Leading the Way in Accessibility FYCD & Catalyst Winner Stories

Katie Grennell 0:03 Content Day and Catalyst Winner stories. So we have two of our wonderful ally partners here to talk about their experiences and share some of their insights. So before we do that and introduce them, I just wanted to share a couple things and I will go ahead and turn my camera off because I talk. With my hands and nobody needs to see that right now, but just some information when it comes to, of course, accessibility for this webinar. So for those of you that may have not used Teams before, if you wanted to access captions, we have some information here on how to do that, so.

Maureen Williams 0:33 You.

Katie Grennell 0:43 To turn on those live captions, you can go to the meeting controls at the top of the screen, select More, and then select Language and Speech, and then you can turn on those live captions. So we have an image here to hopefully guide some of that if that's something that would be helpful for you. All right. I also wanted to just share some of our different, you know, ways that you can connect with us on social media. And also of course we are changing our name, right? So we are moving as far as the company name goes. So Anthology is signing off and we will become Blackboard. So that will mean kind of a a shift in you know where it is that you are going to be connecting with us and the names and things like that on social media. So you'll want to follow at Blackboard for the latest news and all things Blackboard Ally and then of course our wonderful institutional effectiveness tools as well. So we have the information here for LinkedIn. In Blue Sky, honestly, I have no idea what that is. So there there's that I should know. And then of course, you know, YouTube, X and Facebook and things like that. So alright, let me move on to the next slide. And we're very excited about our upcoming user conference, Building Blackboard Together. So this will be July 13th through the 15th in Dallas, TX. Oh, if I could just ask everybody to mute, please, if you don't mind, and then I'll make sure that we check the chat for questions. That would be great. So again that our our upcoming conference will be July 13th through the 15th. It'll be in Dallas, TX. The registration is open. So we have the information here for that. We would love to have you attend and the call for papers is also open. It just opened up.

juan 2:26 In Wisconsin.

Katie Grennell 2:36 Either yesterday or Monday and it will be open until March 23rd. So please submit your proposals. There is an accessibility and inclusion track, so we definitely want to hear from everybody. So please, you know if you have the ability to attend, we would love that and all of the information on where you can submit. Those proposals is here and we'll make sure everybody has access to that too. All right. So I'm going to stop talking in just a moment and turn it over to our guests of honor here. And I'm going to let them introduce themselves so they can kind of, you know, just be able to talk a little bit about their experiences and then we'll dive right into the conversation. But we have Doctor Christopher Procks, who is the Director of the AI Excellence Institute from Sinclair Community College. And then we also have Erickson De Moanahan. And I, if I pronounce that incorrectly, I sincerely apologize. And Erickson is the Assistant Vice President for Digital Education, Learning Technologies and Analytics at Mapua University. So Chris and Erickson, if you both want to introduce yourselves and then I believe Chris will begin.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 3:50 Hi, it's actually good morning here in the Philippines. Excited to discuss it. Yeah, it's all it's actually late and already 12:05 AM here in the Philippines, but I would really love to discuss this the rest of the group.

Katie Grennell 3:53 Well, good morning.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 4:05 Good morning.

Katie Grennell 4:06 Well, thank you for being here.

Prokes, Christopher 4:09 Good morning, everyone, and thanks, Katie, for that great introduction. As she mentioned, I'm Chris Prokes. I run our A I Excellence Institute here at Sinclair. It's a it's a recent position. For the years prior to that, I I was in charge of our e-learning operations and I was also the college's VPAT compliance officer, and I ran a lot of our accessibility efforts.

Katie Grennell 4:31 Well, thank you, Chris. Well, I am going to stop sharing and I believe Chris, I should say Doctor Brooks, you earned that title. I am going to turn it over to you. And whenever you are ready, you should be able to take control.

