October 2019 WAPL Transcript

Nick Noel: Hello, and welcome to the WAPL cast four, October 4th, 2019. My name is Nick Noel and I'm an instructional designer with the Digital Experience Team. First, Nate Evans and Brooke Knapp will go over the EIT purchasing process and readiness worksheet. We've got some updates from the RCPD, from Leslie Johnson, and James Bender will be going over the year three accessibility self-review updates. Make sure to listen to the whole episode if you weren't able to join us in October. Thanks and we'll see you back here next time.

Nate Evans: My name's Nate Evans. I am a senior manager of the Digital Experience Team. Here's our agenda for today. We want to talk a little bit since we are here at MSU Purchasing. This is the first WAPL meeting we've ever had at purchasing before, and I set this up with Kristen Good who's no longer here. She's not with us here today. But we did want to spend a little bit of time since we're in the space to talk about these reminders, about electronic information technology, accessibility purchasing and talk a little bit about the readiness worksheet that Kristen was instrumental in putting together. This is just for the recording, so I'll be louder.

Then we have a few updates from the RCPD, not Leslie. Angela is with us today, which is super exciting. We want to talk a little bit about the year three digital accessibility self-reviews. We have a few more updates. The deadline has gone by, our self-imposed deadline. We want to talk about some of the metrics around that and some of the things that we noticed, now that we've gotten through a bulk of those reviews. We'll talk a little bit about the web accessibility working group. Just an update on that, where we're at next steps.

After that, we'll talk about Deque University. We have some updates related to that and some exciting things to share, which is really cool. We want to talk briefly about what is a service level agreement with digital X and what does it actually look like. Brooke's going to talk a little bit about that and unpack that in a little bit more detail. Then we want to talk a little bit about legal updates in the accessibility space, mostly from a consumer perspective.

What is there for you is to start to take a look at; who are the people to read, who are the people that pay attention to, what are the things to look for? So that way you can understand where is the landscape and how does that potentially impact us going forward. Does that all sound good? Oh man! Everybody's sleepy. We need more coffee or something?

Jim: I'm great, Nate.

Nate Evans: All Right. That's it, Jim. Thank you. Okay, so that was great. That was bonus points, for sure. All right, so let's talk about the EIT purchasing process. This is kind of very high level. Think of this from the 10,000 foot view just as a reminder. Number one, anytime that you're going to purchase an electronic good or service, we recommend that you go to MSU Purchasing. You don't have to physically go to this building, but we wanted to have this meeting here so you could kind of see, here's where purchasing resides on campus. They have really great parking, we noticed, which is awesome.

You could come here and talk to them. The folks that we primarily work with are Susan House and Janice Croswhite, especially as it relates to digital goods and services. If you make a request related to an EIT product, that's probably one of the two folks who are going to talk to. One of the first things that, they're going to ask you to do is complete what's called an EIT readiness worksheet. This asks you a few questions about your product.

What it's going to do, is get some baseline information that's going to be helpful to us in terms of the accessibility review. But it's also going to be helpful to the information security team, that's going to be helpful to understand any risks related to PCI compliance, HIPAA, FERPA, things like that. They may have some follow-ups for you depending on the risk and depending on how many students you're planning on using the tool, or how many staff members are planning on using the tool.

But that gives us the first bit of information. That information, once they have that worksheet, that gets sent out to all the teams that are involved. That kicks off the official review. We were just talking about this in a meeting a few minutes ago. That starts to get us information about, "Okay, is this five students that are working on a research project, or is this a thousand students that need to be using this for an undergraduate 101 course?" Right.

That helps us triage and take a priority-based approach to it, at least as it relates to accessibility. Those teams review the requests to understand the scope of purchase. That email goes out from the purchasing agent, they facilitate that process. Then we start to have conversations around, "Okay, we don't think any further accessibility review is needed at this time." Or we may say, "Actually, this is potentially higher risk."

