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all right thank you everyone for your patience um good afternoon and welcome to the first gutman library book talk of spring 2020. um i today we're joined by cheryl burgstahler an affiliate professor at the university of washington's college of education in seattle who is also the founder and director of the do it center and the it accessibility technology team cheryl you can take it from here well thank you very much and thank you for joining us today um i get to talk about one of my favorite things i'm pretty passionate as you'll see about um inclusion and strategies for helping our post-secondary institutions be more inclusive uh in in multiple ways and with with uh a wide range of characteristics that people might have what i'm talking today is really um is really ideal at a time when we have a pandemic because we all moved our courses online and this toolkit provides a way for faculty uh and others to learn how to make those online courses and services accessible to people with disabilities and other marginalized groups and also today there are a lot of campus efforts that are going on in the area of diversity equity and inclusion and for those initiatives sometimes they have a very narrow definition of diversity and i like to provide ways for them to expand that um somewhat so the book i'm talking about today is creating inclusive learning opportunities in higher education a universal design toolkit there is a 40 discount if you use the code clhe21 at the harvard education press website at .hepg dot o-r-g uh at the bottom of this page i have my email address which is pretty inviting it means you can send me email to discuss any of this further it's s-h-e-r-y-l-b at uw.edu you might wonder why i actually am spelling that out uh speaking the content on this page uh it's because it's part of universal design i don't know if any of you are calling by phone for instance and you can't see the slide so i'm going to avoid reading every single word but i'll make sure that the content projected on a slide is available to you as well sharon i just want to make one note cheryl thank you if folks have any questions please use the q a function at the bottom of your screen and we'll take those at the end of cheryl's presentation just wanted to give folks a place where they could direct their questions thank you great thank you very much laura so we'll have some time for that at the end as you mentioned what i'm encouraging faculty and and administrators at our post-secondary institutions to think of the following who might be signing up for your course or who might be planning to use your it or your service or your facility notice i'm not saying who are already there but might be thinking about arriving because universal design is all about being proactive and i have on the screen here some of the students we had in a summer program this last year i was all offered online of course um but we have these students and i think you can maybe just a quick glance now their appearance suggests we had a diversity of participants but what might is not apparent is that all of these students have at least one disability some multiple disabilities and they include learning disabilities uh visual impairments deaf and hard of hearing people on the autism spectrum and students with hyperactivity disorder and as i mentioned learning disabilities as well as many of them have multiple disabilities the nature of the program they're in is a program for students with disabilities to become more successful as they transition to college and careers and so i i'm challenging people at post-secondary institutions just imagine that a very diverse group might be entering their their service or their course or using the technology that you have to offer i also suggest that most of us are not in the field of rehabilitation medicine or disability services on our campuses so there isn't a great need for us to be learning about different diagnoses of disability uh when they're something is labeled a disability uh voice versus something that someone is not real strong in an area instead i like to look at ability on a continuum and everyone here today in this session um and every else everybody else in the world uh can be ranked on this scale from not able way off the left and then able on the right uh we can start with understanding english or social norms uh some people might not be very high on that scale because they grew up in a different country and english is not their first language or it might be related to a disability some students on the autism spectrum not all of them but some of them have great difficulty understanding social norms and uh and they can benefit from be having instruction in that area so it's not all about disability it's about diversity and so then the ability to see to hear to walk to reprint to write with a pen or pencil or to communicate verbally to tune out distraction to learn to manage physical and mental health and so on uh every person would have a unique collection of abilities that they could rank themselves by the way and so it's most important for people to think about diversity is just part of our campuses and other activities um and we should uh not just think about the average person that might be in our class so i'm just going to give a little one-minute history lesson of the evolution of responses to human differences including disability um in many years ago and still this happens today in some parts of the world unfortunately but we eliminated people with disabilities or excluded them or segregated them and sometimes with well-meaning parents and others that want to protect a child with a disability for example and so therefore homeschools them so that they don't get bullied at school and so forth but they miss out on a lot of the um activities we all enjoy um and every day and in school and employment in the middle of the last century there was a big push for curing disabilities rehabilitating people with disabilities and accommodating them and there's nothing wrong with those three things but if you notice uh they all have to do with focus on the individual and there was a big push in this regard to think of these things because of the end of world war ii when many veterans came back from the war with significant and multiple injuries and they had access