Prokes, Christopher 4:52 OK. Thank you so much again. It's my pleasure to be here today to tell you a little bit about what Sinclair has done in our in our efforts to create an accessible environment for all. And I'm particularly proud of of the work that's been done on our campus over the last several years. It really, truly was. As a team effort and in a lot of ways that embodies the spirit of our founder David Sinclair. Fun fact about Sinclair, we were founded by a Scotsman and his 7th generational descendant still lives here at Dayton. And every year at our graduation ceremony, a bagpiper leads our stage party and that individual. As a descendant of David Sinclair. But our our motto is a phrase that he has said often or said often during his life, find the need and never to meet it. And that means a lot of things in the community, whether it's workforce training, whether it's academic classes or most importantly, meeting the needs of our community, kind of where they fit. Sinclair is a large institution. We're located in Dayton, Oh. We have 32,000 unduplicated college credit students that study here annually. We serve a variety of different sectors, from traditional college students through prison education students who are trying to gain a degree or a credential to. To get out of incarceration and jump in the community and get a job and and prosper. We offer more than 325 degree and certificate programs. We cover everything from horticulture to aviation to business to English to unmanned aerial systems, and the list kind of keeps growing almost every year. This is a snapshot of Southwest Ohio. Dayton is located right where the four, the first four in 12,448 is. We serve that headcount. As you can see, they're coming from a a wide area and we also have students in 47 states around the around the US in our online programs. But our accessibility journey actually began quite some time ago. As I'm sure many of you are aware, there is a legal process in place to file complaints with the Office of Civil Rights against a public entity for accessibility issues. And sadly, we were. The victim of one of those suits, and then I shouldn't say victim. We were the recipient of one of those complaints. And really, that's what spurred us to take a look at what were we doing, why were we doing things this way, and what could be done differently for our campus. We had this complaint occur really at kind of a precipice in our existence where we were revising our strategic priorities. Prior to 2024, our key 3 strategic drivers were alignment, growth and equity and how apropos that we had this complaint because we were in the process of revising these to be more equitable, more inclusive and more community aligned. So at the forefront of all this, we were effectively able to put accessibility as one of those stalwart pillars. Since that time, we have revised those again to be what you see here, accountable, collaborative, compassionate, inclusive and innovative. And accessibility still remains a key institutional mission and it focuses on. On all of those areas because we are accountable through the way we make things accessible. We're collaborative because we have everyone in all offices participating in these endeavors. We are compassionate in that we understand that all of our students come from different backgrounds and so having programs and things in place to help those individuals. Is a hallmark of what we do. We are, of course, then also inclusive in the same vein, but we're also innovative and we're finding new ways almost daily. And I'll tell you about some of those here in a moment to make sure we have an accessible campus. Now we are doing some strategic revisioning again. Some of this is driven by legislation in the state of Ohio, if you're from Ohio. This call, you understand some of the implications of recent legislative action. So I would anticipate those drivers would remain similar, but we may shift again. In addition to the OCR complaint, we faced some other challenges. We had extreme fragmentation in our efforts. There was no communication at any level as to basically who was doing what. This creates a really bad cultural situation because you don't have accessibility at the forefront of the things that you are doing. We had very inconsistent training and true understanding of what it meant to be accessible. I was working on a project at the time with our facilities division and to them accessibility was a physical thing, which is true. And at the time we were also working through some changes to our marketing strategy, which is digital accessibility related. So there's this inconsistency. And what we're doing in these fragmentations that are there, we maintained an approach that was compliance driven to remain in compliance with federal and other statutes as opposed to a culturally driven one. This led to, as you might imagine, a substantial. Situation where there were limited cross department collaborations taking place. When you couple all that together with strategy and with that OCR complaint, we clearly need to make some changes. We felt one of the best things to do was to start with that inconsistent training and understanding piece and begin educating our employees. About what accessibility was, what it meant to Sinclair, and why it's important above the legal ramifications. We were also at a point where we were trying to start launching microcredentials, which I'm sure many of you have seen in your own institutions. We use this as impetus to spur the first employee microcredential in the summer of 2020. To date, we've had more than 165 completers and we're currently running another cohort of this and there are 32 individuals enrolled. I'm sad because I'm no longer directly part of this entity, but it's it's pleasing to see that this program has continued. I won't go through everything specifically here, but you can see this this top level overview. We really want to focus this on training people to integrate accessibility, not from a systems perspective, but from a best practices perspective. We want to use that to then spur across the departmental collaboration.

Steve Cherry 10:42 OK.