One of the things that we talked about last month is the idea of digital integrations, being a little bit higher risk, because of a case that's going on or recently finished up. These are things that we're getting a little bit more scrutiny right now because they have more interest in the accessibility context. What's interesting about them is; publishers are going directly to faculty members rather than working through our process, which makes it really tricky.

These are the types of things. Even, if this is a $0 purchase ... Wow! That's a train. I don't hear the train very often. Even if it's not what you would consider a purchase, right, like you're laying down money, but it's something that a student still has to pay for but maybe the college is not paying for it. That's still a purchase, right? Somebody is purchasing a product and when it's our students especially that are purchasing the product, we want to make sure we're doing everything we can to protect them, related to identity, security.

Using a credit card if they need to purchase things like textbooks, things like that. These integrations are particularly something we want to pay attention to right now. Then the review kicks off. We get response from those teams. Then our purchasing agent acts as a liaison to you as the buyer. One of the things that you can expect from that process is EIT acknowledgement form.

When we're asking our vendors to meet our accessibility guidelines, we're also asking you to take responsibility for making sure that you do everything you can to help accommodate a student when a product doesn't meet those guidelines. That acknowledgement oftentimes plays a little hot potato and it goes, "Who's going to sign the form?" But that's actually a really good process to go through.

Because it helps you create some conversations within your college and that you can even have with administrators to say, "Here's why we're doing this. Here's how we're trying to protect our students." With that, I want to turn it over to Brooke to talk a little bit about the-

Brooke Knapp: [inaudible 00:07:02] EIT process. From what I've experienced so far is, in our case, we are working with Taylor Communications or one of our units was working to Taylor Communications. It seems like they only have one EIT on file, but they're doing two different applications. One is for a students and one is for donors. I don't think, in my mind, it should be two EITs. Because, even though it's within the same department, it's different units.

Nate Evans: In terms of [crosstalk 00:07:34]. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 5: [inaudible 00:07:38]. One of the patterns we're now noticing too, when we get this EIT readiness worksheet, right? A lot of how I assess the risk is off those numbers that we're getting. You're asked how many faculty are going to be effected students, if it's public or whatnot. Then I assess the risk like that. A lot of the times when I'm getting purchases between something that's going to affect 10,000 people versus 300, we can't touch everything.

But in the same sense, it's still really important that we are accommodating for those 300 students and stuff, and setting up those equally effective alternate access plans to have those ready. But a pattern that we're noticing is that, oftentimes, I'll assess the risk based off of one number that's given and I have a department or a faculty member that signs that EIT. Then all of a sudden, they start talking to other faculty members about something that they've used, and those faculty members start using those products, but it doesn't come back to me to reevaluate the risk.

That's a really good example of that is, I may have signed off, maybe for one unit. I'm saying, "Okay, this is 20 people and now this other unit has piggybacked off of this unit's licensing and such. I don't know that the risk has increased by maybe a 1000 users, 2000 users." Especially if it's used to be one faculty member in one college, and now the entire college is using it.

We do don't want to try to keep in mind, I tried look for those patterns myself when I'm getting purchasing requests. But as liaisons in your college, two of you ... Especially if you notice there's a lot of talk about this one system being used and stuff, to kind of maybe if you can bring it through our office to say, "Hey, I'm noticing maybe 20 of our faculty members are using this. Have you evaluated on this scale?"

Most often, we haven't. That's a really good point, is that we ... And I've been trying to add extra language to it in the purchasing unit. If you know that other people are using it or if that number is going to be increasing over the year, to make sure to come back to purchasing and come back to us, to make sure we're still on the same page about what the risk is. Another big thing, like I said, is the equally effective alternate access plan.

When I establish risks for whether or not we should be involved in a purchase, we normally ask for three things like Nate kind of touched on. Which is, that the vendor signs our EIT accessibility terms. Then the second thing that we ask is that; we either do an evaluation, we do not do an evaluation that's based off of numbers and what we are prioritizing. If we choose not to do an evaluation, we ask them to set up an EEAAP, which is an equally effective alternate access plan.