to the gi bill which paid their tuition at college so our post-secondary institutions had a huge surge of people with disabilities on our campuses and those individuals were war heroes so it's hard to justify why they don't belong in our institutions today though we've moved beyond that and expanded our view of disability and how we should treat people with disabilities to more of a social justice model we do still want cures we do want to rehabilitate and accommodate but social justice is different in that it's it suggests a proactive approach we uh for example if we think that people with disabilities as as i do are are welcome at our institutions why are we surprised when they show up and not really prepared for them and have to accommodate once they arrive and so we look for then a a solution or an approach that's consistent with social justice which would be inclusion and universal design so these provide ways to think about accessibility and be proactive in providing resources and so forth so that's we're going to talk about today and there's a lot more in the book of course so i like to start with what i mean by an inclusive campus i mean that who who meets the requirements with or without accommodations is encouraged to participate they feel welcome and can fully engage in the accessible and inclusive activities so all three three things are important in inco to in define your campus as being inclusive now what do we do now well at post secondary institutions typically we provide accommodations as our main focus of access particularly for classes and so a student will enroll in a class and then the student reports their disability to the disability services office and they may work with faculty member to figure out what adjustments need to make be made for that student again thinking about the pandemic the two most common accommodations as far as how much money we spend on them is creating accessible documents pdf format for instance those documents tend to be inaccessible to students with disabilities they can be designed to be accessible but most faculty don't know how to do it so the disability services office might have to remediate the syllabus and other important documents for a student who's blind so that they can essentially get access to the text in that document rather than look at a document that's just basically a big image if it's just scanned in uh because my students are using technology that reads aloud the text that would appear on a screen and scanned in images would not be recognized as text but it's not just about students who are blind uh students who have reading related disabilities like um dyslexia also use this text-to-speech technology because they benefit from both reading the words uh written on the screen and then also hearing them uh similarly english language learners benefit from that kind of technology because also they benefit from looking at the words and also hearing the words at the same time so that's a big effort on our campuses nationwide and then captioning videos one of the challenges is faculty members often put their videos up on youtube and if you looked at captions on youtube you realize that sometimes they're they have misspellings there's no punctuation but what most people don't realize when they post their videos on youtube is that youtube has a very uh user-friendly way to edit those captions and so all they needed is to go in and edit those captions with the right periods with the right spelling and so forth so that they really are a reflection of the content um in a video and if those are videos used in a class then the disability services office has to provide an accommodation if those captions are not accurate and they will recaption them for students who are deaf or hard of hearing so rather than provide accommodations for everything universal design has to do with looking at well what about the design of the product or the environment that should be reconsidered if we're going to be proactive in design and this is an extreme example it was in the book called the coffee coffee pot for masochists in the catalog of unfindable objects uh not a very usable uh product i think most people if they were given this coffee pot which has a spout and a handle on the same side would really ask for a different coffee pot uh it wouldn't accept this as a reasonable design this is kind of like what it's like for a student with a disability enrolling in some of our online classes is they just look for the syllabus the very first thing they're supposed to look at and bang it's not accessible to them they can't use it and so then they have to go through these extra steps to try to get an accessible format and so we're trying not to do that with our courses in respect to students with disabilities okay so universal design is a simple thing simple concept it's been around since the early 1990s the design of products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design so in this that last example how can we create our courses um so that they require few accommodations just a few rather than as many as they are requiring today when students with disabilities enroll notice it doesn't say anything about disability here this is for all people um and so it's broader in scope than just looking at access for students with disabilities and this definition implies then that a universally designed product or an environment is technically accessible to a student with a disability but it's also usable and it's inclusive and so we're looking for products that make sure that students with disabilities and others can actually access the content and use it effectively and do this in an inclusive setting so it's not about one size fits all it's more about including features in a product or an environment uh that make it flexible so that more people can be fully engaged so this is uh you know one uh area where you see this is a physical environment where it's flexible enough so a lot of people can engage moving desks around and so forth um with different characteristics i ran into this quote a long time ago uh it's by a vietnamese buddhist monk and i don't know if he was thinking about universal design but i thought about universal design when i read it when you plant lettuce if it doesn't grow well you don't blame the lettuce you look for reasons it's not doing well it may