Prokes, Christopher 10:54 We used e-learning where I was working at the time, IT and Accessibility services to drive this particular, excuse me, strategy. We wanted to increase student success and engagement by reducing barriers where accessibility could work and of course create a sustainable model that continuously evolves. And with new standards that have come out recently that we're working on compliance toward this becomes more important than ever. We involve several offices in this case and we were really privileged to have that fourth bullet point be center in all of this. At the time we had a VP level position that we we had a. Basically, as an advisory role to our president and executive leadership to represent the voice of the community in a stronger way, to represent the voice of our students and our employees. And when I spoke to him about this idea, I remember his face lighting up and within about two days he'd sent me his own ideas about what he thought this program should entail. And so having him there. Was was key. So you definitely need to have senior leadership involvement in this. The program itself is modular, so we have six. Well, we're starting with six. We're up to seven mini stackable credentials. In this case, we used our learning management system and Ally of course integrated with that to help deliver this program. Every session had hands on applied projects and real world case studies. There was very little lecture and discussion. It was more let's get you the basics and get you to do something like create accessible documents to understand how our content editing on our website works, to hear programs from the community that we use. Or programs on campus aimed at accessibility. Accessibility services ran this program, but again we had e-learning, IT and our senior leadership and faculty as part of this process. Anthologies product or Blackboard now obviously as you as you guys have updated. As Katie said, we used those tools to help have real time accessibility feedback. We were using Ally to improve course materials to improve documents. We were having people upload things into a course shell in our LMS and then have the accessibility. Evaluate on it with with ways to show where it could be improved. In fact, the scores got a little competitive there for a while. We had to actually kind of pull that back a little bit, but it also gave us better access to reporting with institutional data and then this led to faculty who were part of this. Wanting this to be embedded in their own training. Again, we've had 165, more than 165 employees create complete this program and it's now in its fourth iteration. We have it seems strange to say we had 100% increase in understanding, but based on data and feedback from participants. It's been amazing to watch the way things have changed. There is now we call it the unofficial circle of office products, where all of the department admins are almost acting like a fraternity or a sorority, where they're initiating new employees and explain them that this is how our office products work. You will make this. Document accessible. You will make these PDFs accessible. We are the ones holding departments together and we're gonna do this together. We saw a 10 to 15% in our ally scores for faculty members across the institution, which is significant. And what's really curious or what's really interesting to watch were the minor. Ways that things had not yet improved, where faculty were almost getting frustrated, not with the tool, but like, I can't get over that last little hump. I want everything to be perfect in my class. And so they're trying to find ways to learn and grow and develop there. And we increased on average about 200 materials per user in the ally. Within that first 30 days, because they were using the tool so much, we had some fairly significant institutional impact. I won't read all these directly, but you can see the skills were built extremely quick. We felt that trying to boil the ocean, as we say in high, was of course. To be impossible. So we wanted to focus on skills to make things more accessible of course design, which would reduce those barriers, promoting the collaboration in a way that would then ensure students, not just those with disabilities, but our curb cut effect of course, ensuring everyone had equal and improved learning opportunities. And then of course, reducing complaints and improving student satisfaction. And in fact, the Office of Civil Rights commended us for the strength of our training program in closing that OCR complaint. And now we know if we were to get something else like that, we're we're ready, willing and able to address that risk or any outside challenges that come in. One other key impact was that last one under institution that this this internal program and having internal experts who are willing to make the effort to do this, we reduced our professional development costs at a time when when every higher education institution is is facing some of those funding issues.

juan 15:40 Thank.

Prokes, Christopher 15:50 If you're looking to do something like this, there are a couple of lessons here that I will share. The first one is to have those people who are champions. We had five folks who were 100% bought into this process from the get-go, even above and beyond the fact that they were involved in helping close that complaint. If you have people on campus who are champions and not acting as this is some sort of mandate, your culture will will lend to being able to complete a program like this. Always make sure you're using data to drive this momentum and also celebrate progress. When I shared with our president how Ally worked and showed him the impact and scores. I think I saw that data point in every presentation from him for like 18 months and he was asking me constantly for more because those data points can help drive what people are doing. And now we also have other micro-credentials that are started up. I'm finishing one for AI in my current role. This helps everyone work for all. So if you're doing this. Collaboratively, you tend to see the gains the quickest.

juan 16:51 On the quarter.

Prokes, Christopher 16:52 From an initiation standpoint, I mentioned the kind of the informal network of of administrative assistance. If you start embedding accessibility into your onboarding and you offer continued structured PD pathways, you're going to see a large increase in people's use and understanding of why accessibility is important. So a program like this can can 100% help that.

juan 16:53 You can. OK. Simply.

Prokes, Christopher 17:11 By using then tools and dashboards that show you where accessibility is being measured and how it's being measured, you can also use that to make better institutional decisions and also improve workflows internally. I'd be remiss if I didn't kind of tell you where we are now because this program, again, is in its fourth iteration, obviously with WCAG 2.

juan 17:23 Yeah, grab.

