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 Course Accessibility Review Team.
A Course Accessibility 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. The team is usually provided with digital accessibility training and evaluation tools. The Instructional Technology and Development Team can also train the team. Then, the team is provided access to the D2L course pages for all courses in the college. This is the basic process they follow:
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 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.
Alternately, we’ve also seen units have success with instructional designers tasked with assisting faculty and instructors in remediating course materials directly. Some of these instructional designers also have student assistance, while others simply collaborate with faculty and instructors to remediate course materials directly.