Lucinda Parmer from Southeastern Oklahoma State University has provided Alternatives to the Traditional Exam as Measures of Student Learning Outcomes. The article proposes many alternative means of assessing students including:
Blended Learning Toolkit from UCF
Blended Content and Assignments
Blended Course Implementation Checklist
Evaluation Framework for Blended Learning Courses
Implementation of a Blended Course
Evaluating Blended Learning: Bringing the Elements Together
EdX: Syllabus and Class Structure Guide for Blended Learning
Blended Learning Innovations: 10 Major Trends
iNACOL Blended Learning Teacher Competency Framework
Guest accounts cannot be created for Canvas. All users must have a NetID to have access to UIS Canvas.
If an instructor or unit needs to provide access to a person who does not have a NetID, the unit may request an External Affiliate UIN and NetID.
An External Affiliate is typically a person who is not an employee, student, or faculty member that requires a UIN and NetID. This could be a visiting scholar, guest, etc. This is not to be confused with a person requiring only WiFi access, which can be provided by other methods. A new request for an External Affiliate status will typically pertain to three types of people
A sponsor will have been assigned to assist the requester before this request is initiated. The sponsor must be a university employee that will assist in the submission of the new request and is the point of contact for any questions during the process. The employment status of of the sponsor will be validated at submission time.
The unit sponsor will complete this External Affiliate request form. This form must be completed on campus or while connect to campus by VPN.
The sponsor will be required to provide this information for the affiliate who needs a NetID:
If a NetID and UIN from a current or previous university relationship is entered, this will expedite the approval process. Otherwise, the iCard office will search for a previously utilized UIN/NetID.
To add a user by NetID, select the login ID button [1].
In the text field [2], enter the NetID for the user. You can copy and paste multiple NetIDs at one time by placing a comma or line break between login IDs.
In the Role drop-down menu [1], assign the user(s) a role for the course based on available course roles.
In the Section drop-down menu [2], assign the user(s) a section in the course.
If you want to limit the user(s) to only interact with other users in their section, click the Can interact… checkbox [3].
Click the Next button [4].
Note: If you are adding multiple users at the same time, all users inherit the same role and section.
If Canvas finds an existing user, you can confirm the user before adding the user to the course [1].
The user’s name displays in the page along with the user’s information you used in the user search. Although Canvas may display additional search columns, existing information in a user’s account will not be displayed.
When you are ready, click the Add Users button [2].
If Canvas did not find your intended user, you can click the Start Over button [3].
If you cannot locate a user, they may not yet have a Canvas Account. Please have the user log in to Canvas, which will automatically create their UIS Canvas account.
Your Canvas course will become unavailable to students on the Friday before the next term begins. Instructors do not need to take any steps to close their courses.
By default, courses for upcoming semesters are set to Unpublished.
Any students enrolled in the course site will not have a Canvas Card for a course on their Dashboard until the instructor “Publishes” the course site.
To publish a Canvas course site:
Once you Publish a Canvas course site, you do not have to publish it again if you add new content. You only have to Publish the site once.
You can Unpublish the course by going to the Home page and clicking Unpublish. This will remove the Dashboard Card link from all student accounts.
Note: Once you have added a grade for any student, you can no longer Unpublish the course site.
As you take a moment to reflect on your experiences teaching during the Spring 2020 semester, COLRS encourages faculty to discuss your teaching experiences and further develop your skills in teaching in an online or blended environment. Upcoming opportunities include:
COLRS Workshops
Throughout the summer, COLRS will be offering workshops on Technology Tools for Remote Delivery, Blended Learning Best Practices, and HyFlex Teaching. Check the COLRS Workshop calendar for dates and Zoom connection links. These workshops are free and available to all UIS faculty and staff (full or part-time).
Self-Paced Options
COLRS Building Digital Community Course on CanvasThis self-paced faculty development course meets the requirements of the Higher Learning Commission for required faculty training in online instruction. It consists of six modules: Foundations of Online Learning, Accessibility, Instructional Design, Learning Theories, Facilitating Online Learning, Putting it Together. This course is free and available to all UIS faculty and staff (full or part-time). COLRS Canvas Migration Resources on CanvasThis Canvas site is a central location for support, materials, and resources to help you migrate your course to Canvas. These resources are publicly available.
Illinois Online Network (ION) Course Options
ION offers several non-credit courses including Overview of Online Courses, Blended Learning Design & Instruction, Instructional Design, Student Assessment, and many more. See the ION schedule for all upcoming course offerings. These courses are free for UIS faculty and staff (use code DV412 during registration).
For-Credit Course Offerings
UIS offers relevant for-credit courses. Please contact Human Resources for tuition reimbursement possibilities.
EDL 515 – Online Teaching and Learning. This course will introduce students to online and blended teaching and learning. Major concepts and issues, research in the field, and emerging technologies are covered, as well as practical strategies for designing and teaching online, which students actually get to practice in the course.
EDL 555 – Foundation for Technology in the CurriculumBasic technology skills and knowledge necessary for today’s education professionals. Computer operation, electronic communication, and computer applications with emphasis on the tools most applicable to the classroom setting.
UIS has configured single sign-on (SSO) for our Zoom account, you need to use SSO to login on the web and with the Zoom client. Some meetings, like COLRS training workshops, will also require you to login with the SSO to access the Zoom session.
To access a Zoom session that requires you to be logged in with your UIS account:
If you are new to UIS, or you are an employee who has never accessed Canvas before, you will need to activate your Canvas account before you can begin working in Canvas.
Visit the Canvas login page at go.uis.edu/canvas.
Log in with your UIS NetID and password. Important: A NetID is required to access Canvas.
Once you have logged in to Canvas, your account has been activated. If you are a student who needs access to an orientation or advising course, you should contact your program coordinator or advisor to let them know that your account has been activated and to request access to the course in Canvas.
As we near the end of this semester, we are getting closer to moving our classes from Blackboard to Canvas. From an accessibility standpoint this is a GREAT time to do several things. The first is to clean up and remove any files from Blackboard that you don’t use anymore. The second is to take the opportunity to make sure the files you are using are accessible. To help with this, the digital accessibility remediation team of student workers will be working over the summer. If you would like them to help make your files accessible please contact Vance Martin vmart02s@uis.edu.
Authentic assessments require students to apply concepts they have learned to real world situations by having them complete meaningful task-based assessments. This type of assessment engages a variety of skills, and measures higher levels of learning than traditional assessments. Authentic assessment helps students practice creative thinking and problem-solving, and allows for multiple paths to demonstrate knowledge.
Most authentic assessments involve complex questions and tasks that do not have straightforward solutions; students must research, brainstorm, practice, draft, and refine solutions in order to complete the assignment.
Examples of authentic assessments you can use in online learning environment include:
For more reading on authentic assessment:
Inside Higher Ed: Q&A Toward Better Assessments in Online Courses
Authentic Assessment in the Online Classroom
IU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning: Authentic Assessment
If you rely on a paper-based final exam for your face-to-face courses, Blackboard can be used to administer your exam remotely. The COLRS blog has instructions on creating exams and posting exams in Blackboard. If your exam currently existing in Word or another software program, you’ll need to convert it into a Blackboard exam. Depending on the length of your exam, the simplest and fastest approach to convert your exam to Blackboard may be to copy and paste your questions from Word into a Blackboard test. Respondus can be used to convert more lengthy exams for Blackboard. Formatting an exam for Respondus can take time, so you’ll want to consider whether its use is worth the time to download and use it. COLRS can help you determine which approach may be easier for your course.
As Provost Papini mentioned in his e-mail to faculty yesterday, UIS recommends two proctoring solutions for remote courses. The first solution is Respondus Monitor with LockDown Browser . Respondus Monitor is a fully- automated tool that uses a student’s webcam to record the exam session. Suspicious testing behavior is automatically flagged by the software, and instructors are alerted to preview the alert flags. Respondus Monitor is free for faculty and students to use and it is integrated with Blackboard. LockDown Browser must be used to use Respondus Monitor. To use Respondus Monitor, follow the directions for preparing a test for LockDown browser. After selecting Respondus LockDown browser, also select the Respondus Monitor option. Students will be required to download and use LockDown browser for the exam.
The second proctoring solution is Examity Online Proctoring. Through the student’s webcam, Examity uses live proctors to observe and record the exam session. There is a fee for students to use Examity. Unfortunately, Examity’s proctoring facility has been shutdown because of COVID-19. Presently, they expect to be closed for a couple more weeks. If you hope to use Examity, you must e-mail COLRS to let us know the course that will have a proctored exam. Examity provides us with weekly updates on when they expect live, online proctoring to resume. We are hoping they will be resuming live, online proctoring by finals week, but there is a chance that might not be the case. In the event that live, online proctoring will not be available in time, COLRS will work with you to move to Respondus Monitor.
As our classes and meetings turn to synchronous, online options, you may be finding yourself more exhausted than normal. We have heard from both faculty and staff that online, synchronous video conversations are more tiring than their face-to-face equivalents. Dr. Steven Hickman, UC San Diego Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine & Public Health, provides these tips for managing Zoom exhaustion:
Dr. Suzanne Degges-White, NIU Professor of Counseling and Higher Education, provides additional tips in reducing Zoom fatigue:
Despite the downside of Zoom exhaustion, COLRS staff appreciate having the ability to see and connect with UIS faculty and staff using Zoom during the last few weeks. Although it does not replace the face-to-face connections that we miss, we hope that you are finding Zoom useful in connecting with your students and colleagues.
