credits, okay. I'm going to have you talk, cause you know a lot. You raised your hand about the hub and everything, so.

Speaker 10: So I used to work on the provost office communications team, and it was not a popular move, but the whole university moved to a flat rate tuition. Don't call it block tuition, flat rate tuition. Oh, there was a lot of discussion. Advisors were the most important audience, because they are interfacing directly with students. Basically this year, it is approximately the 15 credit tuition rate. It will differ on the year, so we're not even telling students that, though they have it in their heads. Cause the go green, go 15 campaign came out before that, trying to get students out in four years.

Speaker 10: So flat rate means you can take anywhere between 12 and 18 credits for one rate, and it depends on you know, if you're in state, out of state, international, there are different levels on that. And then it's prorated if you take less or more.

James Bender: What was the reason for getting them out in four years?

Speaker 10: Okay, so the reason for getting them out in four years is the long it takes you to matriculate, to get through your degree, the less likely you are to actually graduate. And your debt, if you're taking out students loans, can be up to 50,000 dollars on average more, the longer you go. Like if you're talking an extra year or two to get your undergraduate degree. So they also find that even across different demographics, that students who take higher course loads in general do better. They're focusing more and having to learn time management skills, that kind of thing. It was surprising to us, cause there's a lot of different economic backgrounds that our students come from, but that ran across all demographics.

James Bender: Thank you. Thank you. So our next area is going to talk about the spring conferences. The IT next conference, and Brooke sent me an email about a couple of things and we'll put that in the minutes, some things she was going to talk a little bit about them, but I'd like to hear from you, what you observed.

James Bender: The one thing that we had from our office is, we end up in IT, we have changed our name. Does anyone know our new name? Digital X. Okay, so what that means, John is on our team now, so what that means for us, is we have a bigger team, much bigger team now. So it's just accessibility in content, which was the four of us, myself, Jim, Melissa and Brooke. Yes, thank you and Brooke. That was it.

James Bender: Now we have I want to say, six or seven. I don't even know how many folks. We have a meeting, we've had a couple meetings and different people participate, so I can't keep up with who they are and where they're from. But once in a while we'll see them, so. I think it's between six and seven.

James Bender: And the big part of our portfolio is now that we have these new folks, Nick is a big part of our team and they have instructional designers, so I know we have four instructional designers and a couple, one position for sure that they're posting for. So if you know anybody that's interested in instructional design, or yourself and you've done that, that's a job that's, I want to say it's posted now. Is it posted now? So it's posted now. We're looking to bring another instructional designer on.

James Bender: And they're still trying to figure out what the portfolio looks like. I mean one of the things that we look at is quality matters. Are you guys familiar with quality matters? Nobody here's heard of that? It's a standardization that an organization created for online courses, so that it kind of gives some online; and they do have an accessibility standard. So, we're kind of getting trained on it. We're looking at it from an organization who's I think it's been around maybe 10, 15 years now. I'm not sure the history of it. But it's just a nationally recognized organization and they'll go through and do [inaudible 00:22:20]. There's a fee for it, but we're kind of doing our own standardization. When I say us, meaning our new team, Digital X. And I won't talk too much about it, and Nick, I wont to ask you to come up and talk yet, cause I know you're still trying to work it out.

James Bender: So anyway, that was the big takeaway from that. Anything anybody want to talk about that they think might be good for the group that you learned from the conference?

Speaker 11: It wasn't that conference, but I went to Agile and Beyond last week, and [crosstalk 00:22:49] was there.

James Bender: Okay.

Speaker 11: Day Q was there. And they demoed the Ax Tool, which is a free accessibility checker, and they were claiming that it could catch up to 50 percent of accessibility issues. So I've tried it on a few things, and it actually does a pretty good job, but not necessarily better than Lighthouse, or Web Aim or any of the others that you can use, but it is another tool for the arsenal.

James Bender: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else? All right.

James Bender: So now I'm going to give the mic to Jim, to talk about his portion.

Jim White: Hello all. If you look at the bottom part of this in part from WAPL number 13, October 14th 2016. Anybody remember back that far? We've talked before, no. Well, some people don't. Maybe a couple people do. So obviously we've had some web accessibility working group stuff going on before. We're considering getting something started again. So this is actually the text directly from that previous working group. This project will develop and execute a plan to address MSU compliance with web content accessibility et cetera, the double A level for websites, instructional content et cetera.

Jim White: And we've actually got a long way on that, because you've seen developments with the five year plan et cetera. What the plan will include, and this slide is also from that previous 2016. Development, publishing, the delivery of training material, videos and guides, and there's where we fell down a little shorter than we'd like to be. We've got some training materials out there. We haven't got the videos, yet. And guidelines, et cetera we're trying to work on.