Normally when I say that, I loop in the liaisons if there's a specific one for that college, to see if there's questions on it. I myself also, am open to questions on it. I always leave myself as a resource as well. But sometimes, I'm seeing, as in, I say these things, we also ask them to establish a point of contact, reach out to our office or ICPD if an accommodation is needed or is requested.

But a lot of the times, I think people are taking that as like, "Oh, I don't need a review. It's okay. All these things, I'll just sign it." They're not really putting that EEAAP in place. That's really important. If you noticing as a liaison, if I get questions, I love questions because that means they're actually considering it. Try and keep an eye out too, especially if I'm including you in those emails to say, "Okay, did we actually establish it, did we talked about it?"

I myself, try to keep an eye on it, but just something to notice because those are really important when there's an accommodation. That comes in and there are question, and I'm like, "Okay, what's your EEAAP?" They're like, "Oh, I don't know," and I'm like, "Well, you signed off on these terms that asks you to establish that." We're trying to get into a better cycle of making sure that we're actually completing that work.

Brooke Knapp: All they had to do is sign off in the EEAAP, they don't have to provide it back [inaudible 00:11:17], our administrative law and they sign the EIT. The next thing I know, we hire a person who was, I think she was blind or partially blind. Then we had the scramble at the last minute to try to accommodate her. We didn't know anything about it, and we're the liaison.

Speaker 5: Right. The EIT accessibility terms, that's what we have them sign in. In there it saying, "Okay, can you please set up an EEAAP and that should include these items." Normally what we assume is that, the person who signed those EIT terms is the point of contact for that purchase. So that, when I first get an accommodation request, I'm going to reach out first to that person that's on that EIT form, and hoping that they know where that EEAAP is.

Normally, I always advise them, "You should keep these together. If you're signing these terms, you should have another document included with that." Yeah, it is difficult. That's why it's important, like I said, you get an accommodation and you're like, "Oh, who is supposed to handle that?" Oftentimes, it's someone didn't set it up and so that's why you can't find it. That's at least what I've encountered a lot lately.

I'm trying to been pushing that a lot more. But that's why they're on it, were also saying, "If you're signing those terms, you're owning the risk, right? It's yourself, if you're signing that document. Our office and RCPD are here obviously to help, but that risk is on you and we can help you walk through that. But we also assume that you're going to do your part in that as well."

Speaker 6: Part of the reason me and [inaudible 00:12:52] having, accessibility things in purchasing was so that we'd be able to trust anything new coming in goods and services, technology-wise are accessible. If we're not able to put the same amount of attention to each thing coming in, we have essentially different tiers of how things are being treated. How has that been communicated out? I'm talking to someone and they're looking at you using some piece of software that's been purchased, I have to assume it's good.

But if that's not the case, shouldn't we have some sort of central lists that I can look up or that anyone here can look up and say, "Oh, this is what was done. We know in this case, it just said it was useful. It was only signed off on for this one usage, for this limited number of people so it might need more attention now. Or it's already been determined to work for everyone and be accessible so we're planning to use this."

Without that, there's really no way to know. It functionally doesn't work to have everyone have to contact you every time of every piece of software that comes through. Is there some sort of repository we can access, can something be set up so that we know what's going on and also so we can verify whether something's even gone through the purchasing process?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a good question. That's funny timing because we just had a conversation about that about digital integrations this morning, and trying to make sure we have ... Working towards maybe an accessibility inventory tools so that we can track those statuses of where we are, what's the evaluation, but more on a bigger scale to security and such.

That is in the conversation, there's a couple of other colleges that have done something similar to that idea. We're hoping maybe we could do something in the future to model that, so we are talking about that. That would make my life and everyone's life a lot easier.

Speaker 7: Mine, actually question is kind of a combination of theirs. Well first, that link, I tried, it didn't work. It was usd@msu.edu/purchasing/forums is where I found it, for anyone who's trying that at the same time.

Speaker 5: Well, that's important. Thank you.