Now that we have completed two weeks of remote teaching, it is the ideal time to have a “how’s it going” conversation with your students. This personal outreach can be beneficial in seeing how each one of your students is adapting to their new learning environment and if they are experiencing any new personal, family, or work-related changes that may be impacting their learning. While some students who are struggling will reach out to you on their own, others may not share any challenges they are experiencing until they are asked.
Some faculty have found value in having a phone call or Zoom session with each student. Others have reached out using a personalized e-mail to each student. No matter what your preference may be, you may consider asking your students questions such as:
When reconnecting with your students, they may express issues or concerns that expand beyond your course. The Keep Learning – Guide to Remote Learning at UIS may direct you to campus resources that may be of assistance in helping them. The Counseling Center can provide remote sessions for students. TeleHealth appointments can be requested from Health Services. Other Student Affairs Offices and Centers can be reached via e-mail or via voice message.
As emphasized as a value in the UIS Strategic Compass, the UIS community seeks to understand the world around us through the pursuit of scholarship that is challenging and significant. In the past couple of weeks, COLRS has been approached by UIS faculty who would like to discuss research possibilities relating to the campus-wide transition to remote teaching. If you are interested in participating in an initial discussion about potential project ideas, please e-mail colrs@uis.edu. In your e-mail, please share any immediate areas of interest that you would like to raise in the discussion. COLRS will coordinate the scheduling of a Zoom session in the upcoming weeks for those who show an interest.
For the next couple of weeks, COLRS will be sending out a Teaching Remotely Tip of the Day that comes from the most frequently asked questions by faculty. All Remote Teaching Tips are archived on the COLRS blog. The Teaching Remotely at UIS website is another starting point for faculty who are converting their courses to alternative formats. This week, open Office Hours will be hosted by COLRS staff daily at 10 am for faculty to ask pedagogy-related questions. In addition, you may call COLRS at 217-206-7317 or e-mail colrs@uis.edu to schedule a one-to-one meeting with any COLRS staff member.
In online courses, and now with “remote delivery” of previously face-to-face courses, discussion forums provide a place for student-to-student and instructor-to-student interaction. Within discussion forums, students share thoughts and review the ideas of others modeled through collegial, dialogic exchanges. Research shows the benefits of discussions for student engagement and learning.
To help alleviate discussion board burn-out, here are some recommendations and resources that will help us keep our discussions fresh and prevent excessive workload:
Additional resources:
Successful Strategies for Creating Online Discussion Prompts.
CREST+ Model: Writing Effective Online Discussion Questions by Lynn Akin and Diane Neal.
Please note: This guide replaces the Course Combination Request Form that was formerly used for Blackboard courses.
WATCH A VIDEO TUTORIAL ON HOW TO COMBINE CANVAS COURSES.
Cross-listing allows you to move enrollments from individual courses and combine them into one course. This feature is helpful for instructors who teach several sections of the same course, or whose courses are cross-listed in several different departments, and only want to manage course data in one location. Instructors can allow students to view users in other sections or limit them to only view users in the same section.
WARNING: Cross-listing should only be done at the beginning of a semester or before a semester has begun. Student progress, including assignment and quiz submissions, will not move with the section enrollments. If you cross-list your course after students have begun working on their coursework, their progress (including grades) will be lost.
Your primary course is the course where you will manage your course materials, assignments, and grades. Student enrollments in all other Canvas sections will be moved to your primary course.
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NOTE: If you accidentally merge the wrong section, and you need to de-cross-list it, contact COLRS at colrs@uis.edu. Student progress in your course, including assignment submissions and grades, are not preserved in the cross-listing and de-cross-listing process, so this should only be done before your course has begun.
If you already have a student with a documented disability with the Office of Disability Services, please consider their unique learning needs as you adapt to a virtual classroom. However, twenty-five percent of the population has some form of physical, learning, or cognitive disability so you may have a student with a need and you are unaware of it. A virtual classroom environment may create learning challenges for students who may not have those challenges in a face-to-face environment. COLRS has accessibility resources and a searchable accessibility blog that provides guidance on improving the accessibility of digital content.
As you prepare your course for teaching remotely, here are some basic accessibility tips
For additional assistance in improving the accessibility of your virtual classroom, please contact the COLRS Campus Accessibility Specialist. The Digital Accessibility Remediation Team is able to help you make your digital content accessible remotely.
Finally, UIS employees and students are able to download and use JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion for free on their home computer through June 30. These products provide screen reading, screen magnification, and/or visual enhancement capabilities.
What is Zoombombing?
Zoombombing is a new form of Internet trolling in which a participant uses Zoom’s screensharing features to interrupt and disrupt meetings and classes. Many Zoom sessions, including several universities classes, have experienced Zoombombers this week.
How Can You Prevent Zoombombing in Your Classes?
You can use your meeting and host settings to prevent students from distracting other students in your class session, as well as preventing unwanted participants from joining your class session. Some suggestions include:
Despite the possible challenges associated with Zoombombers, Zoom continues to be a valuable learning tool that allows your students to maintain a sense of connectivity with you and their classmates. You don’t need to use all of these preventive measures. Choose one or two that allows you to use the Zoom to meet the needs of your class. If you need help talking about which feature might be the best in your particular class, please contact COLRS at colrs@uis.edu.
UIS Zoom Resources:
ITS Zoom Support Page at UIS
Consideration for Using Zoom as a Remote Classroom
The Citrix Virtual Desktop allows students, faculty, and staff (whether on or off campus) to access a virtual computer that runs all software for which UIS has licensing. To access Citrix, visit https://uiscitrix.uis.edu and log in with your NetID and password. You can then use a Windows desktop with course-related software installed and ready to use.
Do Use Citrix For…
Don’t Use Citrix For…
Zoom allows you to schedule meetings with multiple occurrences, so that each occurrence uses the same meeting ID and settings. You can schedule these meetings in daily, weekly, and monthly increments. You can also set a recurring meeting to be used at any time. Meeting IDs for recurring meetings expire 365 days after the meeting was last started.
For more tips on using Zoom, check out these Zoom Task Cards.
Blackboard Announcements are an ideal way to post time-sensitive information critical to student success. Add announcements to your Blackboard for these types of course activities:
You can also use your announcements to offer encouragement and reassurance for navigating these challenging times.
Announcements can be sent immediately to students via email. When creating your announcement in Blackboard, simply check “send copy of this announcement immediately” and each student will receive a copy in email right away. They will also see the announcement when they log into Blackboard.
For more information about creating and sending announcements in Blackboard, please check out the COLRS blog.
While we are scrambling to transition face-to-face courses to remote teaching, we’d like to remind everyone that perfection isn’t necessary.
In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, we offer the following ideas regarding assessments for your consideration.
Resources:
Everybody Ready for the Big Migration to Online College? Actually, No by Kevin Carey, NYT TheUpshot
Keep Calm and Keep Teaching by Jody Greene
Please do a bad job of putting your course online by Rebecca Barrett-Fox
While we are scrambling to transition face-to-face courses to remote teaching, we’d like to remind everyone that perfection isn’t necessary.
In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, we offer the following ideas for your consideration.
Remember, perfection is not necessary. Communicate with students. Simplify where possible. Ask for help when you need it.
Resources:
Everybody Ready for the Big Migration to Online College? Actually, No by Kevin Carey, NYT TheUpshot
Keep Calm and Keep Teaching by Jody Greene
Please do a bad job of putting your course online by Rebecca Barrett-Fox
As your students adjust to the many changes that are impacting their lives and education, lessening any uncertainty through your interactions and communications with them becomes ever important. If you haven’t already reached out to your students, it is critical that you do so within the next few days. These initial communications should orient your students to their new learning environment and any tools that will be used. If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed with where to start, the Quality Matters Emergency Remote Instruction Checklist provides useful tips and actionable strategies for adapting to these changes. Some highlights from the checklist include:
COLRS continues to be available when you need us. Don’t forget that the Teaching Remotely Faculty Champions are also willing to help with questions you may have. And when you need a short break, check out the “I Will Survive, Coronavirus version for teachers going online.”
In the last week we have seen immense change to our daily lives, and change which continues or of which we are reminded with every email, from every possible source down to how your gas station perks program is handling the virus. From a teaching and learning standpoint there have been varied reactions as veteran online educators and those who have never taught online are now required to teach remotely. So one let me say, to myself and you, relax we will get through this. And two let’s remember accessibility as we make these remote changes.
Accessibility? Yes, accessibility. About 25% of the population has some form of disability, physical, learning, or cognitive. Typically, about 10% of our students register with their office of disability services regarding one of these disabilities. This means as we move to remote teaching, many of these students will experience issues related to accessibility which they may not have in our face to face classes. So thinking about accessibility as we make these changes will not only help these students, but all students who are making this move.
So here are a few things to think about.
Finally, I know this adds an extra layer of things to think about, however I think we can all agree that making something as clear for our students to understand the first time makes it easier on all of us. I’ll close with a link to something I wrote a few weeks ago about how students expect a certain behavior from their digital files, a user experience, and when they don’t encounter that it is very frustrating.
As millions of people around the world shift to working from home, the unprecedented transformation of our behavior has put a large strain on internet infrastructure which can lead to slow internet speeds.