Jim White: And that's where we need some help, and you know Andy was mentioning that he's got some training materials written up and I know that Jerry in HR has gotten some [inaudible 00:24:54] materials written up and by golly, if we could get some help with some of those, rather than us having to try to do it all ourselves in the central office, that would help a lot and that's why we're considering getting this web accessibility working group back going again.

Jim White: We know there are lots of needs out there, lots of questions in people's minds about well, "How do I, exactly what does contrast mean? And exactly what does getting your heading levels set correctly mean?" So there's lot of debates about those kinds of things, and it's not always clear when you look at the HTML specifications or the [inaudible 00:25:36] specifications. So we'd like to get some kind of feedback and assistance on looking through those kinds of things.

Jim White: The question marks you see around that co working drop in, we don't know what we want this kind of working group thing to look at, whether it's a group of people getting together simultaneously every now and then or whether it's one or two people occasionally working together. Can't just [inaudible 00:26:00] on how the time fits, et cetera. Those kind of things.

Jim White: So we've had a meeting scheduled. Nobody's been invited to it except our internal team., We will announce it with this WAPL meeting and the slides et cetera that go out from it, and you're expected to go ahead and invite yourself if you're interested in any kind of participation in that. So anyway, July 9th. Yes, it's in the middle of summer. Some people will be away but, some people will still be here too, so. Take your pick, and I'll turn the mic back over to [inaudible 00:26:42].

James Bender: Thank you Jim, thank you. So I passed out note cards, and I know in the past some folks have came through and said, "Yes, I want to be a part of the work group," and I'm not sure where that list it at. Nate told me there's been a couple of individuals, so if you can, if you're interested, I want you to write down your name, contact information on the note card and then these questions. Cause that's what Nate to hear. He doesn't want to go through, again, we're trying to identify our portfolio, where we are.

James Bender: But is there interest? Is anyone really interested in being a part of the work group? That's what he told me to say, emphasis that. Is there interest? So if there is, please fill out the note card, and then how you can help. So that's the big part. Again if you already have resources out there that you've done and you've had somebody look at them and you feel like you're ready, you can bring it to the working group, cause we want to make sure that we're getting as well rounded opinions as we can, right? So we can create stuff all day, but it's not going to work for everyone. So I think having that committee and that working group, it just helps add more to the process.

James Bender: And Jim will be chairing that, if I'm not mistaken.

Jim White: [inaudible 00:27:53]

James Bender: Probably. So you'll get to work with Jim. Yes. That's all I'm going to say about that.

James Bender: All right, any questions for me? So please fill out the note card if you're interested. And this is the last portion that we have, this year three self-evaluation. Has anyone in here submitted their year three? Yeah, when I last checked it was zero. I was like, "Aw man. It's just like in college, right?" Get that last day. So one's submitted yet. So this is a gif file, so, I know people are like, where's the captions? No captions required.

James Bender: You're going to go into, I'm going to let this play to the web access, and self-annual review, you're going to scroll down list two. And you're going to download the application, and I'll go over this again, slower. I'll play it again. [inaudible 00:28:42] form. The key thing about this is when you submit it, make sure you talk to folks on your team, people in your office, so that you can get as much feedback as possible.

James Bender: So let me play that a couple times, just a little gif file. If you have your laptop or you have a computer you can go through and follow along with the presentation. It won't let me put it in full play here, so. So you're going to actually go to [inaudible 00:29:08] fill it out. Again, my recommendation is to get folks from your area, everybody in here is so unique in how they fill out their plan, so if you've been doing it the last two years a certain way and it's been working for you, fine. If you think, Nate told me, he said, "Make sure you emphasis to tell folks get feedback from other people in their areas." So it could be a collaboration. Everybody's different. I mean, we have some units that have seven, eight folks that are part of it. Some that's only one person's responsible for the whole thing. So it's very difficult for me to tell you the best course of action for you. You have to know what your unit is, but again, having some feedback from other folks from your team, would be very beneficial.

James Bender: Don't forget the submission date. Anybody here know when the submission date is? [crosstalk 00:29:57] June 30th. Alright, thank you Jim. So good. Don't forget the submission date. Any questions? I think this last slide, I'm going to have questions. Yep that was it, last slide. Any questions about that? Submissions? I know Nate talked a lot about it the last, the process that we use, and I think we're going to use the same process with some tweaks, and we did make some changes to the questions. We got rid of all the; what kind of questions did we get rid of?

Jim White: We got rid of the question about training and how much your faculty and staff have gotten. So you don't have to try and answer that one. I was kind of disappointed to see it go, but, oh well.

James Bender: We also refer to it as the difficult question. That's why I gave Jim the mic. We were adamant about the difficult question. So any questions for us at this time, about that? Year three submission? The date, June 30th, get feedback from peers. You should be good to go. All right, that's it. Anybody else have anything for the group? Nope. Well enjoy the rest of this wonderful day. Thank you.