Speaker 7: Because I clicked it and it didn't take me. It didn't, okay well, maybe it's my computer. But anyway, over the summer, I had a weird thing happened, where we were hiring a student for ... I'm going to try being as ambiguous as possible. I don't want to [inaudible 00:14:58]. But we were hiring a student for a medical position and he was way overqualified, but very hard of seeing. One of his eyes is completely blind. The other, he can see, he just needs help.

We were trying to figure out what to put, what kind of screen reader or whatever and that wasn't really a hard conversation. The next part was somewhat, the person we had to go through the hire said something that was alarming about, "Why don't we just hire someone else instead of put the resources towards this?" I wanted to bring that up in front of everyone who had the same reaction and like, "What do I do?"

Speaker 5: I would say that's a discriminatory thing, right?

Speaker 7: Obviously, but I-

Speaker 5: I would bring that back to HR, is an HR issue. If you-

Speaker 7: She [inaudible 00:15:48] person.

Speaker 5: I would find a new HR person. [crosstalk 00:15:55]. I haven't, yeah.

Speaker 8: I'm from the resource center for persons with disabilities, and I work with students and employees who are blind or visually impaired. So perfect person to talk about this. Maybe some education for the department as a whole, not singling out that person. But just talking about appropriate ways to not answer that way or have solutions that include not having that employee. Because there's lots of very reasonable ways to accommodate people who are blind or visually impaired.

Our boss is blind or visually impaired, he has been our boss for over 20 years and done fantastic things with our department. Sometimes, it's just some education.

Speaker 7: That's what I was thinking, especially since this was the time where we weren't having our meetings.

Speaker 8: Call us, we're happy to-

Speaker 7: Well, we hired him, [inaudible 00:16:54].

Speaker 8: I would encourage this employee to reach out to me because we can, I specifically work with employees and so I could help provide accommodations. Not that we're here to force people to do things, but we're here to force her to do what's appropriate.

Speaker 7: [inaudible 00:17:14].

Speaker 8: Okay. We're here to make sure that whoever is employed as a student or a faculty, or staff member, that they're receiving appropriate accommodations so that they have the access to do their job appropriately.

Speaker 7: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 5: Also reframing it to, I'd probably say, if it were me, I'd be like, "Well, actually this is a great opportunity for us to build a partnership with RCPD and the Digital Experience Team. We haven't worked with them before, so this is actually really good for our team to build relationships." Framing it up that way kind of sounds a little nicer, but also or this door and be like, "No, let's not go there."

Brooke Knapp: I've got to add to what you were saying because when we had that same situation, I got it from multiple people. Why would you ever do something like that? Absolutely person's not qualified, they're qualified. This go, "Little disability here, we just need to accommodate." That was appalled and of course it was like, "The administrator is above me."

Speaker 5: I think that's also like a bigger cultural thing, right? It's like also having a culture shift at Michigan State to have those conversations. To be like, "Oh, why do you feel that way, why do you feel like they're not qualified."

Pointing out reasons why they might not, they're probably wrong saying, "They are qualified for this job, if you look at the resume, if you're looking outside of their disability, they are absolutely qualified to hold this job. We have multiple resources on campus that can help accommodate the student if we need them. But I definitely think that we're able to work with them as well." Also, our office would love to hire students with disabilities.

Speaker 9: I'll say, it's definitely outside the scope of this group, this issue. But this sounds like if it's being heard from multiple places. This is something that needs to come from the top of the institution as deans, directors and chairs or board community memo, because this is a major legal risk of the university. If this gets through to anyone and they decide to pick that up, that individual who's being potentially being hired, will sue and win overnight for millions of dollars.

That apparently, it's an issue across campus and of course, there's the ethical side of it. But even just from that legal side, if that's all that is cared about, that's a major problem. It sounds like this needs to be communicated up to the top that there is a significant legal HR problem going on with this university, and really takes initially at least, is a memo from whether it's president, provost, something at that level.

Saying, "Hey, this is how this works. If someone has a disability that is not considered part of a qualification or ability levels, not considered qualification for a job and you do have to accommodate and here's who to talk to." Again, I think it's outside, there's nothing this group can do, but someone needs to get that to those right people to get that out. Maybe RCPD would make sense to take the lead on that, but it sounds like that needs to happen.