Here are some ideas to help us address this challenge:
The following companies are offering free or low-cost internet service during the crisis:
Those using Zoom web conferencing to connect with students, may find
that Zoom uses significant bandwidth, especially for video calls. To
address this concern:
From discussion boards in Blackboard to group work, journaling, web conferences, and collaborative group projects, we have many strategies to engage our students and keep our classroom communities connected.
As announced on Monday, March 16, 2020, ITS has secured a UIS site license for Zoom, which means that all faculty, staff, and students will have access to this web conferencing platform. Zoom is a robust web conferencing platform for instructors and staff to engage with students and one another.
Zoom is integrated with Blackboard. Faculty can create, schedule, and launch Zoom sessions from within Blackboard, and students can easily join those sessions. Here is a quick video showing how to add the Zoom integration into your Blackboard courses.
Synchronous class meetings for remote teaching should be held during normal on campus meeting times.
Zoom as a Classroom Tool
Zoom can be an excellent platform for delivering lectures, holding class discussions, supporting group work and class debates, and enabling student presentations.
Zoom Usability for Students with Slow or Intermittent Internet Access
Zoom is designed to work on multiple platforms (Mac and Windows, plus mobile devices). Zoom also compresses audio and video feeds to make them work on slower internet connections. Below are some strategies for providing support for students with slow, unreliable, or intermittent internet access, or other circumstances that prevent joining a synchronous session held during normal class meeting times. Being flexible and forgiving will be key to helping all our students continuing their learning.
Zoom Accessibility Considerations
If you have a student with accommodations in your course, the UIS Office of Disability Services will continue working with the student and all their instructors. Zoom can support live captioning, if required.
Links in this post:
All COLRS Remote Teaching Tips: http://blogs.uis.edu/colrs/category/emergency-remote-teaching/
Zoom at UIS: https://www.uis.edu/informationtechnologyservices/connect/zoom/
Zoom Live captioning: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Getting-started-with-closed-captioning
Classroom Assessment Techniques: http://blogs.uis.edu/colrs/files/2015/10/50CATS.pdf
Uploading media files to Kaltura: https://blogs.uis.edu/colrs/2014/07/01/kaltura-media-overview/
Create Discussion Forums in Blackboard: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Interact/Discussions/Create_Discussions/Create_Forums
We understand that test integrity is critical. We offer these suggestions for considering testing options.
1. Instead of a test, you might consider alternative assessments such as a project, paper, or other type of assessment. Vanderbilt University has a nice website on Classroom Assessment Techniques that you might find helpful as you think through your curriculum. COLRS staff is also available to assist in thinking about alternative assessments for your courses.
2. Respondus Monitor is a good solution for low-stakes tests. UIS has a contract with Respondus that includes both Respondus LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor, a fully-automated proctoring solution for online tests that builds on Respondus LockDown Browser. This option does not cost the student any additional fees. When possible, please use this option to improve affordability for our students. Using the student’s webcam, Respondus Monitor records the exam session. Suspicious behavior is flagged automatically. To use Respondus Monitor, follow the directions for using Respondus LockDown Browser and then select the Respondus Monitor option.
3. Examity is the preferred solution for all high-stakes tests. Remember that students pay an extra fee based on the level of proctoring that you, the faculty member, choose. This may cause hardships for students who may be effected significantly through loss of work or dealing with healthcare issues because of COVID-19. You should always share the cost of Examity which ranges from $10 – $17 per hour with your students so that they are never surprised by being asked to provide a credit or debit card for a test proctoring. Respondus Monitor is free to use for students.
As we move forward in responding to this difficult and challenging time, please remember that COLRS staff will do everything we can to assist you in the important and very difficult work that you are all undertaking to finish this semester.
Our friends at the Brookens Library, share the following message with UIS faculty.
In these unprecedented times and in an ever-evolving situation, faculty and staff of Brookens Library are available to provide remote services for you and your students. Library Faculty are available to assist you in finding materials that can be accessed online at no cost to your students.
In response to COVID-19, the larger educational community has been active in curating virtual resources for educators needing to quickly convert on-ground courses to alternative formats. As COLRS discovers resources that may be useful, we will share them here in this blog post.
Merlot Materials (can be filtered by discipline)
Interactive Simulations for Science and Math
A spreadsheet of online resources organized by science subject (curated at large)
Merlot Collection of Virtual Labs
LabXchange Foundational Concepts and Techniques in Biotechnology
Interactive Simulations for Science and Math
Online Lab Toolkit (Office of Digital Learning at Penn State University)
Digital Theatre+ Access Resources for Remote Learning
Teaching Theatre Online: A Shift in Pedagogy Amidst Coronavirus Outbreak
L.A. Theatre Works Offering 25 Audio Recordings of Stage Plays for Educators
If you’re traveling out of town, or just need to connect to campus from home, we have some tips for keeping connected with ease.
For additional help with the VPN client, remote desktop access, or Box, contact ITS.
Files can be uploaded from a local drive or the course itself, and can be documents, spreadsheets, Powerpoints, etc.
The email tool allows you to send email to other people in your course without launching a separate email program. You can send email to individual users or to groups of users.
Blackboard keeps no record of your email, whether you send or receive it. Any email you receive from Blackboard appears in your UIS email inbox. Keep a copy of important messages in case you need them at a later date.
You can send email to these users:
Note: Recipients of each email won’t see the email addresses of other recipients.
Note: To select multiple users in a list on a Windows computer, press the Shift key and select the first and last users. To select users out of sequence, press the Ctrl key and select each user needed. On a Mac, press the Command key instead of the Ctrl key. You can also use the Select All function to send an email to all users.
Announcements are an ideal way to post time-sensitive information critical to course success. Add announcements for these types of course activities:
You can add, edit, and delete announcements from the Announcements page. When you add an announcement, you can also send it as an email to students in your course. Students receive the announcement even if they don’t log into your course.
Announcements appear in the order you post them. The most recent announcement appears first.
About a month ago, I posted about an issue with the accessibility checker within Office 365 v the one in Office 2016. After a few weeks of meetings and testing we’ve come up with a path forward, currently for UIS, and this can be applied within the UI system.
Office 365 by default has some of the accessibility checker functions disabled. However, they can be enabled. Most of those who are currently using 365 at UIS are doing so on their own laptops or at home. For these individuals we recommend doing final accessibility checking on an Office 2016 machine. If it is your laptop, IT can help you install a registry key which will enable the 2016 level of checking in 365.
IT will ensure this is enabled on new machines which receive Office 2019 which are maintained by them. It is possible to do a global push of these settings, but this is not currently what we will do at UIS since most of the machines with 365 are not university owned.
I have a wonderful team of student workers who do remediation of documents and video captioning. Recently two examples of their angst as students, highlighted the benefits of thinking about user experience and universal design for learning by making content accessible.
One of my students has a second job, and at that job she is allowed to quietly do online homework. This means she can watch captioned videos only. For one class, she was required to watch around 20 hours of video, however it didn’t have captions, not even auto generated captions. For a student who has personally captioned several hundred hours of video, she was more than a little upset with her professor. She is just trying to make the most of her time, and do her assignments, not having captions impeded that.
Another student, sent me a message the other day that she could not highlight some text in a pdf to copy to her notes. She’s working on a paper and thought a few sentences from the required reading really nailed the point. I knew that the pdf had not had any accessibility work done, so I told her to download it, go through the first few steps of making it accessible, and then copy the required quote, which worked.
In both these cases the students don’t need the files to be accessible because they have a a physical, learning or cognitive disability. They are used to files working a certain way because they do this work at least 20 hours a week, and they are busy people. In their attempts to do their real work, as students, they were inhibited from learning. Yes, accessibility certainly benefits students who may have a hearing or visual impairment. However, if we make content accessible, universally design our classes for all learners, and think about the user experience it will benefit all our students.
I have a team of student workers who remediate a lot of files in Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and videos. Many of these files come from faculty as we work on their classes, but we’re working on a growing number of files from campus offices. I too, work on some specific, special cases.
Recently, I’ve had several instances where a file had known issues, but the faculty member or office staff swore that they had used the accessibility checker and there were no issues. With some very low level sleuthing I figured out that everyone with these issues was using office 365. This led me to copying or recreating some of these issues, checking them in Word or PowerPoint 2016 and Office 365. Sure enough the issues were not caught in 365, but they were caught in 2016. I used NVDA to read these test documents, and as expected they were still issues. I contacted several colleagues and they too noted that these were issues.
Since most people are not experts in accessibility, and using the built in checkers is the safe guard that many faculty and office staff are learning and using, it is my recommendation for faculty and staff at UIS and within the UI system, to do their final accessibility checking in Word or PowerPoint 2016.
I am confident that Microsoft will remedy this in Office 365 in the future, but until that date, for accessibility, let’s stick with 2016.
Currently, I am finishing the book Haben, by Haben Girma. She is the first deaf-blind person to graduate from Harvard Law. The book ties her story growing up deaf-blind in the US with the heritage and struggles of her parents coming from Eritrea, in eastern Africa. For me, this work merges with several other works I’ve read this year on empires, oppression, race in America, religion in America, and several LGBTQ biographies. And the theme that emerges from these works is weariness.
Weariness, really? Yes, weariness. Imagine, that on a daily basis you were judged not by the content of your character, but by the color of your skin, the way you practiced religion, the person you were attracted to, or your physical abilities. Because of this you had to constantly be on guard, to watch how you acted in case you were judged more harshly than others. And frequently you were asked to share your experiences with others, to explain how you felt, so they might be able to get a sense of what you experience. But too often your own experiences were questioned, discounted, deemed invalid. With all of that you still need to go to school, work, be involved in family and organizations. That is the level of weariness which I see.