Prokes, Christopher 17:31 Coming out and looking past that, we've had to make some changes in that regard. But because of programs like this, we were able to revitalize that culture to meet this need. Our IT has taken on better institutional planning with infrastructure to make sure app development remains accessible from the get go. Designers in e-learning have changed their templates to be more accessible from the start. Therefore you kind of you indirectly force this onto the workflow in a positive way. Our marketing team has beefed U web content accessibility and the training that they use for. Content editors and then of course the steering committee of all of this has worked with Accessibility services for oversight coordination. We are in the midst of launching a new website as well and that's kind of steering things that we're doing right now. The templates on that website have been. Better created to have accessibility built in. We've been holding our vendors to a higher degree of accessibility. I know one of them got quite upset with us at one point, but quite frankly, I don't really care. This is their responsibility to make sure what we're doing is accessible. We've done some work with a I to have automated audits as well as keeping manual. Ones in there to ensure the human is driving this and we've beefed up that content editor training. I apologize for my bad transition here in the last one, but with terms of Ally and e-learning and AI, we've used some agent building to help scan course materials even before they go into the system to be evaluated by Ally. By doing some automated alt text generation which is reviewed by a human, looking at document structure improvements and then working at looking at workflows that remediate rather than are punitive. For example, we continue to use the Ally LMS scoring and feedback opportunity for faculty. It offers us a chance to have bulk remediation support. We can use that data. Us that faculty can coach their peers, especially adjuncts, and by having dashboards available, we can have that easily reported out to our leadership. As I wrap up this presentation, I just want to say if you are looking at a program like this or looking at some institutional efforts, I'll give you these four kind of model stances here, the first one being invest in training from day one and don't stop. We now have on our new employee onboarding process. Accessibility is part of that conversation. It's not a direct topic, but it's included in those initial pieces of training. And as staff especially are encouraged to attend training over time, accessibility remains one of those tracks that they continuously push so people understand. Not only its importance, but its place within our culture and our systems. We've gotten the message across loud and clear to our senior leadership with 31,000 full students. Effectively we have a lot of administrators. We've gotten their buy in because that cross-functional governance has to start at the top our president like I said for 18. Months I saw that data point constantly. He has bought into this. He understands the importance of it and he has been our champion. In fact, he is a completer of the accessibility micro credential. Took him some time. It took him a couple of iterations, but he did get it done and when you get an e-mail from his personal account. That accessibility micro-credential badge is proudly displayed in his signature. All decisions you make when it comes to accessibility should be data-driven as opposed to anything else. What is your data telling you in terms of accessibility weaknesses, but also accessibility strengths? When you have a data point that you can show an institutional increase in scores in Ally, or even just a reduction in complaints or challenges or risk assessments, that data tells a lot bigger story than just what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. And lastly, embellish continuous improvement. I realize we say continuous improvement constantly in higher education. It's almost overused. But if every day or week or month or semester you can make some kind of gain that helps continually improve what you're doing as an institution, even if it's a small change. It makes a huge difference. A quick example of that is in our vendor process for construction projects, we've always had the physical accessibility requirement. We are at a point where we've gone out and actually met with local firms to train them better on what that means for a higher education or a public facility just. Because there's so many changes constantly to those laws that they need to be up to date on that. So it's a service we've been able to provide to our community. I'll leave you with this statement. I've said this in many of those trainings, and it's one I believe to be true. I don't remember where it came from, but accessibility is not a project. It is truly. Culture. And if you can make even a small cultural change in what you're doing as an institution or a business or an employer, you're going to see a massive shift in your culture very quickly. Sometimes it takes something like an OCR complaint. To spur that. But when you spur things in the right direction and you can do some of the things I've mentioned like the the collaborative culture, like the training, like starting with with things at the top with that level of governance, you're really going to make some fairly significant change. So I thank you all for hearing me today. My my e-mail. Is there. Please shoot me an e-mail if I can answer any further questions. I'm happy to connect. Again, I moved into a little bit different of a role as of late, but I still maintain a pretty strong portfolio of accessibility related projects. So thank you so much. And I was missing a chat here. Oh wow, thank you. Um. All right. So any initial questions for me or Katie, do I turn it back to you?

Katie Grennell 23:15 Yeah, I think if you are good with that, we will save time for questions after Erickson is done. So thank you Doctor Brooks. That was fantastic. I you're, I mean obviously you're very accessibility oriented, but you're the way that you talk about things is just in.

Prokes, Christopher 23:27 My pleasure.

Katie Grennell 23:35 Really nice, clear language. I loved all the examples that are tangible takeaways. So this was really, really great. So thank you so much for sharing all of your your successes and what brought you to this. So we really appreciate it. All right. You're welcome.

Prokes, Christopher 23:49 My pleasure. Thank you.

Katie Grennell 23:52 So without further ado, Erickson, we would love to have you present. So you should have the ability to share your screen and I will keep an eye on the chat and then when you're done, we can dive into the questions. And I'm not sure if there's any, if you're having any issues, connection issues or anything like that, but Erickson, I can always share the slides if you need me to.

juan 24:40 Hi.

Katie Grennell 24:47 Just give him a moment, might be trying to connect.

Andres Trujillo 24:55 Why don't we go with the questions for this for doctor pros in the meantime, Katie?

Katie Grennell 25:00 OK. That's a great idea. Yeah, if you're all right with that, Chris, if we can turn over to, you know, if there's any questions, we got a lot of great, lots of emojis happening here, lots of great positive reactions. And I think it's a a good place to kind of open up the floor and see if there's any questions here for Doctor Probst.

25:06 Sure.

Katie Grennell 25:26 Amy.

Amy Lomellini 25:28 I'll start us off. Hey, Chris, Doctor Prokes, you know, for those who maybe don't have the impetus of, you know, an OCR complaint, where would you suggest people start? You listed so many wonderful things. There's so much going on. If you don't have that, you know, drive what? What would your be your suggestion?

Katie Grennell 25:29 Mhm.

juan 25:35 OK.

Prokes, Christopher 25:42 Yeah. That's a great question. Thank you, Doctor Lolini. I think you still have to have something that spurs that. So maybe you have a a complaint, maybe it was an OCR complaint, but you have a complaint from a student that became something you could kind of latch onto or more importantly an employee. For example, we have an employee that I work with quite a bit on several projects that. Recently was involved in a in an accident and has lost, has lost the use of of her legs and so she now uses a mobility assisted device. She has, you know, a placard and parking parking spot and she has made it very well known that she frequently was looking at the accessibility of our structures. A voice like that, which you can elevate through the right channels, especially through leadership, will make that case very quick. And so I think if you find. A case like that, which you can use to spur the discussion. That story becomes very powerful, very quick. The other thing that you can do is use something like a building renovation. You know our our campus, and if you can tell in the picture, but our campus is brutalist. It was built in the 60s. It looks, we joke. It looks like a Soviet prison sometimes. It is not an easy structure to modify, so if you have someone who's accessibility minded that's part of one of those projects, you can use that case to make it a larger case to start thinking about even as a niche of accessibility like like physical accessibility.