need fertilizer or water or less sun in other words you look at the environment first maybe it isn't a faulty plant but we're not caring for it in the way that it can be successful in becoming a mature plant there are examples of universal design uh and probably the most uh accepted one is curb cuts for sidewalks i think we've all grown to be used to curb cuts these little ramps cut into the curb usually used by people uh pushing baby strollers or delivery carts or um even uh those uh driving skates and so forth as they're going down the sidewalk which isn't always a good idea but people with disabilities as well and this image on the screen shows the front page of the daily which is a student newspaper here at the university of washington and it was in 1970 and here we have a young man with a sign on the back of his wheelchair that says ramp the curbs get me off the street and way back then the university uh kind of pushed back on that like really uh you know we're really hilly and so it's gonna be tough to figure out where we would put these crib cuts and that would be really expensive and they found that it was by the way but they're all the curb cuts on all the ramps all the sidewalks i run into on campus because it's expected now and it was expensive to retrofit all of those sidewalks with ramps but not a lot more expensive to include these curb cuts when a new sidewalk is being created on campus so in the book um i go through in much more detail than today we're kind of just flying through a few ideas um but i i go through a framework on how you can take universal design in higher education and apply it broadly or even specifically to a particular aspect of higher education like online learning programs for example and so for each of these different applications for a service or course or physical space or technology uh in the book i go through this framework for each one where we talk about the scope of our application the definition which i already shared with you principles for applying universal design guidelines that come build from those principles and practices that can help guide people in applying universal design and then even the process of universal design and we're not going to talk about each one of those in detail but i do want to point out the principles some of you may be familiar with universal design for learning and that certainly is covered throughout the book um but there are actually three sets of universal design principles uh that i think for a whole campus allows us to to make our products and environments inclusive of everyone including people with disabilities so udl is focused much on learning um and so for courses that's certainly relative relevant but other principles are relevant as well and so if we just take a look at universal design uh that i defined a few minutes ago uh there are actually seven principles that uh came about with a lot of collaboration with engineers and architects and product designers uh to define how you might design a physical space or a product to be more inclusive of people with disabilities um and other uh and those who have other characteristics a one for instance is if you're designing a lab or something that you make sure that there's plenty of space for someone to participate in that facility and you might one example would be making space for people who are right and left-handed users using that technology in the space and uh simple and intuitive that you develop software that is intuitive rather than make things difficult uh for us to figure out what we're supposed to do or give uh give feedback when you make a mistake how many of us have had an experience on a website or with some software where we clearly made a mistake and all we get is this notice that we made a mistake now why uh the software can't be smart enough to guide me out of that uh situation um would i don't know i think sometimes software packages do well at that but most do not i think and so those are seven principles and then we have the three universal design for learning principles and then i add a third set of principles and these are four principles that underpin the web content accessibility guidelines um that can be applied to all of it and those are important because in online learning and other applications certainly within the pandemic but also post pandemic as well we need special guidance on making sure the websites and other technology is accessible to people with disabilities and to others on our campus like english language learners and so i put that in there as well and so universal design as this image suggests it's kind of the broad brushstroke principles that you would apply to any product or environment where udl and the wicked principles are more specialized but still part of that universal design umbrella and so we're not going through those but uh i don't encourage people to memorize those for 14 principles but i do suggest they think about three things um that as as in an instructor or as someone directing a service when where learning is concerned that you provide multiple ways for participants to learn and to demonstrate what they've learned and so as far as learning an example would be in an online course you could take a topic and find a maybe a ted talk video or video you've created yourself on that topic and then provide some written materials for the students to look at what universal design ensures though is then you make sure that the video is captioned and the document is an accessible format so the second one is provide multiple ways to engage on my syllabus when i teach online i like most professors ask the students if they'd like to meet with me one-on-one to arrange an appointment so we can uh get together at a time convenient to them but i also say that they can choose the technology we'll use for that one-on-one meeting so some students might want to use zoom that's what i prefer actually but it's not about me really is it it's about them or what they want to do some people might choose skype because they're more familiar with it or they might choose something a feature in the learning management system or they might want to just use email and it could be an accessibility issue um it could be because they don't have a usable voice and so it's difficult to to communicate in a system like we're using today it could be because they're an