So for 2020, I’d like to think about reducing this weariness. I encourage people to read books on similar topics, and believe the author’s experiences. Do your own research to determine the struggles others have. And from an accessibility standpoint think about the power you have to make your corner of the world more accessible. Use Word documents instead of PDFs. Run the accessibility checker within Word. Run the accessibility checker in PowerPoint. Provide captions and transcripts for your videos. Think about how you can leverage your position to make a larger corner of your world accessible. Can you contact the textbook publishers, and check on the accessibility of their software? Can you ask for help in determining whether websites are accessible? Can you contact people to make the websites accessible? Do you know what software you use on a daily basis, and is it accessible? Are you in a position to question people about improving the accessibility of that software, or finding accessible software?
Over the weekend Harvard’s lawyers finally came to a decision over the almost five year issue of captions, they have a consent decree. What does the decree say? In the matter of violation of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Harvard denies the allegations. However, Harvard agrees to caption any video or audio content created by Harvard or posted on their sites after Dec 1, 2019. And for any audio or video content produced before that date, they are willing to provide captions if they receive a specific request by an individual with a disability.
This was one of several cases brought by the National Association of the Deaf. Previous agreements were reached with Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix all during or prior to 2016. So why is this case important? It has dragged on for almost five years, and been seen as a test case. As Harvard goes, so goes the nation. So while Harvard is able to deny the allegations, the end result is the same, they will caption their new audio and video content. With the recent Dominoes case, businesses and educational institutions will be very concerned about their website accessibility. With this consent decree, schools with smaller budgets will be more concerned about making their video content accessible. Harvard has presumably dodged a very large or expensive bullet, not having to immediately caption any of the large catalog of videos they were sitting on prior to December 1. However, this is a win for accessibility. One of the oldest, and most storied institutions of higher education in the United States is now complying with accessibility laws, whether they deny it or not.
Over the past two years the student workers at UIS have worked on a little over 400 PowerPoint files with over 10,000 slides in those files. PowerPoints account for about 17% of the files we work on overall. In that time I have posted on how to use the accessibility checker in PowerPoint, proper use of lists, checking for color issues, a primer on alt text, and specifically alt text for math and science. In many cases, such as adding alt text, making the file accessible can add time overall. However, using proper slide layout can not only help make a PowerPoint more accessible, it can help save you time in the long run.
I must confess when I began using PowerPoint about 19 years ago, I would right click on a slide and paste an image, then resize it. I believe back then I could also right click and create a textbox to add a title or content, and resize it as well, let’s call this the “outdated method” . With many of the PowerPoints we see today I think that same thing is occurring. However, let me introduce you to using layouts.
In PowerPoint 2016 for PC you can access this feature on the insert tab, on the far left there is a new slide option with a drop down menu. This will give you about 9 different options for slide layouts. My guess is the two most commonly used are the “title and content” or the “two content” options.
In PowerPoint 2016 for Mac you can access this from the home tab, on the near left there is a new slide drop down menu. From there you will have the same options as for the PC.
If you select the title and content, you have a pre-made box which you can enter the title of the slide. You also have a content box, which will allow you to enter text, a table, a graph, smart art, a picture, or a video, just by clicking in the box for text, or clicking on the corresponding icon within the content box.
By using this layout you have solved one of the common accessibility problems, reading order. This means that a screen reader can intuit, from your use of the pre-made layouts that you would like the title read first, and the content text, image alt text, or table read next. If you use a two content layout it will know which order to read as well, title, content box one, and content box two. If you create slides using the outdated method, a screen reader will not be able to read the content in a necessarily logical order. As an added bonus if you use the layout features and need to convert the PowerPoint to an outline format, the titles and content text will transfer. If you use the outdated method, none of the content will transfer over.
What about slides where you just want a large picture, or you cut and past the same title over and over, perhaps “Civil War”? From a universal design standpoint, a unique title per slide will allow students to reference the slide on discussion boards, in class, or with classmates. Referencing the “Pickett’s Charge” slide is more precise, and helpful, than referencing that “Civil War slide, in the middle somewhere”.
And I promised this would save time, right? Using slides that already have these title and content boxes built in will save you several extra clicks per slide. If we think about 2 clicks per slide for the 10,000 slides we’ve worked on (estimating 1 second per click), that would save about 2 hours and 45 minutes, enough to enjoy a film in the theater.
And finally, if you use the layouts, and decide that you would like to change the design or look of the slides, using the built in layout will allow that to occur more fluidly, with less resizing and moving on your part. An image placed on a blank slide with “insert picture” will not move based on slide design, one placed in the content box will move with different design templates.
Learn our top tips for wrapping up your online course, including the best practices for ensuring good returns on your course evaluations.
Time is the commodity, which none of us seems to have enough of. For those who make their own class videos, I’d like to save you some time. Based on most cloud based video services, the average watch time of a video is 2:03. When we’re thinking about educational videos I like to think of this as the maximum per video in an introductory or 100 level course, perhaps adding about 2 minutes per course level maxing out at around 10 minutes. However, different disciplines may have different student demographics, and for those faculty I’d like to show you a way to check out how much your students are watching.
When you first login to BlackBoard, on the left, usually at the top is the My Media option, click on it.
You will then see a list of your media you use in your class, select one of the videos to click on. Either click on the video or the video title.
Below the video on the right is a back button and an actions drop down menu, select the actions drop down menu and select analytics.
You will then see the analytics for the video.
There is some interesting data about the video, which is about 27 minutes. It has been visited 29 times, and played 24 times. To protect student information I am not showing that on the right of the analytics screen you can see which students played the video, and the number of times they did so. Several students played the video a few times.
I think the most useful piece of information here is that the students stop watching about 38% of the way through the video, at 10:43. About 16 minutes of the video is unviewed. So how can I use this data to improve my videos, and help my students learn more? I can do one of two things:
So where does the time savings come in? If we know the average overall time our students are watching our videos and we make them within that range, then can save that time to create a shorter, better video they will be more likely to watch entirely.
And to bring this back to accessibility I’d like to point out two things:
A final note. On the analytics screen in the upper right there is a dropdown menu which should default to 30 days. You can choose the amount of time the analytics cover. So if you are looking back on a Fall video, select Last 365 days, if you’ve used it for several years use the custom setting and go back as far as you want.
This is my 37th blog post, and my 8th on videos. I have talked about evidence based video lengths, correcting captions on YouTube videos you don’t control, audio descriptions, captioning, and getting a clean transcript from a caption file. Today I’d like to write about how to improve the overall quality of a video, and the answer is scripting.
I have worked on, and sat through many videos which are, to a certain extent, improv. This means that the creator sat down cold, and began recording all in one sitting. The video portion could have a talking head, or a PowerPoint, a screen recording, a drawing, or even show some sort of event or chemical reaction. In a video like this there could be a lot of filler words like um, ah, ok, a… Or perhaps there are interjections based on occurrences during the recording such as running out of ink, trying to find the proper tab for a function in the software, or yelling at someone in the house that the laundry is upstairs. For the student this can be distracting. And for those of us who don’t like hearing our own voices in a recording, it can make us cringe even more to hear, in our own voice, “someone let the dog out, um ah, where was I?”
An effective way to decrease these instances is to write a script for the video. Take the time to write down what you plan to say. Edit it a few times. And then read the script during the recording. Depending on your setup, you may want to print it out or have it displayed on an extra monitor. I recommend increasing the font size so it is easier to read as well. Doing this will decrease the ums, ahs, and oks. It cannot prevent a barking dog, but it can allow you to scrap the recording with the barking dog, and not worry about where you were to say what you meant to say. It will also give you an initial transcript of the video. Depending on how you are captioning your videos, you might also be able to upload the transcript and allow your video hosting platform to sync it.
In the 1980’s, Dominoes created a mascot called the Noid (pictured above), a super-villianesque character clad in a red jumpsuit. His goal was to ensure your pizza wasn’t hot or delicious. Today the company that gave us the Noid is in the news over an accessibility lawsuit.
Three years ago a blind customer wanted to order a pizza online, and was unable to do so using screen reading software. This customer filed a claim against Dominoes under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Over the last three years this case made its way to federal court. The federal court decided that customers could bring suits against companies for inaccessible websites and mobile aps. Dominoes appealed the case to the Supreme Court, who decided yesterday not to hear the case, which means the federal court ruling stands. For accessibility rights this is a win. For many large companies this will be a major concern.
However, it shouldn’t be. According to the court documents Dominoes could have made the website accessible for $38,000, their revenue last year was $3.5 billion. It is probable that the legal fees for Dominoes were higher than the $38,000. The lesson for other companies and educational institutions should be, it is cheaper to make content accessible in the long run. A greater lesson is that universally designing websites, videos, and documents is not only in the best interest of the consumer, but of the company. By designing in this way, we can all avoid the Noid of inaccessibility.
Alternative text or alt-text, is a tough issue for some people to wrap their heads around. In general, it is a description of a picture, table, or graph in a webpage, Word doc, PowerPoint, or PDF. In the past I wrote a primer on alt-text. When we think about math or science, alt-text can become more difficult as sometimes the equations themselves are the image, and need to be described in mathematical or scientific language. Last spring I wrote about the site wide license we acquired for Equatio which can help with some of these issues.
