Supporting a Connected Learning Intern project at the Ear Institute and creating interactive accessibility checklists.
Add some interactive accessibility checklists to your Moodle pages.
You can find the H5P checklists referred to in this post at the following Moodle page:
Open Moodle site for interactive accessibility guidelines
Included are instructions as to how to import and suggestions for where to place them on your course.
Background to the project
In 2021 I worked with Hannah Cooper at the Ear Institute and two Connected Learning Interns (CLI’s) on a project looking at accessible teaching content.
After applying for two internships it was nice that both were current Audiology masters students who were finishing up their dissertations, and so they already knew Hannah very well. They were funded for 70 hours each which they used over an 8 week period.
The first thing we considered doing was to ask them to accurately transcribe some teaching video to ensure recorded elements of a module were as accessible as they could be. But we soon realised that we could do much more than this, and we had the opportunity to work closely together and shape something that could help out with accessible teaching more generally.
The project starts to take shape
As the Ear Institute runs several modules with a CPD component for external students that use online teaching and resources, we thought that a good starting point would be to look at the UCLeXtend Course Approval Team (CAT) reviews that advises on online course design. The accessibility portion of these reviews tend to be fairly light touch so we wanted to examine whether we could provide a more in depth review for teaching staff to refer to.
We also noticed that some of UCL’s guidance was in different places so we wanted to consolidate this into one easy to access place.
We met with the CLI’s every couple of weeks to offer support, guidance and direction for the work they were undertaking. They also met with the digital accessibility team who had input into the project and organised for them to go in and use the computer labs with accessible software such as the JAWS screenreader.
Outputs
The CLI’s wrote up in depth reviews of current courses circulated to the department staff and produced guidance documents for creating accessible teaching content.
3 main outputs were created:
- In depth accessibility reviews of four modules from 20/21.
- Accessibility guideline documentation.
- Checklists for how to create accessible teaching content (PowerPoint and video).
Additional findings
One thing that the review flagged up was accessibility issues within the Moodle platform itself – things that editing tutors couldn’t change as they were inherent. The findings of these were passed to UCL’s Digital Education Team.
Further development
The CLI’s did a great job with producing some very detailed guidelines for the department. I wanted to add a more practical component and make it available to all as this was outside of the scope of the original internship.
Using H5P in Moodle I used the checklist activity and set it to behave like a quiz. This meant that it included some light gamification elements to encourage the tutors to complete the checklist alongside their content creation / redrafting.
It also meant tutors could select when they had applied accessible elements as they edited – the more they checked off the more accessible the content.
Because H5P requires a server to run, and we have it as part of our version of Moodle I added the guidelines to an open Moodle site from which any UCL member of staff could access and then import to their own as they wish (I had to set the enrolment to bring staff in as administrators to enable this).
References:
Zainuddin, Z., Chu, S., Shujahat, M., & Perera, C. (2020). The impact of gamification on learning and instruction: A systematic review of empirical evidence. Educational Research Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100326.
Fleet, C., & Kondrashov, O. (2019). Universal Design on University Campuses: A Literature Review.. Exceptionality education international, 29, 136-148.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Universal-Design-on-University-Campuses%3A-A-Review.-Fleet-Kondrashov/60318200ca302e2237c7d480807f61cb64609c1e