english language learner and they want to have time to compose their thoughts but it doesn't really i don't have to be concerned about what their their reason is i just have to make sure that they know that they can make that choice so um the third thing is that for all of these things we use to present information and see what people have learned and to engage with them to just ensure that all the technologies and the facilities and the services and the resources and the strategies that we're using in teaching or presenting material are accessible to individuals with a wide variety of disabilities and so if you follow those three guidelines uh you'll basically be covering most of the requirements for the principles of universal design that i just mentioned those three sets that's oversimplified of course but but that gives you the idea with how the book progresses uh and as uh this framework is is developing then uh the practices supported by these three sets of principles um you know conclude with some ideas uh faculty members i've taught them for many years about universal design and student services personnel and they all want kind of checklists and i in early days thought well i don't know i have a checklist you know i want you kind of think in terms of universal design but i realize now that it's very helpful for people to have some specific ideas and so if we take here and look at the four categories in a post-secondary campus we have instruction we have services information technology physical spaces those would be the four uh primary applications on a post-secondary campus and so if i have someone i'm working with who is teaching a course i would look at the instruction and under instruction it has some specific categories that we would discuss in a workshop or presentation or whatever and for instance class climate how can i make a class climate where everyone feels welcome uh part of universal design and inclusion uh interaction i talked about you know giving students the choice on how to interact uh when it's appropriate can happen all the times but when you're choosing uh other things to use in the class like the discussion board to be making sure it's accessible to everybody physical environments and products because people who are teaching often are using a makerspace or a computer or an engineering lab and so those considerations need to be made as well and universal design provides some guidelines for that delivery methods so you help prevent i mean how you present the content uh information resources and the technology uh pdfs i mentioned already but they're you know be sure to use a document format that is fully accessible by learning how to create pdfs that are accessible or if you don't want to invest in that skill set learning that skill set then just use other formats like microsoft word or just the content pages within a learning management system those two options are much easier to make accessible than pdfs and then feedback you know giving students regular feedback if you have a large assignment that maybe give them feedback halfway uh so students don't have the experience of getting finished with a project and then realize they didn't understand the directions so you can do that and then assessment again providing multiple ways that students can demonstrate their knowledge by short answers uh communication the discussion list by doing a project and so forth and then i include accommodation on there because we're not getting rid of accommodations there will always be a need for certain accommodations we're just trying to make the the um them nest less necessary that the number of accommodations someone might need are reduced for example if you put captions on all of your videos then people who need captions on videos no longer have to have an accommodation for reformatting your videos with accurate captions and so that's the that's the idea then it comes to practices in these specific areas and i'm going to use the example of an online course um and this is uh not the you know this isn't the end of this but gives you some idea what do these practices look like these inclusive practices well if we take a look at websites and documents and images and videos here are some ideas avoiding pdfs i already mentioned that how about that and especially scanned images so learn how to make accessible pdfs or just avoid using them you don't have to create new ones um if you're using some in your class that you didn't create like linking to them then you might explore with your librarian if there's some um accessible versions of that uh document available or you might need to wait and make that an accommodation uh if you can't find a way to make them accessible yourself so we're not trying to do away with the disability services office but trying to minimize the the work they need to do as an accommodation and along with that structuring the headings you know we talked about documents people who are blind and using screen readers those screen readers have capability of skipping from heading to heading and so they can see uh what the outline is of a paper let's say they're reading and the way it might read out loud to a person who's blind the screen reader might say petty one so that's the major heading and then say heading two and and describe what's in that line heading three and then maybe heading three another heading three going back to a heading two so they could a tab go through very quickly in that document and get an idea how it's organized and then they can and then they can just go to the part they're interested in um in contrast a document has absolutely no structure the screen reader might just read it at all as it's just like one sentence imagine a 25 page page paper and it just you just read it one word after the other without any organization uh very difficult and so that's one thing to do uh to provide descriptive text for hyperlinks this would be like on a web page or the page in a content management system where you have a lot of links similar to the last example a screen reader for a student is blind can read the the name of those links the link text on the screen and so they're looking for something let's say that was covered in one of the earlier lessons if they go back to the earlier lessons and just skip from from link to link if you've decided for consistency you're going