However, I still receive questions, often from people in math and science, about how to write alt-text for an exam when the alt-text might be the correct answer for the question. Sometimes the solution is revamping the question to cover the same idea, but in a slightly different manner. Other times, the solution is more difficult. The NWEA Image Description Guidelines for Assessments should help in these instances. This 116 page guide covers many typical charts, diagrams, and equations used in Math and Science exams, and how to develop good alt-text which will not give away the answer.
In this workshop, learn our top tips for assessing and tweaking your online course at the midpoint of the semester, as well as the process for online proctored exams and more.
Various scholars and researchers have summarized how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide to writing measurable and effective learning outcomes. This is important when designing an online class, because without a clear idea of what you want your students to have mastered at the end of the class, it is difficult to design assessments and activities that will help your students achieve the intended outcome.
Click to enlarge
From Arizona State University:
From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library:
You can use Bloom’s taxonomy to identify verbs to describe student learning. Examples of learning outcomes verbs for library instruction include:
There are some verbs to avoid when writing learning outcomes. These verbs are vague and often not observable or measurable. For example, how would you measure whether someone has “become familiar with” a particular tool? Use a more specific verb. If you want students to “understand” something, think more closely about what you want them to be able to do or produce as a result of their “understanding.”
Verbs to avoid:
From the University of Arkansas:
How Bloom’s works with course level and lesson level objectives:
Steps towards writing effective learning objectives:
The official system of record for your class list is the Enterprise Self-Service system. This is also the system where students register and drop courses and instructors enter midterm and final grades.
I have taught online classes since 2003, and back then we were often told to make our content into a PDF. That way it could be read by anyone, no matter what type of system they had. That advice has been handed down over the years and become canon, thou shalt post things as a PDF.
However, when it comes to document accessibility, we should not follow canon. PDFs are highly problematic for screen reader users. Some PDFs, like a scanned document, are not initially accessible to screen readers. Remediation can be done to these files, but it takes training and time. When training my student workers it takes about 35 hours to fully train them on PDF remediation. Documents initially written in Word and saved as a PDF have a higher probability of being read by a screen reader, but without some remediation it will still be difficult. For instance a user may have to listen to the whole document to get to the last page, rather than navigating there by using headers.
So what is the answer? If you are posting content in an LMS or on a webpage the best thing to do is post the content as html or as a page within the LMS. The next best thing to do would be to post the content as a Word file, attached or linked. Of course use the accessibility checker to make sure everything is accessible in the Word file. At this point in workshops I am often asked a few questions. The first is what about scans. Scans can be made accessible, my suggestion is to work with the library and they can put your scan on e-reserve and make it accessible for you. The second is, anybody can open a PDF, that’s not true with Word, is it? If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat you have to download Acrobat Reader. If someone doesn’t have Word they can download doc viewer from Microsoft. (Or PowerPoint viewer or Excel viewer) And for students on our campus, they all have access to Office 365. The third is, I don’t want anyone to edit my file, and they can’t with PDF, right? Actually they can edit your PDF, everyone on campus has access to Acrobat and if someone wanted to edit your PDF they could. But, you can lock your Word file to mostly achieve the same intended end. You can follow the directions from Microsoft on locking a Word file.
There is still a small place for PDFs. However, in most instances all of the same information can be shared in a webpage or a Word file.
If you are getting ready to teach online for the first time, there are several critical items to consider:
While this may seem like a challenge, COLRS staff is ready to assist. Please contact your individual liaison for individual consultation, or contact our main office for any further assistance you may need:
Office hours: Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Phone: 217-206-7317
Email: colrs@uis.edu
Liaison to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Carrie Levin, 217-206-8499, levin.carrie@uis.edu
Liaison to the College of Education and Human Services and the College of Public Affairs and Administration: Emily Boles, 217-206-8311, boles.emily@uis.edu
Liaison to the College of Business and Management: Michele Gribbins, 217-206-8251, mgribbin@uis.edu
In this workshop, learn our top tips for starting the semester in an online course. Later this term, we’ll offer tips on the midpoint and concluding your online courses.
The following is from Constructivism and Online Education by Doolittle:
Constructivism is a theory of knowledge acquisition, not a theory of pedagogy; thus, the nexus of constructivism and online education is tentative, at best. Constructivism posits that knowledge acquisition occurs amid four assumptions:
These four assumptions have led, indirectly, to eight primary pedagogical recommendations:
The question then arises, can an online medium support this pedagogy that is based on the constructivist assumptions?
An issue we frequently have is that a faculty member has a great video on YouTube which they use for class, but the captions aren’t anywhere near the necessary 99% accuracy they need.
Now you can use DIY Captions. Once you goto the page scroll down to the second search box which allows you to enter a URL.
Paste in a link to a public YouTube video which has captions, and hit enter. Depending on the length of the video it could take a few seconds to a few minutes. You will then see a screen which looks like this with the video, an editable box, and the transcript on the right.
You will be able to play the video, and see the transcript. The captions appear one line at a time which allows you to quickly edit them, or hit tab to continue if, or once they are correct. Once you are done you can select the dropdown menu to download the caption file.
The time tagged file (.srt) is the caption file, and the the plain text (.txt) right above it is the transcript file. You should download both, and upload the transcript near where you link to the video. If you select the Open Video in Amara from the dropdown menu it will open the video in
Amara , and you can upload the caption file. The video is hosted through YouTube and displayed through Amara with the accurate captions. You will need to use the Amara URL when you link to it in your classes.
For those who would like to make their conference presentations more accessible or understandable, Microsoft has recently released an add-in for PowerPoint. By following the hyperlink you’ll find the first item on the page is “presentation Translator for PowerPoint” Download Now. Click Download. You’ll then be taken to a new page with a dropdown menu for your language, and next to it another download button. At this point there are 10 language options. Select your language, click Download. This will now download the add-in, once it has downloaded, select it from your browser’s download area to begin the install. Depending upon your current configuration you may be required to download a few extra Microsoft-add ins as well. Then you can open your PowerPoint, and under the Slide Show tab you should have a new option on the far right, “start subtitles”. Click it.
You can now select what language you will be speaking and the language you would like for subtitles. At this point if you select that you are speaking German and would like German subtitles, you will get German subtitles. You are able to do this for any of the 10 language options.
If you select you are speaking Chinese and would like English subtitles you will get English subtitles. You are able to convert Chinese to English and English to Chinese only at this point in the live subtitles.
However, once the PowerPoint opens you will have a QR code which you can share with your audience. By using the QR code your audience can follow the presentation on their device seeing a live translation into any of the other 8 languages. So if you are speaking in German, with German subtitles, the audience can view the translation on their mobile device or laptop in English. The audience is also able to ask questions via their device in their language and have the question translated.
At this point the software only works on the PC version of PowerPoint, and you must have an internet connection, and a microphone. The subtitling is done by an AI engine and is about 80-85% accurate. It will become more accurate the more you use it, if you continually use the same device. This should not be used for making recorded course videos as the captions cannot be corrected to 99% accuracy nor turned off. This is an excellent tool for live presentations, or presentations with different language speakers.
COLRS Teaching and Technology blog: http://blogs.uis.edu/colrs/
UIS Information Technology Services: http://www.uis.edu/informationtechnologyservices/
Keep students informed.
Syllabus is the center of your course.
Course Calendar – Keep dates in one location.
Make your course materials accessible.
Discussion Board
CREST+ Model: Writing Effective Online Discussion Questions
UW Oshkosh Discussion Tips and Pointers
Announcements
Create a consistent day and time for deadlines.
Create a consistent format for your course.
Give feedback within established parameters.
Rubrics
Grading Rubrics in Blackboard written info
Graded Assignments Workshop Recording
Announcements
NetID-Authenticated anonymous feedback tool
Check roster in Faculty Self Service. Blackboard is not the system of record.
Enter Grades in Faculty Self-Service
End-of-course Evaluations
Strategies for increasing response rates
Student -drop emails from ITS – Hiding and Removing Students from your course
Faculty Focus is an excellent resource to locate the latest trends in online education. See recent articles and sign-up for email or RSS updates when new articles are posted.
University of Central Florida’s Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository
Over spring break we acquired a site wide license for digital math software Equatio. This means any faculty, staff or students with UIS email can download the software. This gives you a two and half minute overview of the software. The software is designed for STEM fields which use equations allowing input by typing, writing, or dictating equations. The software can also read out equations in a paused video, a PDF, Word form, or almost any digital format. In the coming weeks we’ll talk about ways to use this software to help with accessibility as well. This week I’d just like to let you know how to download it.
First goto the Equatio website.
Scroll down to the first section and you will see a choose your platform button. Click the button
When you click on the choose your platform button you will have four options: Windows, Mac OS, Chrome, and a webapp. Select the version you would like to install then click the install button. For this walk through we are selecting windows.
You will then have a new window which will allow you to download for Windows or Mac, for this walkthrough are selecting Windows.
Since Chrome is the browser the file has downloaded to the bottom left hand corner, the EquatioIO.exe file.
When you select the file, a new screen will pop up asking you to accept and install, click accept and install.
Another screen will popup asking you how you would like to authorize your account. For UIS you can click either Microsoft or Google. On the screen which pops up, not shown, please enter your UIS email address.
This will take you to the final screen where you can enter your NetID and password.