Amy Lomellini 27:11 Yeah, that's a great way to think about it, starting with the stories and guaranteed there's stories on your campus, whether it's students, employees, whomever it may be, find those stories and you know, if people are willing to share, it goes a long way. Absolutely.

Prokes, Christopher 27:14 Thank you. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I see a question here. What data points did you share beyond just Ally score? So satisfaction survey results, faculty satisfaction survey results. We did a survey after each micro mini credential session about takeaways. Those types of data points, not as much quantitative, but certainly help to, you know, to what I just said and what Amy just said.

Amy Lomellini 27:26 Uh, OK, Yep.

Prokes, Christopher 27:45 I said that telling the story of that we also we got building inspection results from recent construction projects where those types of accessibility things were were discussed. So it's a combination of qualitative and quantitative and then the other big thing is. Number of students we served. We looked at overall number of documents that had been scanned, course shells that have been evaluated. So there's a lot of data you can pull in there. It's best to have a lot. Try and tell the story.

Katie Grennell 28:21 Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Chris. And it looks like Christina shared her thanks as well. That was a great question. Oh, we have another one, Chava.

Maimon, Chava 28:31 Yes, thank you so much. So I wanted to understand or to clarify how the credential worked. You had mini synchronous sessions. Did I understand that correctly or completely wrong?

Prokes, Christopher 28:48 We did. We had, we had synchronous sessions, although they were offered in a hybrid nature as part of, you know, aforementioned construction. We expanded our hybrid meeting capability that helped drive attendance for sure. They were 90 minutes a piece to start. They were Matt. We maxed, we joked. We maxed out our presenters. They got 20 minutes to talk, 70 minutes to. Do and then that way we were, we were having those opportunities engaged. We did have those recorded and we did do some editing to make sure that a person who could not make it could view the recording and still gain, you know, the same experience. And then they had to submit, you know, their assignments through the LMS, through the tools that were there. And then the facilitators kind of served as graders and we use that submission to trigger each mini bad or each badge that became part of the overall credential which can be shared broadly. The credential program, to Kayla's question, was not mandatory. It is voluntary. But I will tell you that two things drove participation. One, the tie into the institutional strategy. And two, I'm going to tell you it got pretty competitive around here for a while with that first micro-credential because you'd see it in e-mail signatures, you'd see it on LinkedIn pages. And all of a sudden people were asking like where do I get one of those accessibility champion badges? We did partner with frameworks. We did use UDL design as part of our curriculum for creating the course itself, but also spurring some of the the content in the e-learning focused module. We did look at AHEAD as one of the organizations to align with some of their standards. We did not have any external folks from those organizations, that organization specifically, but we did have outside community organizations like we have a local organization that does interpretation. Services come in to talk about their services. There's a program at one of our local high schools that won an award for their intervention specialist program. They did a presentation on the K12 world because a lot of our students are in college credit plus, which is a pre-college program. So we did bring in some folks. We really only had three sessions that were actually fully led by Sinclair. One was e-learning, one was. Accessibility services and the other was facilities. Everything else was external.

Maimon, Chava 30:57 Thank you very much. That clarifies a lot.

Katie Grennell 31:08 Did anybody have any other questions? Yeah, these are fantastic so far. Well, I'll give folks some time to if they if they think of their question and they want to pop that in the chat or of course you can come off mute and ask a question. But I excuse me, I did have a question for you Chris, cause I.

Prokes, Christopher 31:31 Sure.

Katie Grennell 31:33 I would be curious to know how this is going to sound slightly silly, but how can you recruit accessibility champions? I think in some ways they they might kind of reveal themselves, if you will, right by talking a lot about things that they're by accessibility and things they're passionate about. Out and just showing more of an interest. But I would love to know, you know, how, how are you doing that? What are you looking for? You know, things like that.

Prokes, Christopher 32:02 Sure. So they do kind of emerge organically. I think it goes back to what what I said with Amy of you know everyone kind of has a story that that can relate to that. So you know the the K12 context for example, I'm one of I've multiple siblings and and one of them is is has a fairly severe learning disability. So I've always kind of had a passion.

Katie Grennell 32:12 Mhm.

Prokes, Christopher 32:22 As an educator for making sure that we have accessibility at the forefront to help students that have exceptional learning needs. The 2nd way is the kind of competition of having that micro-credential. People who completed the program have now become our biggest supporters and our biggest speakers. And then the other part of this is we were able to convince our faculty leadership.

Katie Grennell 32:33 Mhm. Mhm.