to name them all the same thing click here they will go from click here click here click here so what they have to do if they want to figure out where those links are going is read all the surrounding text so you force them to go back and read the whole page to find the one that they're looking for and so it's easy if the underlined text says do it website then they can then they immediately know what that link is linking to rather than just the click here similarly in images it's very easy to provide alternative text and so someone going through a document and or a website can encounter an image and their screen reader will accept it as an image but they'll get some alternative text to describe it i'm that's what i talked about at the beginning of this session and a good example is when the coffee pot appeared on the screen i just simply told her that the handle and the spout are on the same side of the coffee pot i didn't describe how it what color it is or much to any other detail about it but if some of someone is calling in by phone they would know why i'm making the point that i'm making about it poorly designed so you can do that very easily using large bold fonts on uncluttered pages and plain backgrounds i'm doing that today as well to kind of model that that behavior we share with that with faculty that's pretty easy to do captioning videos already talked about that uh using accessible tools um i really encourage faculty to use the tools within the learning management system because lms producers are doing a good job at making those uh increasingly accessible day by every day they're getting more accessible but if they're going to go out and use another technology they should investigate a little bit to find out whether it's accessible and there are ways that they can do that that i share in the book and then the instructional methods it's much easier to make asynchronous uh activities accessible to students with disabilities doesn't mean you don't have synchronous activities like we're having right now but making sure that a video like this would be um recorded and that you would have captions on it so that someone who missed the original time that occurred real time can look at it later or can look at it multiple times but ensuring that the captions are on it so that students who are deaf or hard of hearing can access the content as well making instructions and expectations clear when i work with students with disabilities um and talk about online learning and maybe they're on a panel or something this is often the number one thing that they uh are that they complain about as far as courses that the instructors don't give them very clear instructions and expectations for an assignment i find that quite interesting i can think of all these more complicated issues but for students with disabilities and i'd say probably for students without disabilities that's a really important concern what's happened as we moved our online courses so quickly online because of the pandemic is faculty members now need to go back and kind of rethink some of the things that they did quickly and make them um better improve the wording and so forth um address a wide range of technical skills uh he's here from faculty on our own campus but we use canvas and everybody uses it so we don't have to tell them how to use canvas and i said well how do you know those students or one student in your class hasn't used canvas before so their universal design feature is not necessarily to train everyone because it might be one or two students but to provide them a resource where you can say if you haven't used canvas before here's where you can get started even though there are a lot of faqs that they have access to that's actually part of the problem you as the instructor know what you're going to teach and what tools they're going to use and so you can just lead them to the ones that are most relevant providing options for communicating we talked about that providing options for learning uh for demonstrating learning spelling out acronyms defining jargon using plain english those are all important as well so uh they're pretty basic and uh after all good teaching is good teaching it's not uh rocket science here and uh faculty members can apply universal design without giving up the the uh successful practices they have in teaching but just add universal design as a layer to ensure that everyone in their class can benefit from those practices that you've found to be very successful with other students and then in the book i'm not going to elaborate on this but you can take the universal design and higher education framework and you can use it to underpin a model where you can go through a process to to apply universal design on your campus and so you start with your own vision like an inclusive campus as an example your values i looked on our website at the university of washington what does it say it says diversity equity inclusion compliance and so universal design has a way to address all of those issues and then you take that framework that we talked about a little bit but you flush it out with some details look at your current practices and make a list side by side of the new practices you're going to need if you change that paradigm and then you have to create measures and then when you measure things you look at the impact uh and then improve your work from there and so this is just a little uh preview of universal design in higher education i consider it a framework a goal a process kind of a way of thinking uh it supports social justice that i mentioned at the very beginning of the talk it values diversity equity and inclusion so it can be used to frame uh methods that you're going to use on your campus for those uh promotes best practices it does not lower standards uh it's proactive can be implemented incrementally benefits everybody at least close to everybody and minimizes the need for accommodation so that seems like a pretty good thing to do right so stay tuned if you want to read this book and that's what it's all about and uh so i'm anxious to see if there are any questions or clarifications you'd like to have from me thanks cheryl that was terrific as a reminder to our attendees you are welcome to post any questions in the q a function at the bottom of your screen and we'll start taking we've uh several come in