Equatio is now installed. Please check out the Equatio website for more on how to use the software. There will be a live software webinar for UIS faculty and staff on April 10, from 2-4 pm. If you are interested in attending the webinar please email vmart02s@uis.edu. It will be recorded and we will share that info with you at the time. We will have some more examples of how to use Equatio in the coming weeks.
Recently I presented at the 44th annual ICCHE conference on the work of our student accessibility workers, and it seems fitting to share some of the results of this work with UIS faculty and staff. UIS made a bold statement by hiring a team of student workers to assist my office with the task of institutional accessibility in February 2018. By mid-March four students were hired, and began their training. The student worker team launched the accessibility work in late March.
In Spring 2018, College Deans provided priority class lists for accessibility work. Faculty received communication through my office regarding how to submit files and students began work. After much monitoring, shuffling, and training on the spot for difficult files, together, we all learned ways to more fully provide accessibility services to all of our students. Many faculty worked with me to build opportunities for future students to have accessible files. Most of our work focused on making Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs accessible for screen reader users. We also provided captions for videos. Over this semester the Accessibility Team was able to complete:
Over the summer faculty continued to work on accessibility issues, and the library expanded their accessibility work with our office, as well. As I mentioned at the end of last semester the library began making their scanned course reserves accessible. This has been a major move as it allows faculty to have one place to contact to get their materials scanned, made accessible, and posted for online access.
In Fall 2018, we brought 2 new student workers on board which required additional training. We also were able to add to our service offerings a bit. As discussed last year, audio descriptions are required for videos. We are now adding audio descriptions where possible, and making notes of the need for audio descriptions when not possible. The Team is also providing transcripts along with the caption files. Over this semester The Accessibility Team was able to complete:
We had a substantial decrease in the Word files received which is credited to all of the faculty who attended workshops, reached out, or came to COLRS for one-on-one consultations with the Accessibility office within the last year. To faculty who are making accessibility of digital documents for their students a priority, thank you!
And in this semester, along with continuing work on courses, we’ve been doing work for some of the OER fellows to make the materials they are adopting or writing accessible for all users. These efforts have pushed the skills of the student workers to a new level. The Accessibility Team has now made an entire textbook accessible for one of the OER faculty fellows teams. So thanks for the excellent effort: Alana, Brandon, Daniela, and Kayla.
In the past we have looked at how to use the accessibility checker built into Word. It highlights issues and explains how to fix them. We’ve also looked at how tables should be laid out properly. A common issue with tables – that PC users of Word using the accessibility checker will see – is that the table must have alternative text and a specified header row in order to be considered accessible. Alternative text for a table should usually list the items in the header row. With a syllabus, for example, this might be something like week, reading, and due date. It gives a screen reader user an idea of what is in the table. Specifying the header row allows a screen reader user to know that the top row lists the type of information which will appear in the following rows. For example: One, Two, and Three corresponding to Week One, Week Two, and Week Three.
However, if you are creating Word files on a Mac, these issues will not be highlighted. So, if you are a Mac user and have tables in your Word documents there are two things you could do:
Respondus Monitor is a new tool available to faculty at UIS who want to enhance the integrity of low-stakes exams in online classes. While Examity remains the recommended option for high-stakes exams like midterms and final exams because of its ability to provide live, real-time proctoring, Respondus Monitor is a good option for faculty members who want to improve the integrity of low-stakes exams like weekly quizzes.
It uses a student’s webcam to record the testing environment. Suspicious testing behavior is automatically flagged by the software, and instructors are alerted to preview the alert flags. Respondus Monitor is free for faculty and students to use and it is integrated with Blackboard. Respondus LockDown Browser must be used to use Respondus Monitor. To use Respondus Monitor, follow the directions for using Respondus LockDown browser. After selecting Respondus LockDown browser, also select the Respondus Monitor option.
To learn more about how to protect the integrity of low-stakes online exams, please visit Respondus Monitor’s Instructor Resources website.
As the Fall semester is ending, I’m sure some of us are thinking about the holidays and winter break. But, spring semester is right around the corner!
For instructors who know that you will need to scan book chapters or articles, please take advantage of Course eReserves through Brookens Library to plan for your spring needs.
It’s an easy request: Fill out the course reserve form. Then the library produces some very fine scans of those materials and makes them accessible.
The Brookens Library staff began making all Course eReserves accessible for the Fall 2018 semester. This added service does add some time to the process, which is why I encourage you to think about those materials for next term now.
Recently we conducted a survey of department chairs concerning accessibility. The greatest number of respondents were interested in handouts on how to make specific file types accessible. The handouts below cover the most common file types in courses at UIS.
The second highest number of respondents were interested in workshops, and in mid-October we held a three day workshop attended by 18 faculty and staff to help them learn more about accessibility. Departments may schedule workshops on specific accessibility topics (or other teaching and technology topics) for their faculty. Of course, faculty are welcome to schedule individual consultations at any time.
Explore the new Adobe Slate and Voice iPad apps, which allow you to tell stories. Slate allows you to create scrolling stories from pictures and text. Voice helps you to create videos from text and images with background music and transitions. Beyond being attractive, these stories are mobile-friendly!
The apps are currently FREE to download. Slate is also available for use through a web browser on your desktop, though handout focuses on the iPad app only (they work in the same manner). You will need to create a free Adobe ID in order to use these tools.
Consider this tool for use in presenting course content and for student presentations. Topics included: navigating and building projects with the apps, importing photos, importing text, project privacy, making projects accessible, and including projects in Blackboard courses.
Videos can enhance your course by offering examples, explanations of concepts, and can be a visual for your students to refer to when learning new content.
There are several ways to add video to your course:
Brookens Library has many films freely available through film collections to which the campus subscribes. If you find a video you would like to include, contact the library for help linking to it in your Blackboard site.
If the film you wish to show is not available in these collections, it may be available in the library’s film collection or available for purchase. The library can work with you to find obtain copyright clearance for the film.
You can also request that your students find a film at a local library or video store. Contact your Brookens Library Liaison for help teaching your students to use the WorldCat database to find films at their local library.
YouTube and Ted.com are just two of many great sites for free video on the Web. The embed codes provided by sites like these make it easy to add the videos to Blackboard. The Library of Congress created a National Screening Room collection of American films from 1890 to 1999.
To embed a video player from Ted.com or YouTube.com in your Blackboard course site:
Check out a digital video camera from ITS or record your screen using Camtasia Relay. Once you have created your video, you need to put up for your students to see it.
Please upload the video to Kaltura Media through Canvas. Learn more about Kaltura Media here.
COLRS is happy to announce the Fall 2018 team of student workers who will be helping faculty make their course materials accessible. The students began work September 10, and as of this week have completed work on fifteen classes. Each college will determine their own prioritization of courses which need accessibility help, and each college dean will share that list with Dr. Vickie Cook, Executive Director of COLRS. Dr. Vance Martin, Campus Accessibility Specialist, will then contact the faculty members from the list for instructions on how to share the materials, and once all materials are received, he’ll work with the Accessibility Team to help make the materials accessible.
The Accessibility Team Members are:
Daniela Arizmendi is from Waukegan, IL. She is majoring in English and minoring in Secondary Education. She plans to attend Graduate school to pursue a Masters in Education. She loves food, movies, and makeup.
Kayla Thomas is a transfer student from Richland Community College. She is majoring in English with double minors in Communications and Global Studies. She is also the co-managing editor of the Alchemist Review and has been accepted into the National Honors Society of Leadership and Success. She has one dog and four cats who take up all of her free time!
Yuxuan Zhang, “Xuan”, is in his senior year at UIS. He is majoring in computer science. He is from China, and his hometown is near Shanghai. He likes playing computer games, watching movies, and playing with drones on the weekend . This is his second year working for COLRS.
J.R. Gomoll is in his junior year at UIS. He is majoring in computer science. He is from Richmond, Illinois. This is his second year working for COLRS.
PDFs have been used in a variety of ways in higher education: from a medium to share articles and book chapters, to a format for saving document files which can be opened on various platforms. However, when we think about the accessibility needs of students, PDFs become more problematic. For scanning a book or article, creating a PDF is still a useful means for sharing the materials, but we still need to follow procedures to make the scan accessible.
For those who are writing course materials in Word or Pages, or some other word processing software, and saving the file as a PDF, there is a more accessible way to share that same information within Blackboard. Create the file as you normally would. (If in Word, run the accessibility checker.) In Blackboard, under the “build content” tab select “blank page”. Enter a title for the page where it says “blank page”. Then copy the material from your word processing software and paste it in the content area, scroll to the bottom and select submit. That content is now much more accessible than in a PDF, and quicker to open regardless of platform.
Welcome back for the Fall 2018 semester! As we begin to greet our new students and make final changes to course materials I wanted to offer a reminder of a few tips from last year. Please make sure you’re using the newest version of Word, which is Word 2016. If you’re not you can download it by logging in with your UIS credentials from the UIS webstore.
And this previous post from April 2018 gives you the link to the accessible course syllabus, the link to more Word tips, and also a reminder on how to use the built in accessibility checker within Word.
Why does the first tip of the new year focus on Word? At the end of last semester we had 4 student workers who worked on 42 classes for faculty around campus. We received just over 1000 files, and 498 of those files were Word files. With 50% of the files being in Word, it seems like a good place to start.
Have a great semester!
To upload an .srt file in Blackboard, goto My Media. Next to the video you would like to add captions to, click the greyed out pencil highlighted below with the red arrow.
