In order to address the time, technology, and complexity barriers related to online learning, we can adopt three essential advocacy efforts: regularizing the design of our various interfaces, following inclusive procurement processes, and access-first planning.
Advocate for Consistent Interfaces
Outside of in-person conversations, the way that learners engage with everyone in higher education colleges and universities is through our web sites and learning management systems (LMSs), most often on their mobile devices. Our institutions should adopt consistent navigation elements across systems such as web pages and the LMS. Buttons and links that perform the same functions should have the same names, shapes, and colors across different systems and applications. This lowers a barrier of having to learn new “look and feel” elements for each system supported by the institution.
This also helps to create another powerful support for positive changes: ‘inclusive defaults.’ Instead of providing instructors, designers, and support staff with empty LMS shells or web-page templates, build a standard shell that includes a navigation and content structure that follows accessibility and design best practices, such as a shallow sub-foldering structure and alternative-version requirement for media elements. Allow users to change the structure if they prefer (to avoid the ‘you’re forcing us’ argument), and rely on the inherent inclination of humans to adhere to default structures.
Advocate for Inclusive Procurement
Our Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other information technology (IT) leaders are in a unique position to influence the overall ease of access across all systems supported by colleges and universities. By training purchase-level staff in IT and the accounts office in how to assess Electronic Information Touchpoints (EITs) for extensibility and accessibility features, we can silently increase the ease of use and interaction for the entire campus community. Kirsten Behling and I wrote recently in Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone about an expert-level procurement strategy:
“By adopting the mind-set of offering at least plus-one choices for users of EITs, many institutions are using recent legal settlements as a call to proactive action. Some are creating procurement policies that ask the vendors who supply EIT resources to prove, through a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), how usable their technologies are for diverse populations (spoiler alert: even when vendors have VPATs and claim their products are widely accessible, test anyway, because there is not yet any centralized authority that checks the validity of VPATs).”
As more institutions ask vendors about usability and inclusive design as a routine part of their procurement processes, vendors are taking a harder look at incorporating accessibility into their products.
Many of our institutions ask learners to be part of the testing of proposed technology-tool purchases. We often make a special effort to ask learners with disabilities to be testers: can people use a given tool via screen-reader software, or without a mouse and keyboard?
However, we should expand our user-testing groups beyond just the disability barriers that can be present in technology tools. Include learners whose first language is different from that used by the institution, learners who will test proposed tools using various devices (especially mobile ones), and learners with varying levels of familiarity with technology tools, generally.
Advocate for Access-First Planning
Inclusive design strategies help to keep online and technology-mediated learning costs down across the institution. As we explored in the first course in this learning path, universal design for learning (UDL) is a key plank in the approach to open and inclusive pedagogy.
UDL reduces learner attrition: learners stick around when they feel that they have agency and can choose their own paths through their studies.
When we make this bottom-line argument, we are more likely to convince our colleagues to take broad action. It’s also key that we frame our argument in terms of access, writ broadly as mobile-device access to interactions, rather than accessibility, which colleagues can hear as applying to only a small segment of our learners.
An expert-level inclusive-design strategy is to adopt a wider perspective at leadership meetings. By talking about how our system- and application-level IT design, procurement, and budgetary decisions expand access for all learners, we actually reduce the need to assign resources intensively to perform accommodations—making one change, one time, for one learner. Accommodation needs will never go away, but with the UDL framework, we can make the argument for inclusive benefits beyond students with disabilities.
Imagine a student who is a single father who has to drop his daughter off at school and then drives 45 minutes across town to work. Giving him a way to do his course readings via alternative formats (say, read-aloud to the Bluetooth connection in his car) can be the difference between dropping out and keeping up.
These are the sorts of narratives that we can use when we advocate to our institutional leaders for more inclusively designed technology tools and systems.