Angela Sebald: [inaudible 00:20:08] talk a lot today, apparently more than I had planned on. Sure. My name is Angela Sebald, and I work for the resource center for persons with disabilities. Because of the turnover in administration recently, we have talked in our department about inviting both the president, the new provost. We also have a new APUE director as well, and we've got to know Mark Largent pretty well.

But inviting them to our office, sharing what we do and then talking about the challenges that we are experiencing with faculty, with students, with staff members. Helping them to understand those pieces and letting them know that the culture here is not going in the direction in which it should, and asking them for their help in that process. That is something we've been talking about. I could tell you a thousand stories, that sound very similar to what the two of you just shared.

It's really unfortunate. Typically, faculty members may start out that way, especially for my students who are blind. When I tell them, "You're going to have a finance major who's totally blind." They look at me like, "How is that even possible," and he's about to graduate in spring. Now, the faculty is so excited because this student completed this rigorous coursework in Stellar Fashion and is going to be a great Spartan success story, plus he's blind.

To me, now you have this great story to brag about and share about how you went, I shouldn't say above and beyond because it's not above and beyond. You should be doing this anyway. But what a great story to share. Anyway, I could go on and on.

Speaker 5:

I also like to mention, even though this might be out of the scope of this space, it's really good to bring up those stories. Because you're only helping RCPD and [Aislinn Sapp 00:22:06], our ADA coordinator assess what is the culture of our campus? Sometimes, those stories might not get to them and they might not know that those conversations are happening. Like she said, that just gives us an opportunity to bring forward those conversations too.

If you're having those conversations or you're coming in contact with it, it's not necessarily a bad idea to mention it to RCPD or our office to coordinate with Aislinn Sapp too, because that's really important.

Speaker 9: [inaudible 00:22:37].

Speaker 5: Yeah. I was going to say, I'm sure she'd love to know that that is going on.

Angela Sebald: Well, this [inaudible 00:22:45] perfectly.

Speaker 5: Okay. Cool.

Angela Sebald: If you're going to stand-

Speaker 5: Oh yeah, no. Absolutely.

Angela Sebald: I believe we've shared this information before, but we wanted to share it with you again before we talk about an issue that we're having in our department that we think you might be able to help with. We wanted to talk a little bit about the students that are registered with our office. If you take a look at this pie chart, 35% of students registered with our office are students with learning disabilities. 33% are psychiatric or mental health conditions, and 15% are chronic health conditions.

If you think about that percentage of students, the majority of students that registered with our office are those what we call invisible disabilities. If they walked in the room, you would not know there's someone with a disability unless they share their accommodation sheet with you, which we call [Visa 00:23:45], stating that they need these accommodations. That's the majority of our students and many of those students don't want to share.

They're nervous to share. They feel like they're telling you a secret about themselves that nobody knows unless they share. It's a really difficult time for a lot of our students. My students who are blind or visually impaired, they'll walk in with their cane, they're used to sharing this information, they're ready to share that information with you typically and they want to tell you all about their needs.

I just wanted to share that because it's typically, when you think about students with disabilities, many people automatically think of someone in a wheelchair or someone who uses a cane and that type of thing. We have over 2000 students registered with our office. It varies between 2,000 and 2,500. These numbers are a little bit older, I tried to find if we had ones recent, but we're not quite updated with that yet from last year.

But these, it's still right along these same lines. Okay, thank you. I also wanted to share their areas of study with you, just to where they're headed. Social science, obviously natural science plays larger communication, comm arts and those. So just so that you can see where maybe your college would fit into this. We'll just stand there for ... I'll just let you take a look at this for a moment and this was last spring, so not that long ago.

Then go ahead. I can share these with you as well. This is an also interesting pie chart as well. Many freshmen who come to us don't want to register. If you think about students with invisible disabilities and they've had accommodations in high school but they want to see if they can do it on their own, is one reason. They wanted to see if they can make that happen. They don't want to tell people, so they just want to see if, "Is this something that I can handle on my own?"