Prokes, Christopher 32:42 To have specific evaluation targets they could include in their faculty evaluations related to accessibility. So all of a sudden we start seeing faculty members who had something motivating them of course tied to their to their evaluations, but they separate themselves just from the evaluation pretty quick. So that that was a big one. I do see Eric's on here. So let me answer this last question real quick and then I'll I'll.

Katie Grennell 32:53 Right.

Prokes, Christopher 33:02 I'll turn it over to his time. How are you aligned this work with the new accessibility requirements? So we've integrated that new set of standards into the curriculum and web and digital accessibility is one of the topics our marketing and IT teams have actually lead that program. And so now as part of the new requirements, all training to be a content editor of our website requires you to have at least. At least that mini credential part of the series in order to get content editor access because that way you know that what you're doing even before it goes through marketing and IT for approval, you know that it's been designed with with best case in mind.

Katie Grennell 33:38 Excellent. Thank you so much. All right, Erickson, if you are ready, we are happy to turn things over to you. You should have the ability to share your screen, so whenever you're ready, we can begin.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 33:52 Yep. Uh, again. Good morning, everyone. Uh, share my screen. OK. Yeah. Are you using my screen now?

Katie Grennell 34:13 It is loading. Yep, we can see it. Perfect.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 34:13 OK. OK, good morning. Good morning everyone. I am Ericson De Bonan again from Mapua University. So I'll be sharing our experience actually with using Ally for for. For quite a short time, for almost like it's just two years. So I want to do and also how actually improved our learning experiences for our students. So first and foremost I would just like to. Uh, introduce our university. Our university is located in the Philippines. So as I mentioned earlier, it's it's early morning here, it's all 36 AM here, but I'm really glad that I will be able to share what we are currently doing um in our university in terms of improving accessibility. So Mapua University, we just celebrated our one. 100th year last year. It's established in 1925 by Don Tomas Mapua, the first architect, registered architect here in the Philippines. So our university focuses on. Range of academic programs from engineering, sciences, architecture and design, information technology, business manage, business management, communication and media studies and Health Sciences. We have around 16,000 students which covers from our base. education from K12 to our graduate studies and including masters and doctorate degree. So we have two campuses, one is located in uh Manila, Philippines, and also one from an annex in Makati, the central business district. So. It all started our accessibility experience or journey started when we realized that our students are have different types of ways to learn. Um Some of them are visual, some of them are absolutely prefer. More on listening to different types of contents. When we realized that our students already has different ways to learn, we did acknowledge that most likely we need to provide accessibility. And establish it and inform our faculty members, but. Just like any university or institution, it's really not that easy to have this advocacy or things that you need to implement because when we were talking about accessibility initially with with our in our institution, most of them didn't really understand. And what accessibility is. So we need to create and start telling them and informing them why accessibility is really important. We then realized that. um There's really a need to to inform faculty members and retrain them. So our commitment to the university is actually committed to the strategic vision of inclusivity right now as the head of Educational technology in Mapua University and also digital content. So we my office handles also creating different digital contents. We are committed to actually ensure that every tool that we integrate to our learning management system which is black. Blackboard is that there should be accessibility features, not just for our learning management system, but all digital platforms should have accessibility feature to actually support different learning experiences of our students. Regardless of their individual needs. So that is our vision and our vision was made. We realized our our mission and vision through using allies. So again, as I mentioned, just like any other institution when you introduce a new tool to the faculty member. They don't get much appreciation unless they will be able to experience fully what the function is, so aside from that one. What we wanted when when we saw Ally for accessibility is just it's really easy to integrate it with our students. It's really straightforward where our students are able to generate different alternative formats without. Doing anything much. So once a file was uploaded to the learning management system, it automatically looks into the file and tries to provide different different alternative formats. One of my most favorites actually also file. Epubs, because especially in our university right now, we don't use as much as physical books already. So our students, you'll be seeing them roaming around with tablets or phones and being mobile, so they're just using epubs. I haven't used electronic Braille, but the function of Ally, you can actually convert the the data or the the file into an electronic Braille, which actually allows our students to consume much content. One of the things that our students actually use is EPUB. Aside from that one, they also use what you call translations. We have students that are coming from different countries which are not native English speakers, so they were able to use that one. Aside from that, for the faculty members, as I've mentioned, this is one of the initial tasks that we need to ensure that we need to be able to communicate to our faculty members that the use of Ally will be. Enable them or empower them to make their courses accessible and it's easily integrated the learning management system. The platform or Ally actually provides a real time feedback on how faculty members will be able to improve the accessibility score aside from that. For the university itself, for Papua University, we actually saw the baseline score of our current accessibility and my my my mandate actually is to to ensure that our accessibility score will continuously be improving. Coming from our baseline scores term per term, actually we're looking into specific industries whether what is really the the best accessibility score for an institution, but there is none. But I want, but our goal is really to improve the accessibility. Year in, year out. So first we do to improve this accessibility, not just by using this tool. We partnered with Blackboard. We had an accessibility