Audience: Online instructors in higher education
Roles: Instructional design, subject matter expert, storyboarding, prototyping, visual design.
Tools: Articulate Storyline 360, Adobe Illustrator
As an instructional designer at a major university, I noticed the need for digital accessiblity training for online instructors. Many instructors not only lacked the technical skills to make their courses digitally accessible, they were also unaware of digital accessibility principles altogether.
This training is designed to fill that knowledge gap and provide instructors with the knowledge and skills they need to create digitally accessible courses.
Through my work with dozens of faculty members teaching online courses, I noticed that few knew about digital accessibility standards and how to make their courses accessible. And yet they were also expected to deliver digitally accessible courses without any training. Therefore, my goal with this training was to efficiently provide answers to the what, why, and the how:
I started development by determining my outcomes. Through work with colleagues, reviews of resouces on digital accessibility such as WebAIM, and own experiences with faculty members, I determined that my training should teach seven key digital accessibility areas:
The most authentic assessment for this content would be the creation of a digitally accessible course. However, that type of assessment would need to be evaluated by an instructor and would require more time and resources. Because of the time and budget contraints on faculty members and their departments, this training would need to be short, self-paced, and free. Therefore, I determined that the outcomes for this course would need to be assessed by automatically graded multiple choice questions.
Multiple choice questions can assess a student’s ability to identify, which is why I chose identifying the seven accessibility areas as the outcome for this course. If faculty members had even this level of knowledge, it would drastically improve their ability to design digitally accessible courses.
I considered my audience carefully when designing the concept for the course. Most of the information and trainings I’d seen on accessibility had been generic and designed for a wide audience. This makes sense: digital accessibility is required in a wide variety of occupations and roles.
However, I wanted this specific training to speak to the specific needs of faculty members and provide examples that they would recognize as familiar in their own work. I also wanted to provide a more engaging structure than the technical descriptions of most accessibility materials. Therefore, I decided that my training would be an Accessibility Story: the familiar story of a faculty member creating materials for their class.
As a guide through the content, I created a character called Dr. Folly. This character could be summoned to provide assistance to the user by selecting her door when faced with a multiple choice question. Dr. Folly also provides explanations (the “why”) and encouragement throughout. Her dialogue is written to give her a fun, casual tone, like the quirky but helpful colleague that’s in nearly every university department.
I also wanted to present the user with familiar examples: a syllabus, lecture slides, a course website, etc. I knew that faculty would be able to connect digital accessibility with their own work if the examples in this training reflected that work. Some aspects of digital accessibility are difficult to describe through text alone, so examples served an important instructional role.
With these aspects of the concept determined, I created a storyboard.
This training’s seven digital accessibility areas form the structure of the course. Between the introduction and conclusion, each section focuses on a single digital accessibility area. Each of those sections are comprised of:
I first brainstormed the different situations where faculty members would need to apply digital accessibility best practices. Because of my extensive experience working with faculty members on these issues, I had a lot of experience to draw from. To determine the multiple choice questions that formed the core of the instructional content, I came up with the situation, the best practice, and then two or more distractors showing examples with poor digital accessibility. I sketched all of this out in a Google Doc (excerpt shown here).
Through storyboarding, I was able to determine what assets would be needed for the project: images, sounds, documents, etc.
I found several assets on Envato Elements: the image of Dr. Folly and her door, the image of the online class, success sounds, an email sound, etc. But to ensure that the content was authentic, I created several documents myself: syllabi, class website layouts, etc.
The course was developed in Articulate Storyline 360. I selected straightforward and calming styles; I selected the neutral Arial as my font, and cool blues for the design. I also added in sound effects to let the user know that an action has been performed or a task completed.
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