Typically, freshmen are not coming to us right away, which we wish they would and we encourage them to do so. But what you notice is; seniors are the largest of the population. Because usually by senior year, students are saying, "I wish I would have used my accommodations when I came freshman year. I could've had such a better GPA or I maybe would've learned some strategies, or about some resources that you had."

Also, a lot of ... So one of our highest populations is mental health. A lot of those things happen in this environment; so a college environment, high stress, strong competition. Students tend to develop conditions during their time here. That's another reason that these numbers ... But I just find it interesting, 13% of freshman, but 30% of seniors, so just to another interesting stat.

The reason I wanted to share some of these with you ... The problem that we're having is that we have, like I said, over 2000 students registered with our office. Out of those students, we have about 800 that have the accommodation, that they can receive an alternate format for their materials. That's quite a few. Now some of those are braille, some of those are TACTAL, some of those are electronic text. Most of those will be electronic text.

What we're noticing is that; students are coming to us and saying, so they're kind of skipping this purchasing process that we're talking about in this review. I have a student in a class who, he has to do, not the long [inaudible 00:27:38], that was a different one. I just want to share some of the different ones, but he has to do both: Packback into dashboard, Top Hat and D2L to find these materials, four different places.

Now D2L, he doesn't have to pay for, but the other three he does. So that's probably how they get around the purchasing processes. The department's not purchasing those things, the student is and the student is blind. Top Hat, we're getting more familiar with Top Hat and trying to work through. I've actually shared that with both Brooke and Nate, about some of the inaccessibility of that platform.

Packback has been a nightmare. My students are going in there with their screen readers. They are perfectly capable of going through and answering all the questions that they need to, but they can't because their screen reader is not reading it appropriately, so they're not able to complete the material. The professors are saying to me, "Well, this is when it's due and that I shouldn't have to do this for this one student."

"Well, you do because my student can't answer the question. They can't look at a question that their peer asked and make a response to it." There's no equality there. I wasn't even including all the publisher websites that we're dealing with. I've had two students to have to drop Spanish courses because all the homework and tests were on this online platform that said, "Here's the picture, drag on, take the picture to the correct vocabulary word."

Okay. Well, first of all, my student can't see where the picture is or what the picture is of, and they're not going to be able to click and drag this to the [inaudible 00:29:13]. This is a huge problem that we're dealing with. First of all, for all students to have four different platforms to go to, I thought that was the point of D2L. One place to go to find all of your materials.

Anyway, this is a huge issue that our students are facing and that our office is facing, and we're just looking for suggestions, help, thoughts, just some brainstorming on how we can work with faculty to solve these problems. What happens is, our students get in there and then they find out things aren't accessible, and they're already in the class, so now what?

Especially that my students were blind, if we have to adapt materials in any way, it takes time. We start in the spring for the fall semester. Anyway, any thoughts you have, I would love to hear.

Speaker 6: I just had a quick question because I have a more elaborate one later. But I'd asked an individual that brought it up to me to, anyway. Do you consider language an accessibility issue or a barrier in this-

Angela Sebald: What do you mean?

Speaker 6: Over the last few years of having this job, every year we get one particular research or faculty, whatever, who is competent in English but it's usually translated. But their research isn't exactly English but it's science-based, so that's why it doesn't matter. But in the event, I have started painstakingly because a cascade sucks, is putting language bars on every page but the way they have it set up, you have to do it individually, and every single page.

I didn't know if that was something that was thought of at all, because I've had some encounters where they have a really hard time explaining what it is they're trying to explain. I know it's such a not normal issue, but it happens.

Angela Sebald: Do you have thoughts about this thing? I don't know.

Nate Evans: I think, it probably just depends on the medium. Like with the video, you could do subtitles in different languages or something. But yeah, I would probably have to get more specifics to understand.

Angela Sebald: Yeah. I'm sorry. [inaudible 00:31:32].

Speaker 10: That's the other ... right.