already so we'll start taking a look at those um uh the first question um i can take this one cheryl and give you a chance to catch your breath but oh for the sake of the audience i'll read the questions in full and then we'll do the answers um this question is is there an accessible version of the book available and the answer to that is yes harvard education press does make an accessible version available through apple and through bookshare so there are two options there and our next question it's a little long so um thanks for your patience um in my experience mentoring and advising students having voice to voice conversations are the most effective for both parties in that nuanced information is shared the fastest and actions can be taken as quickly as possible how could i be more accommodating to a student who can't use their voice while still gleaning nuance and responding in real time i think they can't use their voice first of all universal design would say think about a student who has difficulty in that area and so that many things will be proactively done to make it accessible to them um in that case maybe but not requiring that they use their voice in class or if you want them to use their voice that they're going to have some time to prepare their response for instance if you have a zoom session and all the students in the class are going to introduce themselves make sure that the students know ahead of time what you're asking them to say so someone using technology assistive technology to compose their introduction can do so and then when it's their turn they can present that that description keeping in mind that students if you have a university design course may not have to ask for an accommodation and so that student may not have even disclosed to you uh that they uh don't have usable speech or the diff speech is difficult for them and so just by giving them time to think about how you're how they're going to introduce themselves can be helpful so that's one thing if they're going to communicate with you i think this idea that you communicate the way they want to compute communicate is a good idea i have a young man he's probably 40 now but he was a kid still seems like a kid to me and uh he likes to communicate in an environment like this he doesn't really have any usable voice but he he likes using his technology so he'll compose a little introduction and then his computerized voice will speak to me and then i might ask another question and all i need to remember is just to pause so that he can compose his thoughts and not to rush him in any way and so you can have a very good communication with that student particularly one-on-one just by being patient and giving them the time that they need great thank you all right the next question do you have any recommendations about facilitating a focus group with a group of students with diverse background including historically underrepresented minorities and people with disabilities a focus group for what purpose or they didn't specify okay suppose you're having a focus group i think one thing is to determine what you're trying to gain from that focus group and i assume it's input from a diverse audience about something and uh to kind of piggyback on the example that i've already given on online learning um it wouldn't be a good idea to have this focus group when you they're in your class sometimes faculty members want to get these students together that are enrolled in their class and talk about it at that point um it's better to get a group that's not part of your class maybe you're going to do this to help faculty understand their particular needs that's where this this idea of having a clear instructions will come out and something like that and so um i'd say pull them together with different needs keep in mind that only the the people in the group are only representing themselves so they don't have to agree or reach consensus on things and they're not speaking for the whole group for instance if you have a blind person in that group uh if they're a a power user of assistive technology uh the screen reader their experience in an online course will be much different uh than it's than a new user to using that technology and so sometimes it's not canvas or blackboard that's the issue it's there they don't know the capability of their own technology to use those uh accessible features within those learning management systems and so then i think uh you know just uh making sure that students have the questions ahead of time sometimes students will be very anxious in a focus group and it's because they just don't know what's going to come up and even though you don't even want them to prepare the answers some students particularly students with disabilities will want to so that they don't embarrass themselves or whatever but give them the questions ahead of time make it clear to them why you're asking that these questions make it clear that they don't have to speak for their uh group of people with disabilities or other characteristics similar to their own they're only speaking for themselves um and but i think the most important thing is figuring out what questions you want to ask what are you going to do with it um and so it becomes clear to the students as well that you're just not prying into their personal lives but they're you're actually going to take that input and use it for something thank you next question is can you recommend a good learner profile survey that can be given to students to determine learner variability in any class um i really don't have anything if you're i wouldn't recommend doing it if you really want to find out about their variability because once they're in your class even if you say the responses will be anonymous people that are very savvy about technology will not believe you uh you're they're giving you information from what they it's coming from their own computer and you may keep that information confidential but if they're sensitive at all about their needs they're not going to present them to a faculty member because then they will feel uh like you will discriminate against them because of their their needs so again i think that's kind of a separate issue i think um what i would do is apply universal design uh features within your course the idea there is to create kind of a platform that's reasonably accessible