You will then be on a screen with 9 options below your video, one of them is captions. Click captions
You will now see a blue button on the far left, “upload caption file”, click it.
Then a new box will pop up. Browse for the file. Select the language. And give it a label. If the language is English, “English” would be a good label. Then click save.
Professor Katherine Brown, associate professor of communication and faculty director of the Career Readiness Initiative in the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavior and Social Sciences, describes how she helps students connect what they are learning in the classrom to planning their next steps after college by demonstrating how others can resist the tendency to portray any concern with employability as somehow anti-intellectual, or as a rejection of the ideas and traditions of liberal arts education.
Professor Brown outlines the following points relative to her initiative:
Perhaps you are seeing OERs or Open Education Resources mentioned more frequently at your disciplinary conferences. Or perhaps there are initiatives on your campus to promote OERs, like at UIS. In general OERs are materials made by other instructors, anywhere in the world, who are willing to freely share them with others. Do you need to think about accessibility with OERs? Yes. However, it shouldn’t be a stumbling block in your adoption of OERs. If you adopt OERs for your class you should check them for accessibility, as you would any other materials, and as you review them for fitting with your learning goals. As we’ve discussed, running the accessibility checker for Word files, PowerPoints, or PDFs can tell you how accessible something is and how to fix it.
In most cases, academic materials which are termed OER are licensed under a creative commons (CC) license. There are six different licenses. If the license is “attribution-non-commerical-no derivs” or “attributiuon-no derivs” and the material is accessible then you can use it, but make no alterations and you must credit the license holder.
For the other four licenses you can alter the materials to make them accessible or alter and add other content to them, just remember to credit the original creator/licensor.
We’ve mentioned that PDFs are generally less accessible than Word files, and that making a PDF accessible takes more time. We listed the process for making PDFs accessible in a previous post. There are a few instances when you do have to make a Word file into a PDF. So here are the best steps for doing so:
Yes, Word does have a save as PDF option. However, when it comes to accessibility doing the above steps will reduce your work in making the final PDF accessible.
There is an accessible course syllabus template in Word on the Academic Affairs website. We’ve posted several tips on accessibility and Word, as well as presented several campus wide and department level sessions on Word over the past few months. And many of the files that the Accessibility Team has worked on thus far have been Word files. So once we’ve used the template, worked on our files, or had the Accessibility Team work on them, we’re done? Maybe. It is always a good idea after making any edits or opening and saving a file on a new computer to run the accessibility checker. Why? Any edits we make could add a new accessibility issue to the file. Or sometimes there are settings on one computer which will override the look of a file, which can also lead to accessibility issues. So how do we run the accessibility checker again?
In Word 2016 for PCs select File > Check for Issues> Check Accessibility
In Word 2016 for Mac select Tools>Check Accessibility
You can run the accessibility checker when you’re creating new files, as a tool to find out issues in old files, or to make sure all your changes are still accessible.
COLRS is happy to announce that we now have a team of four student workers who will be helping faculty make their course materials accessible. The students began work and training the week of March 20th, and as of this week have begun working on course materials. Each college will determine their own prioritization of courses which need accessibility help and each College Dean will share that list with Vickie Cook. Vance Martin will then contact the faculty members from the list for instructions on how to share the materials, and once all materials are received he’ll work with the Accessibility Team to help make the materials accessible. The Accessibility Team Members are:
Jalee Braner is in her freshman year at UIS. She is double majoring in elementary education and English. She is from Springfield, Illinois and plans to teach in Springfield for at least 2 years after she graduates. She likes working out and spending time with friends and family.
J.R. Gomoll is in his sophomore year at UIS. He is majoring in computer science. He is from Richmond, Illinois.
Genesis Reyes is in her freshman year at UIS. She is majoring in business administration and minoring in Spanish. She is from Grayslake, Illinois.
Yuxuan Zhang, “Xuan”, is in his junior year at UIS. He is majoring in computer science. He is from China, and his hometown is near Shanghai. He likes playing computer games, watching movies, and playing with drones on the weekends.
Recently I saw a post on Facebook with a blue circle, with a barely lighter blue rhino in it. It equated intelligence with the ability to see the rhino. It made me think of the need to keep color in mind in our instructional materials. Around 8% of men and 1% of women of Northern European descent are color blind. And the older we get the more difficulty we all have with certain color combinations. So it is important to think about this for our students, if you like to use color in your documents or presentations. Below are some known color combinations which are highly problematic.
This website by Giacomo Mazzocato or by WebAIM can give you an online color checking tool. The Paciello Group Website has a downloadable piece of software for Mac and PC which you might also find useful. If you use lots of color, please check the contrast.
Many people like to use textboxes in Word to highlight certain sections of a document, the problem is text boxes aren’t accessible. However, if you want the same look you can modify an existing style within Word for the same effect. Select the section of text you would like highlighted and boxed. Goto the home tab, and in the style menu select “intense quote”. At first this will make the text blue, italicized, and between two blue bars. Now right click on “intense quote” in PC or control click on a Mac to modify this style. You can change the text to black, and bold, or whatever you would like. At the bottom of the window you can select format and then select borders. Now you can choose a box and you’ve just achieved the same look, but accessibly. You can modify it to achieve various looks. You can do these modifications for this document only or save for future documents.
Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers
According to results from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, Class of 2018 Job Outlook Survey, college students believe they’re ready for a job, but employers disagree. For the most part, a high percentage of students indicated in most of the eight career readiness competencies that they were proficient. The largest discrepancy was in the professionalism/work ethic competency. These findings were supported by similar research conducted in 2015 by The Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup’s higher education division adds that research definitions can vary among employers and academia. For instance, Gallup has found that generally, an employer believes “critical thinking” is coming up with new, original thought. But in an academic sense, it can mean picking apart ideas in depth. Another varied definition relates to written communication. Some students might excel at writing technical reports or papers with citations, but this type of writing is far different than writing for marketing.
Alternative text (alt text) is probably the most confusing topic when thinking about accessibility. In general, alt text is adding a description to a picture, table, graph, or any image in a Word document, PowerPoint, PDF, or Excel which can be read by a screen reader. The key is what you put in for alt text. It needs to be a description of what the picture, table, or graph is. If it is a picture of Harry Truman, the alt text could be “Harry Truman.” If it is a picture of an atom, the alt text might need to be much more descriptive of what the picture is showing. It is important to think more critically about what images we put in documents, and what information we assume people will get out of the image.
On the COLRS website are some images, along with the alt text and captions. The alt text will only be read by a screen reader. The captions will be read be everyone. These are all taken from an anthropology course developed by Alex Markovic, Ph.D. at UIC, who gave permission to share his materials. It is important to note that he had never taken an online class, nor taught an online class, and he was developing the first online anthropology class for UIC. The idea of alt text was new to him. The only instructions he was given were to describe the pictures by thinking about what he’d like a visually impaired student to get out of the pictures included in the class. He did a wonderful job on 100+ images in his course. Below are sample of them.
Lists or outlines are a perennial favorite way of organizing content. But there are some things to keep in mind. If something occurs in order, use a numbered list.
For this dance:
If order does not matter use bullets.
Primary colors of pigment:
And if you’re using a numbered list as an outline don’t force spacing by using extra returns, or other odd functions to force a look, go with what Word gives you or allows. The accessibility checker can give you some odd errors if you do this, and it can take a lot of time to fix them.
In Word, tables can be problematic. They should be used for tabular data, they are often used for page layout. The top example below shows a table used for layout. In this case, the Word autochecker will give you an error, and a screen reader user will have difficulty. A screen reader sees row 1 as 5 cells merged into one and expects everything below it to also be one large merged cell. Then it encounters row 2 and sees 1 cell and 4 cells merged into one. To a computer, this does not compute. What the computer wants is a header for each column with every row below that containing the same number of lined up columns. If page layout like this is desired, using tabs for spacing may suffice. The second example is how a table should be setup, with headers and the required information below it. It is fine to use a table in a syllabus for listing readings and assignments. Define the header row. Don’t merge cells. And it is fine to have empty cells.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigates cases of discrimination, disability discrimination is a part of their caseload. They have a policy of investigating and attempting to close cases within 180 days. Until recently, the only way to know who was under investigation was to receive notice of investigation, or by word of mouth. Annual numbers of total cases have been available in the OCR’s annual budget, 2017 budget ( about 4,485). However, as of the beginning of February 2018 the OCR has made available their pending cases on a searchable website.
When using videos for educational purposes, they need to have audio descriptions. What are audio descriptions? They are a spoken, verbal explanation of what is occurring in the video. The audio descriptions are captioned, as well.
For an example, take 3 minutes to watch these two, almost identical 1.5 minute videos. Close your eyes and listen to the first video. Do the same thing and listen to the second video. The first video probably made much less sense than the second, and hopefully illustrates the use and value of audio descriptions.
When you enroll a user in your Blackboard course, please keep these points in mind.
To enroll a user in a Blackboard course:
If you cannot find the person in Blackboard, s/he may already be enrolled in your course or may not yet have a NetID. Please contact COLRS for help.
When using videos in class or online they need to have captions which are 99% accurate. If you have created your own video and are using Kaltura within Blackboard, these directions from the ITS website can help you. If you created your own video and are using YouTube, these directions from the COLRS website can help you. If you are using a video on YouTube which you didn’t create and is not captioned, you can use a secondary website like Amara. Amara allows the video to remain located at YouTube, but allows you to route the video through their site and add the captions at Amara, so there is no copyright issue. You can even search Amara to see if your video has already been captioned there.