Speaker 12: Related to what you were talking about in the different platforms and technology that students are interacting with in their courses. From a liaison perspective, from my perspective, I am almost completely out of that information loop. I am not part of any of the purchasing processes that go along. I have informed our IT person that there is a process that needs to be followed, but they don't follow up with me on those things.

The faculty don't come to me with questions about technology or things along those lines. For me, it's like I don't even know what my department's doing, and I'm also a college liaison. I've heard nothing at my college level about this. This is something for me, it's like, if there was that repository, the database of what is happening then and that is shared with the liaisons.

Then we can follow up with our faculty who have done pre-purchases that are already in the system to try and help with what you're talking about, to make sure that things are getting filtered through with new purchases and whatnot. I'm not even sure how to go back on the purchases that have already happened. That might not be what we're hoping for.

Angela Sebald: Right. See, by the time we get involved, it's because there's a crisis, and a student's two weeks into class and not able to access materials. Yeah, I feel like we're maybe all in the same page then and we're saying, "Somebody has to start talking to us." That's interesting. Okay, thank you.

Speaker 11: Some of the issues that we run into in central IT, is that we don't actually have authority to mandate specific technologies. We can support certain ones and say, "If you pick a different one, you're not going to get the support for it." But because there's a large amount of academic freedom on the part of the faculty to choose the technologies that they want to utilize in their course or using their course, it's not our prerogative to demand that they use a specific one.

That's kind of where the issue of ... Then, the only way to address this issue is; one, it has to be motivated from a college and faculty level and there has to be initial training. This is something we're trying to do with reformatting some of the workshops we do around the idea of, how do you work through and make these decisions? It's not always just, what am I the most comfortable with? It's also, what are my students need?

Long term, what do I have the most support for, what is the institution recommending I use? If I can't find something to meet my needs instead of searching on my own, go and talk to somebody first. We have to be constantly reinforcing that there are people to help. Because, I think a lot Anof the assumption is that there isn't. gela Sebald:

I think that goes back to what Graham was talking about in that cultural, "How can we reach the people who can make those differences?"

Speaker 6: I don't work in a college, I work in administrative unit but I do see the problem that's going on here. A lot of the people, they're just going to rely on the vendor to say, "Well yeah, we're accessible." We're not going to ... Us we're in the WAPL guys are at liaisons in that unit, we're not going to be even involved in this purchase. I don't know, maybe getting more feet on the ground as far as in that unit.

Maybe having the WAPL guys also sign off on it. I'm feeling like, "Why am I saying that, because that's more work for us?" But we're the ones-

Angela Sebald: But maybe less work in the end, I don't know.

Speaker 6: Yes. Less work in the end, and maybe in educating them regarding the process. I don't think you'll be able to get everybody into maybe one bucket, but they don't have the education as far as, or they're not even paying attention. Even when you showed the graph earlier, I was like, "That's for disability? You're right. I was thinking about people in wheelchairs and let's take then," not thinking about the ones that have the visible disabilities.

Angela Sebald: Oh, I just lost my train of thought on that point that I was about to say. Oh, and it may encourage the companies, if we're not purchasing from companies that aren't accessible. If Michigan State isn't purchasing from you, other universities are doing those, not purchasing, maybe it will encourage them to think about accessibility for their software.

Speaker 7: Right. Quick comment. Sorry, I have to get up and leave pretty shortly. This is a great conversation. I don't want to leave, but I have to get to another appointment.

Angela Sebald: Sure.

Speaker 7: But, so I think College of Nursing, I feel like we have a pretty good ... We're set up to do this really well because we have, as a liaison, I'm in the educational technology realm. I'm working with faculty to, they're coming to me for suggestions on what to use, and so we can reach out and go through the purchasing process. I really appreciate this purchasing process. But I think that list of what other people are using, so I unlike the College of Education, you guys use a lot of great online tools.

I went through that online program so I know there's stuff that we could use that nursing that was used in that program. But just a list that tells me that those purchases or those tools went through that process, would be extremely helpful. What you were referring to at the college level, if we have individuals who are there to lead that and to make sure these pieces are accessible.