day. It was held in our one of our Mapua Cardinal Cinema. We've invited the team from from Blackboard and some panel members. If you will be seeing, I'm one of the panel members for this one. We have Miss Maria Veronica Temple. Or as the Vice President for La Salle Admission and Student Life from the La Salle College of Saint Peniel. We also have Miss Reya Alvaya Gutalib. She's an accessibility consultant at Level Access and Inclusive Education Program Manager. Which is in partnership with the Department of Education in the Philippines. Rhea actually is a is actually diagnosed as blind. So she's one of the the speakers in our accessibility today. It's really helpful for our faculty members and administrators to understand what really meant of making sure that there will be equity and ensuring equitable access to different types of technologies and different types of learners. So we have this accessibility day. Actually our cornerstone event to launch accessibility, not just with by using Ally, but really our goal to ensure that all our students will be able to access and and be able to utilize technology. To empower them as different types of learners. So these are some of the photos of the actual event of our accessibility day. So aside from that, we've presented specific institutional case study. We I I personally presented the comprehensive deep dive into the learning technologies that we are using, not just with the learning management system, but also in our e-textbooks. We ensure that our e-textbooks has some accessibility features where in it could. Read out loud. You can personally download it offline. We even without Internet will be able to access it. Aside from that, again, as I've mentioned, how our university integrates different digital tools to support different diverse learner profiles. Before, I don't actually give much importance on a video with transcription and subtitles. I just thought, especially for the Philippines, this is just for Korean novellas, just completely understand it. But eventually I have been learned by interviewing students that this actually helps them learn using transcripts, transcriptions, and even subtitles and captions. Especially for those learners who are visual in nature. Also, we learned that using accessibility or understanding the data generated by Ally actually helps us improve our course design. And we're able to showcase some of the improvements and student engagements because we are now engaging into inclusive practices using or by pioneering or implementing accessibility as I've mentioned earlier. With the use of Ally, it actually improves our course design. One of the key highlights is that Mapua University follows Quality Matters, and we are glad to say that we are Quality Matters is a global recognized organization. that actually benchmarks or evaluates online education, but really highlights one of their criteria, which is accessibility, usability, and instructional design. Um Actually, with Quality Matters, Papua University is the first university or institution In in the Philippines with two courses qualified or accredited by Quality Matters, meaning our courses pass their criteria in terms of course design and improved accessibility. Aside from that, our commitment in terms of accessibility, we joined the recent effects for Content Day, which is again powered by Ally. Mapua University is the only Philippine institution that participated in this event, which is fixed for day content. We encourage before us. Actually joining this one, we did an actual training of faculty members and retooling them on how to use Ally to improve accessibility and tell them what is really the importance of having improved accessibility and usability in a certain course with that one. We actually launched our internal contest. We're using the the old logo of AB Anthology because this is the old post in our social media. We launched an internal fixture content day as a contest within the institution if you. We'll be seeing we have the top 10 faculty members who joined coming from the different departments from the SFS in our School of Foundational and Studies and Education. IEMG is the. Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, some coming from the School of IT, School of Health Sciences. So we launched this as an institutional contest to our faculty members to for them to participate and we have have the top three. Schools or programs. The School of Foundational Studies and Education is the champion internally. School of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management and School of Ideas, School of Information Technology, where the as we mobilize our faculty members. It helped us land on the 5th on the leaderboard of a fixture content day with a total of around 28,859. Fixes or actually if you will be looking here an average of 1.64909 number of fixes over our total number of students roughly around 17,500. So actually we we we mobilize our faculty members and also. Instructional designers to participate in this initiative. Again, as I've mentioned, we are the only Philippine school who actually joined and actually landed luckily in the number 5 or 5th place of the overall leader board of. Fix your content day. So currently, what is our path forward in terms of accessibility? We are still continuously monitoring our improvements of accessibility score institutionally. And we also look into the different tools. In our university, we almost have around 10 at the minimum number of tools integrated to the learning management system and it is. Our goal is to ensure that there all tools that will be integrated actually is implementing or using an accessibility feature. Aside from that, we are continuously training our faculty members for them to. Actually realize and utilize accessibility features in their instructional design. And aside from that, Mapua University is still pushing into and advocating for accessibility by joining. Uh, I'll fix recommend the launching an accessibility day for this year. We'll be having one more accessibility day and also training our faculty members and students by using this tool so that to to actually build a more inclusive. An accessible education and platform in the university. So with that, I just want to end with this simple quote and encouragement to everyone who is. Starting who might be starting in terms of improving accessibility in their institution. Our vision is actually to make sure that there will be equity and providing different. Tools and apps accessible, which are accessible to our different types of learners. And I so want to end by saying that cultivating true inclusion in education means dismantling every barrier, meaning we need to reorient. Your faculty members of why how important accessibility is and ensuring that the current technology adapts to the learner, not the other way around. So again, that's all. I am Erikson Dimaunahan from Pua University and thank you for your commitment to inclusive education. So if you want. To reach out to me, you can e-mail me at at this one. So thank you so much and and bambujay from the Philippines.