The inline grading tool in Blackboard is not functioning. When you submit an assignment on Blackboard during Spring 2018, submitted assignments will look a bit different. Please review the instructions and images below to
The assignment submissions screen in Blackboard. Students click on Browse My Computer to select a file to submit for grading.
The Review Submission History page shows that the submission was successful. The green bar with a success message and the title of the submitted file appear on the screen.
The inline grading tool for Blackboard Assignments is not functioning. We’ve identified two work-arounds for this issue. If you would like to continue using an inline grading function, consider creating a Turnitin Assignment to replace the current Blackboard assignment. You can also learn to grade a Turnitin Assignment. The other work-around, described below, is to download the student’s work, mark it up in Microsoft Word or other text editor, and upload the document to the course grade center.
By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the economy will require postsecondary education and training beyond high school. The United States is more educated than ever: In 1973, workers with postsecondary education held only 28 percent of jobs; by comparison, they held 59 percent of jobs in 2010 and will hold 65 percent of jobs in 2020. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce publication provides vital labor market information such as which fields are expected to create the most jobs, the education requirements required to gain employment in the U.S., and the skills most coveted by employers. Key findings include:
In an era marked by rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence, new research by McKinsey and Company, assesses the jobs lost and jobs gained under different scenarios through 2030. A key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030, under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.
For more information about job loss to machines, view the TED Talks video by Anthony Goldbloom titled The Jobs We’ll Lose to Machines and the Ones We Won’t (with transcript).
McKinsey Global Institute researchers claim 46 percent of all of the time for which people are now paid in the U.S. economy is spent in activities that could be automated based on currently available technology. But the rise in automation doesn’t necessarily mean that postsecondary institutions are losing their value; rather, it means that colleges and universities are going to have to shift their focus and start focusing in on the humanities — developing soft skills needed for jobs of the future. Filling gaps in the workforce and being the institution that can provide those graduates for jobs that don’t exist yet — requires a collective look into the education to career pipeline.
Employability Skills, part of the STEM 2.0 framework, are an essential skill set for 21st century employees. Additionally, employers believe a gap exists between the required skill set and the skills that employees entering the work force possess. The STEM Innovation Task Force has taken a multi-phased approach to identify what skills lie in the gap, how those skills can be taught or imparted, and what actions employers, educators and policymakers can take to close the gap. The authors encourage educators and organizations that teach these skills to continue to prioritize employability skills and the use of career-focused experiential learning.
Most of the time as college instructors, we are concerned with ways of knowing. We want to teach students about our discipline, and train them to think like scholars in our field. But we should not neglect our duty to teach broader skills — ones that transcend the classroom and can be put into practice in the students’ lives beyond college. By trying to help our students develop habits of mind, we are guiding them in the future, whether they continue in our disciplines or not. The author of this article, David Gooblar writes a column on teaching for The Chronicle and runs Pedagogy Unbound, a website for college instructors who share teaching strategies.
The New Vision for Education project examines the role that technology can potentially play to improve education for the future. In phase II, we investigated innovative ways to help students develop competencies* and character qualities broadly defined as social-emotional skills, which are critical components of 21st-century skill framework but not a core focus in today’s curriculum. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) will prepare today’s students for this evolving workplace, with consequent benefits for individuals, businesses, the economy and society as outlined in the World Economic Forum Report.
Exhibit 3: A variety of general and targeted learning strategies foster social and emotional skills
The global economy has undergone a transformation that has shaped our lives in ways that we are only starting to understand. As indicated in the Opportunity Project white paper developed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the traditional social contract separated the roles of employers and government in talent development, with employers investing in the training of their employed workers and government focusing on initial secondary and postsecondary education. This traditional contract is no longer applicable because of rapid economic and technological changes, the changing nature of employment relationships, and the growing disconnect between employers’ needs and government-financed secondary and postsecondary education. What is needed are new incentives and risk management tools and for employers to become more engaged in working with education and training providers in developing talent.
Read the article and view the video (video transcript version) about the U. S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s approach to career readiness.
When machines come for our jobs, we will need skills in communication, creativity, collaboration, and complex thinking to compete, says Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University. It will take a completely different kind of education system he says — not the current one created at the height of the farm and factory economies. He believes you can study creativity and entrepreneurship, but practice is also needed to test yourself, see where you are good and where you are not, and to determine your passion. Additionally, practice facilitates an understanding of how to work with others and allows for practicing systems thinking.
Currently, higher education is producing I-shaped graduates who focus largely on their particular knowledge and skill-set, views the workplace as a competitive environment, and works within disciplinary silos. T-shaped professionals are characterized by their deep disciplinary knowledge in at least one area, an understanding of systems, and their ability to function as “adaptive innovators” and cross the boundaries between disciplines. Currently, many college and university graduates have been trained to be productive in one field, but employers are placing increasing importance on skills that reach beyond a single discipline or focus.
Additional information about T-Professionals can be found at the College Employment Research Institute (CERI).
T-Shaped Professional
In days gone by, it was common for just two age groups to be represented in the workplace. There were long-serving, “dyed-in-the-wool” old-timers and ambitious newcomers. Times have changed, and now you could find yourself working with as many as five generations. Broadly speaking, each one has its own set of preferences, styles, perspectives, and experiences. Generational diversity has great potential, however, the potential for conflict and misunderstanding is very real and intergenerational conflict within the workplace is a growing issue. Learn more about the six strategies for thriving within a multi-generational mix.
Characteristics of Different Age Groups in the Labor Force Today
Just like with Word, PowerPoint has a built in accessibility checker. This link to Accessibility at the Microsoft website can show you how to run it for Macs or PCs. It also lists some of the most common issues and fixes for PowerPoint. Typically, those are alternative text and reading order.
Alternative text is what is read by a screen reader to describe an image in a presentation. If there is no alternative text a screen reader will read there is an image and the size of it.
Reading order is the order in which a screen reader reads the information on a page. And while it may seem intuitive to read from top to bottom and left to right, PowerPoint reads in the order which the information was added to the page originally.
There is an urgent need for young people to develop the practical skills employers are demanding. Employers globally declare that educational institutions are not adequately preparing young people with appropriate skills for the jobs they have available, and the deficit is greatest in the area of soft skills. Fortunately, there are shining examples of schools from which we can learn—schools that take responsibility for preparing all of their students to become changemaking leaders.
All economic indicators show a positive view of the U.S. economy in 2018, with the majority of occupations projected to grow. The fastest growth next year is in the healthcare, personal care, social assistance and construction sectors. Compare and contrast the previous years’ predictions (2013-2017) that are based on hundreds of conversations with executives and workers, a series of national and global online surveys and secondary research from more than 450 different research sources, including colleges, consulting firms, non-profits, the government and trade associations.
Explore the two resources below to obtain employabiity skills topics and learning objective samples that can help generate ideas for complementary content for your courses.
Incorporate industry trends and professional development opportunities within learning activities, so learners can keep abreast of industry changes by having them compare and contrast association information, identify historical changes, or predict future trends.
If you want your learners to have opportunities to explore the realistic aspects of the world of work and future jobs, think about ways to incorporate labor market, industry and occupational information into your learning activities. Below are a few resources to get you started.
Listed below are tools you might consider using to enhance student engagement to facilitate connecting course content with real-world scenarios and trending information.
Do you and your learners know what employers really want? Augment your learning activities with information about which skills, abilities, and expertise employers in various fields are seeking and how to incorporate the most relevant skills and keywords in résumés, cover letters, and interviews.
In much of the recent research to prepare learners for the 21st Century Workforce, a common recommendation is for universities to develop meaningful partnerships with employers. Learn about best practices from others.
The National Network’s library of tools, guides, white papers, frameworks and other resources can provide guidance to educators and other learning providers so they will know what foundational skills to emphasize. These products can also help employers, industry leaders, learning providers and others who seek to take action and connect learning and work in their companies, communities and beyond. Learn more about the National Network’s innovation projects.
Resources:
Learn how the Necessary Skills Now teams of faculty and employers will develop a curriculum that integrates technical content and employability concepts within existing courses rather than teach stand-alone courses on employability topics in isolation from the technical content. The project will provide opportunities to teach employability skills prioritized by industry within discipline-specific courses using authentic workplace scenarios as the context for instruction.
Project Goals:
Learn more about project deliverables, outcomes and pilot sites, or apply to become a pilot site by completing the interest form.
Employability in Higher Education: A review of practice and strategies around the world is a literature review associated with the practice, ecosystems and strategies in place around the world that are used to improve the employability levels of students and graduates and ensure that their skills and knowledge are fit-for-purpose for the graduate labor market upon leaving Higher Education (HE). The publication is divided into five sections:
Figure 3. Employability Skills Wheel (UKCES, 2009, p.17)
In a McGraw-Hill Education 2015 Workforce Readiness Survey, thirty-five percent of college students said college was effective in preparing them for a job while 61% wanted classes designed to help build career skills. Additionally, in an IBM Institute Report, Pursuit of Relevance: How Higher Education Remains Viable in Today’s Dynamic World, only 43% across industry and academia believe higher education prepares students with necessary workforce skills. If you’re seeking ideas for curriculum improvement, learn how other universities are augmenting their curriculum with real-world, career-specific teachings.
If you’ve been trying to identify employability skills’ rubrics, check out the resources below.
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