Video: Taking Action for Inclusive Design

Hello, everyone. I’m Tom Tobin, your host for this OneHE course, Taking Action for Inclusive Design. As you are thinking about how to lower technology-based barriers to learning, so far in this course you’ve considered how to balance the academic freedom to adopt any tools that help us to learn against the cognitive savings of adopting a small suite of technology tools that everyone learns and uses in common across all of our offerings.

We’ve also examined how to lower cognitive load through common, consistent, inclusive-by-default interfaces; adopting inclusive procurement processes; and starting with access-first design to cut down on expensive and labor-intensive retrofitting efforts.

But none of this will have any impact unless you are able to share your ideas with colleagues and get them to take action to support inclusive design approaches. So, how do you get your leaders to pay attention?

Accessibility and inclusive design are not one-time checkboxes, but continual processes that should be integrated from the start: essential for some, useful for everyone.

And, by the way, your leadership is going to think in checkbox terms. “We bought the tool, we did the thing, and now we’re done with accessibility. Now, we can move on to something else, like equity, diversity, and inclusion; and the flipped classroom; and working with incarcerated learners . . . .”

Have you ever felt like your institutional leaders go to a retreat once a year, and then they come back and they’re all fired up with the new thing? Then everybody has to do the new thing. And that new thing changes every year as the trends shift.

Part of the challenge is that people can see UDL, or inclusive design, as one of the new things, until we start to suffer from innovation fatigue. “Oh, yeah. I don’t have to do this, I’ll just wait until the weather changes, right?”

Let’s think of some system-wide expert-level ways to frame UDL so that it’s not part of that new thing, new thing, new thing progression, but it’s more mission critical, perceived by campus leaders as part of how we should be doing our business.

The first of the three frames is scope. 

When you talk to leadership, the biggest challenge that we have is that many of us work in disability services offices, instructional-design areas, information technology, or other specific-audience roles. In those areas of our organizations, leadership perceive us as having a narrow scope. We “only” do computer technology, disability support, diversity and inclusion. Our efforts are seen as being aimed at a very small slice of what the entire organization does.

So the first technique when you are arguing for an inclusive method, a new tool, more people, more funding or time, is to broaden your scope. Ask your leadership what are the big problems or challenges that they perceive? What are the obstacles that they are trying to address right now? And then show how a UDL approach can help them with those broad problems for everyone.

One of the ways that we can talk about scope to leadership is talking about our learners on their mobile devices. Most of our learners do not own a laptop or a desktop computer, but north of 90% of our learners own a smartphone. And on that smartphone is how they’re trying to get access to all of the services that we offer at our organization.

When we talk to campus leaders, it’s not just that accessibility benefits people beyond just disability barriers in the environment. If we made our systems more inclusive, we would be able to retain more of our learners. They would stick with us better. They would understand what we’re talking about better. Students would take a course with me and then come back next time and take a course with you and continue their educations.

The first strategy is to broaden your scope. And be as specific as you can in relating it to the problems and challenges that your leaders themselves perceive.

The second thing is impact. 

Here is where I get a little sneaky when I talk to my own leadership team. 

When we think about impact, we can often box ourselves in. We can talk about how inclusive-design projects that we want to do will have an impact on everyone whom we serve in, say, the disability-support office.

Now, our leadership probably has a mistaken notion of the people whom we actually serve in various areas of our organizations. Start collecting data and statistics about the problems and challenges that we heard from our leadership colleagues when we were thinking about scope.

For example, a common challenge is the “freshman cliff, where if we take in 2,000 freshmen, by the time they are sophomores, there’s only about 1,400 of them left. Where did the other 600 go? Find out. Get the information. Get the data. Most of them dropped out because of financial reasons. 

The second-most-common reason why people drop out of colleges and universities is time: time management, literally finding enough time in the day to be able to honor their personal, family, work, and educational commitments. And this is where lowering tech-access barriers really does have a positive impact on everyone, across all of the different use cases that we have.

Even if we’re lowering barriers a bit at a time, doing so helps us to retain students better, because we’re finding just 20 more minutes out of the day where they could study, practice, or prepare, where they didn’t have time before. And we’ve got lots of data that show that those 20 minutes for study can be the difference between struggling and keeping up.

When we think about impact and we’re talking with our leadership team – especially if you work in an area where you could be perceived as having a narrow impact – take those data and do a report or a quick two-page summary with people in the other service areas of your institution. Band together. 

If it’s just me in disability-support services saying we need to adopt inclusive systems, that’s one thing. But if it’s me and the IT director and the CIO and the folks from the registration office, and the people in Financial Aid all saying that UDL has a positive impact and is something that we need to do that has a stronger impact on our leadership team.

The third expert strategy is to talk about the budget. 

Talk numbers. One of the reasons that we don’t often get funding for large inclusive-design projects is that our leaders see the investment in time, people, and projects as being niche or narrow. So listen to the numbers, as you did in the first two strategies on scope and impact.

For scope, you were asking the question of your leaders, “what are the big problems you want to address?” In terms of impact, take the answer to that question and find data that show the trends or information that you can use to show how your solution can help to address those challenges.

Here, when you’re thinking about budget, is where you actually run the numbers, doing the information gathering and the application. Put together a project and start it up under your existing frameworks of people, time, and resources. 

Then you can compare when you ran a particular course or interaction the way it’s always been run, versus running another in a more inclusively-designed way. Did you end up keeping more students? Did they earn better marks, stay with your institution, persist better, go on to go take more courses?

Collect and analyze the data to show that you spent this many hours, which costs this much money in salary and benefits, and overall you saved this much money. This holds up, too. Back-of-the-envelope math is that compared to what it costs us in marketing, job efforts, and recruitment to find and bring in one new student, it costs us only a fifth of that to keep that student from one year to the next. 

You can have productive conversations with your recruitment, marketing, and student-services teams, because they know how much your institution spends per person in all sorts of ways. And you can use those data to say that if you hadn’t given people options for engagement, representation, and action & expression, you’d end up spending that 5x to find replacement students rather than the 1x of a “maintenance cost.”

So, to recap, when you are advocating for lowering tech-access barriers, talk to your leaders in terms of scope, impact, and budget.