Katie Grennell 52:21 Thank you so much, Ericson. That was so fantastic. We have time for questions, so I do want to open it up and see if anybody had any questions for Ericson.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 52:25 Yes.

Katie Grennell 52:36 Well, let's see. There is one in the chat. So Susan's asking where the quote was from that you had just shared on the screen.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 52:45 Actually referring to some of for for that that code actually it's combination of different codes for accessibility and it's just that it actually relates to our mission and vision to make sure that there will be inclusive education to our. university um because actually two or three years ago we launched a fully online fully online programs. This is to provide accessibility for those people who want to have that papua university education without stepping into the campus. So we have fully online programs so students can actually finish a degree without stepping into the university. So that makes that what's what our one of our goals to ensure that for those people who are far from the Metro Manila will be able to. Um, access Papua education remotely.

Katie Grennell 53:50 Thank you so much. Are there any other questions that anybody had? I'm going to turn my camera on now. Well, I have a question if if that's all right. I I I was, I mean I was so moved by your commitment to accessibility and inclusion and and equity for all of your students. I'm curious to know a little more. You had mentioned that you were doing or kind of like gathering student testimonials about how. Some of the accessibility initiatives that you had implemented have been benefiting them. Were there any kind of takeaways or anything like that that you wanted to share that students had, you know, kind of talked about, you know, how these tools or these different strategies have kind of helped them? I always love hearing, you know, how this impacts the students. So if there was anything that you wanted to share, I would, we'd love to know.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 54:48 One of the key feature of the elements, not just the Ally, is that you could actually download if you are using mobile.

Katie Grennell 54:58 Mhm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 54:59 Especially for our students, most of our students access the the the courses through mobile. So we do have the policy that it should be mobile first. The first thing that they they open in the morning is through mobile phones. So we do have a campaign in terms of.

Katie Grennell 55:07 Yeah, mhm. Mhm, mhm. Right.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 55:19 Of really advocating and telling the students this are accessible through mobile. We also told them that they could download the files offline and we'll be able to access it even without the Internet, especially for those who are mobile or moving from location.

Katie Grennell 55:23 Mhm. Mhm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 55:38 To location. So we do have that. They mentioned that they actually appreciate the learning management system together with this features, making sure that it actually helps and complements the way they live, especially for for our students right now.

Katie Grennell 55:47 Mhm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 55:56 Which are Gen. Z's. They don't prefer bringing much books, so meaning files as epub are actually helpful for them. And also it's actually it's it's from them that I learned that you could actually study by just by actually listening.

Katie Grennell 56:06 Mhm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 56:16 Students right now are really a fan of podcasts, so especially here in the Philippines, people are doing a lot of podcasts, and I've learned that some of the students really prefer listening to some of the lectures.

Katie Grennell 56:20 Mhm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 56:31 While they are going home. So especially in the Philippines, there's a lot of the heavy traffic, so they prefer listening to this one and there's a lot more, even the one of our features in terms of video studio as as the.

Katie Grennell 56:35 Mhm. Mm-hmm.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 56:51 The one hosting our videos are really helpful with transcription and even caption subtitles, which actually helps our students who are visual learners. It actually improves a lot of things in the way the students learn.

Katie Grennell 57:03 Mhm. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. I love that. So you're taking into consideration the devices they're using their environment, right. And that might be changing, you know, throughout the day, you know, as they're going from one place to the next. So I love hearing how, you know, universal design is, is kind of working its way in there as well.

Ericson D. Dimaunahan 57:27 Yep.

Katie Grennell 57:27 Well, thank you so much, Erickson. Really this was so it was a great presentation from both you and and Chris and I'm just going to share my slides real quick. We have just a couple kind of closing slides that I wanted to end with. So bear with me for just a moment please. And I will switch the settings. So we have some additional ways that you can connect with us from the Ally side of things. So we do have our international Ally user group and this is a global community of Ally users. Our next meeting is March 26th and it's Thursday at 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, so we have the the link here if you're interested in joining. There's also an online discussion forum and you can ask questions and learn from other Ally users. We have also the community, which is our kind of the Blackboard version as well, an online, you know, space for collaboration and discussion and blog posts and things like that. So we have the information for that here as well. And then of course our member idea exchange. So this is where if anybody has. Suggestions or feature requests or things like that that you'd like the product team to be aware of, we would love to know. So please share that. And I will also share, we do have our upcoming Ally office hours coming up on Monday, March 9th and that's at 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. So we have the information here to be able to go and register for that and that's led by the the wider product and development team for Ally. And we'll talk through, you know, we'll take a a significant portion of that time is for questions and answers, but we'll also go through any kind of recent releases or updates or things like that. And I think that is it for today. So we'd like to thank you all for joining us today and listening to the the wonderful, you know, stories and experiences from Erickson and Chris. And we hope you have a great rest of the week and thanks again.