you don't have to have a survey to ask them whether your documents are success are accessible you already know whether you've created accessible documents and then rely on accommodations but make it very clear that an individual student can uh talk to you about their accommodation needs uh faculty members usually aren't positioned to authorize accommodations but many of the things they're asking for are things you provide for for any student and do make sure that they know where the accommodate where the disability services office is by putting that in your statement as well thank you next question like in the sidewalk example that you use retrofitting is time consuming and sometimes costly how would you recommend that we go about convincing colleagues that the work and effort of retrofitting the way in which our services are provided is essential that's a very difficult thing to do and i've been working on it for quite a few years um one thing i would say is think of some easy things or very relatively easy things for them to do like even the few guidelines that i shared with you about an online course most of them don't require a lot of extra knowledge to do them and it's just good teaching and so that can lower their level of concern if they're you're thinking about the accessibility of their class don't share the web content accessibility guidelines that's very technical the four principles aren't so technical and that may be benefiting them but simply knowing that it's important to make technology accessible to them so i think keep the story simple give people opportunities for baby steps and tailor it to the audience if you're talking to faculty what do faculty members need to know about this if you're talking to instructional designers what do they need to know about making things inclusive if you're talking about student services offices talk about what what impact is there in a student services office okay all right thank you um this is a bit of a general question but since we are in this this coveted time period right now and that is certainly presented a variety of challenges across the board but also some opportunities um can you speak to anything couple points you know cova specific that you feel have either um encouraged you know some further action on universal design or has proven to be an obstacle or um there are some benefits and uh one last spring when we were in hysterical mode and putting things online i didn't bother people too much but what i did about accessible design but i did help a lot of faculty get their courses online and that was the immediate concern but we did share with them a resources that they could put on their own websites for their department where they linked to uh covert related resources all of them seem to have those and i can say link to this one resource on 20 tips so it's just a simple one but the 20 tips document actually will link to other resources for learning more about that and so keeping this the message very simple but also being respectful about their their issues that they're dealing with at the time another one at the university of washington and many other schools is they get frustrated in working with english language learners uh people who are english for for whom english is not their first language and they they really want to include these students they're not suggesting they didn't belong there but how do you work with students with just with uh who are english language learners as far as discus discussions in class and so forth but when you put those discussions online asynchronous asynchronously you'll see a very high quality of the responses from students in that category and so you actually can benefit rather than from that rather than in a classroom situation where there's a great deal of pressure to respond quickly when the faculty member calls on you not to mention the anxiety around that so there are some things like that i find one thing when everything's online is everybody has to participate i can have 50 people in my class and that they read a lesson and i tell them to go to the discussion board and my instructions are usually post a message with the question i'll give them and then respond to one of your um your your peers in the class everybody has had two responses if they're going to get the total of five points i'm offering for that exercise that can't happen in on site uh you you don't everyone doesn't have time to participate like that so i really like that aspect of it uh but don't get me wrong there's a lot lost when you don't have the on-site component in fact i much prefer to teach at hybrid classes where you're on site sometime and then online other times um one additional question here specific to the book does the book address the response of higher education leadership to persons with service animals you know it doesn't uh specifically it's mentioned but um it doesn't uh address that um that for one thing is kind of more typical as an accommodation in that it's for a specific student and so there are issues related to what kind of the service animal can be considered a service animal in the context of post-secondary institution and what about living in the dormitory and uh all sorts of very specific issues and so most of those are addressed in the for particular students uh they request as an accommodation for that that accommodation of having a service and animal and then the people within the disability services office make that decision and it's really unique to different campuses i belong to a couple of discussion lists that are designed for people in disability services offices and they're talking about it all the time and it's very clear that individual campuses are handling that in very different ways thank you thanks cheryl um it doesn't look like there are any other questions so i'm going to thank you for your time i'm going to turn things over to my aunt who can let folks know when and where the recording can be found thank you thank you cheryl and laura that was great um actually everyone who registered for this book talk we'll receive an email tomorrow um and that will contain the link where you can find a recording which will be about a week from now um thank you again for attending and bringing this very important discussion to government library [Music] thank you good night thank you bye bye bye everyone