But one issue that we're running into a nursing right now is that, it's a lot of extra work. It is their job, so I can put, they need to do that. But then we end up with faculty who are so nervous about that, that they're just dumping readings out on D2L and the active learning strategies are just done. It's like, "Here's all the readings, it's all accessible. Do a discussion board, here's a quiz."

It's so painful, but I'm like, "Okay, we need to make this active learning and let's actually get them to create things. So infographics and other things that the students are actually creating, rather than just killing them with PowerPoints and quizzes." It's that balance that we're trying to find them.

Angela Sebald: Just because a student has a disability, not assuming and lowering your expectations, just assuming less of students. So many times when I say, so the students coming into your class, they're blind, "How are they going to do this and how are they going to do that? Let's brainstorm together." I don't know everything. The student doesn't know everything. We don't build together, "What concept are you trying to get across here and how can it be the most engaging way?"

Not just going through a PowerPoint and writing a paper about, how can we engage and have that active learning, and let's think about it. Maybe we'll create something that nobody ever thought of before, but just trying to be very creative and thoughtful in the process.

Speaker 7: Thank you.

Speaker 5: Imagine [inaudible 00:39:00] purchasing process. Like I was saying, those EIT accessibility terms, really the education with your faculty on, you're seriously signing off on the risk. The funny thing for me is, when I send that, I've gotten people signing off in a minute after I send it. I'm like, "You don't even read what you're agreeing to," right? It's because of this point that they literally don't think that it will ever happen to them.

They're buying something in the class and they say, "I have 50 students. It's so unlikely that I'm ever going to get an accommodation request. I'm just going to sign off the risk." These stories are so important to have with faculty too. For an education standpoint being like, "No. Yes, you can. Absolutely you can. Do you think that 50 students you might not?"

Even professors who sign off for like a 2000 persons course or something like that, and they're just like, "Oh yeah, it's never going to happen to me." Are they really that education piece too, with your administration to say, "We're having our faculty members signing off as risks for our department." There are faculty members that are part of our apartment too. Having that with your administration saying, "Do you know that this faculty member is signing our risk agreement, is that education piece?"

Obviously, that doesn't solve the problem right now, but that's also the pattern I'm seeing is that, people will just blindly sign something and they're ... I know they're not reading it because they're also not setting up those EEAAPS, which are in that agreement as well.

Angela Sebald: I know we have to keep moving forward. Thank you and any thoughts, suggestions that you have, we would love to hear them. We're happy to work with departments, help with training of departments and just sharing information, so don't hesitate to contact us.

James Bender: All right. This is James Bender. We're running out of time. We want to keep it moving forward. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've been doing with this year three. I have a lot of information on a slide. I made that purposely so individuals that are not here you can go back and look at it. I just want to highlight some things. Right now, we've used the same rubric that we use before and we created a new metric.

This is approved and then approved with minor corrections. What you can look at, see, there's a few comments. Not clear what metrics or parities are being used within the MAU. That's examples and some answers we gave back to individuals, and let them know we need a little bit more information. What we did was; we spent a total of 48 hours as a team going through the plans. Can you go to the next slide please?

What did I say? Well, I'm sorry, 84 hours. I stand corrected, 84 hours. I just have an infographic here that talks about year two and compares it to year three. In year two, we had 24 plans that came through. In year three, we had a total of 26. If you notice that the numbers, we have 15 that came through, that were approved with minor changes and in the next year we had a few more.

We added an extra category, not enough information. As I think, individuals were putting things in and by the time we got to that next year, they were like, "Well, I don't know what to do here. I'm using my template," and they just pushed a button through to get it through, so we needed more information. If you can go back just to the previous slide.

One of the things we want to do is focus on ... We tried this approach of, "Okay, here's a successful unit and here's a unit not successful, maybe pair them up." But their success is measured by individual units. What might be successful to one unit, may not be successful to another unit.

Nate Evans: Okay. I want to respect your time. I know we're at time. Thank you all very much. We'll send out information about our next meeting very soon. All right, take care.