1. Student-Created Content Counts!
Carolyn Speer, Ph.D.
Manager, Instructional Design and Access
November, 2017
Bit.ly/ContentCounts
Hello, my name is Carolyn Speer, and I’m the Manager of Instructional Design and Access for Wichita State University. Today we are going to discuss the issue of student-created content in the university setting and how the use of such content in credit and non-credit courses constitutes a training challenge for our university. If you would like to download the slides from today’s presentation, you can find them at Bit.ly/ContentCounts. The slides contain full note scripts that will cover the presentation content.

2. Agenda Situation at WSU From Agreement to Outcomes “Training” Students
Today we will begin by briefly explaining what is going on at WSU with regard to accessibility. Then we will shift to a slightly detailed discussion of our agreement with the National Federation of the Blind so you can understand how we developed the course outcomes and learning objectives for our accessibility training. From there we will think through how we made the decision that student-created content counts under our agreement, and we will end with a discussion of how we plan to track and motivate our students who receive this training.
Tracking and Motivation

3. What’s going on at WSU? 15,000 student state R-1 university in Kansas
NFB agreement signed in July 2016
All content, credit, non-credit, and for enrichment and in any delivery mode (f-2-f and online) must be accessible by July 29,
Major re-tooling underway including:
Committees
Training
Policies, procedures, etc.
Wichita State is a 15,000 student R-1 university in southcentral Kansas. The university entered into an agreement with the National Federation of the Blind in July of The agreement states that the university will make all university content accessible by July 29, This statement is designed to be read broadly to include all content and especially course-related content provided to WSU students. As a consequence of this agreement, the university began a major retooling of certain committees, existing training, and policies.

4. Letter of the Agreement
“All instructional materials, co-curricular materials, EIT, and online courses created or used by a WSU department or professor in connection in with any WSU course offering will, to the best of WSU’s ability, be accessible … at the same time they are available to any other student in that program .... [and they] will be made accessible no later than four years from the execution of this agreement.”
“All instructional materials, co-curricular materials, EIT (Electronic and Information Technology), and online courses created or used by a WSU department or professor in connection in with any WSU course offering will, to the best of WSU’s ability, be accessible … at the same time they are available to any other student in that program .... [and they] will be made accessible no later than four years from the execution of this agreement.”
This includes all information presented visually in a classroom, test or homework setting. WSU is to ensure that all qualified individuals are not excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities at the university.

5. Letter of the Policies
Agreement led to three policies, with 8.11 being primary here:
“All instructional materials, co-curricular materials, Electronic and Information Technology (EIT), LMS’s, and online courses created or used by a WSU department or instructional staff with any WSU academic course offering will be accessible to students with disabilities, and at the same time as they are available to any other student enrolled in that setting, to the best of WSU’s ability.  Any educational materials or content that is required, optional, or for enrichment for any WSU student will be accessible or an equally effective alternate access will be provided.”
The agreement led directly to policy 8.11, which state in part: “  All instructional materials, co-curricular materials, Electronic and Information Technology (EIT), LMS’s, and online courses created or used by a WSU department or instructional staff with any WSU academic course offering will be accessible to students with disabilities, and at the same time as they are available to any other student enrolled in that setting, to the best of WSU’s ability.  Any educational materials or content that is required, optional, or for enrichment for any WSU student will be accessible or an equally effective alternate access will be provided.”

6. We Got “Spirit of the Agreement” Yes We Do!
“All” means ALL
“Services, programs, and activities” (Agreement)
“Required, optional, or for enrichment” (Policies)
The resulting university policies are faithful to both the letter and the spirit of the agreement. Where the agreement states that WSU will create and maintain accessible services, programs, and activities, the policies require all content whether required, optional, or for enrichment be accessible. In order to meet the standard that is captured in the spirit of the agreement and the policies, it becomes clear that students who create content for classes, participate in campus activities, and otherwise help to create the culture of the university should be properly trained in accessibility, disability awareness, and technical standards.

7. What Training is Necessary?
Aligned our agreement training needs with our existing goals
Distilled our agreement to learning objectives and outcomes:
III.C.1
WSU instructors and appropriate WSU administrators as determined by WSU can:
1. Summarize/describe/paraphrase the requirements of the ADA Summarize/describe/paraphrase the requirements of this Agreement.
To identify what training development was necessary, the university pursued two paths: the first was to fit disability awareness training into the existing sensitivity program including “Green Zone” and “Safe Zone” trainings. This gave rise to our Ability Ally training; a two-hour face-to-face disability awareness program that has subsequently been put online. Some aspects of this training satisfied training requirements of our agreement, but not many. To identify our existing needs, we distilled the agreement into 70 training objectives, which we then used to guide our ongoing training efforts. Most of these objectives were then covered in our Foundations of Accessibility online class. The total content of this class is approximately on 3-hour college course.

8. Who Must be Trained? Letter of the agreement: All “instructors”:
“’Instructors’ means all individuals who provide any course-related instruction to WSU students, including, but not limited to, professors, lecturers, fellows, and teaching assistants.”
Spirit of the agreement: All instructors and others who offer:
“Services, programs, and activities” (Agreement)
“Required, optional, or for enrichment” (Policies)
If we step back and think about who must receive accessibility training in order to meet both the letter and spirit of the agreement, we find that students are reasonably included in both interpretation. In the strictest interpretation, students who create and deliver content with instructional purpose within a course are acting in an “instructor’s” role as defined by the agreement. This would include students in seminar classes, speech classes, performance classes, etc.
Moving beyond that, we find that students who create any content that supports or offers services, programs, or activities on campus whether they are required, optional, or for enrichment should also receive training, not because WSU is meeting a training requirement but because WSU needs to be able to ensure the accessibility of these offerings, regardless who developed and delivered them.

9. Building Training for Students
Students aren’t typically “trained”; they are taught.
Wichita State does not have a history of extending staff/faculty training to students without a direct instructional role.
Existing university training can provide a model for creating student-facing training on similar topics.
Where should this training “come from”? And how should it be delivered?
At Wichita State, students have only a few ”training” events, most of which are tied to orientation and student activities such as Greek life. For the most part, students are thought of as being “taught” in classes rather than “trained” in a corporate training model. Those people who teach students are thought of as instructional staff rather than regular staff. So creating a full set of training materials aimed at students and designed to be used within courses or to support courses describes a new model. In order to conceptualize this new model, we turned to our developed and planned training for staff and faculty. At this time we still have some open questions: where should this training be seen as coming from, and how should it be delivered?

10. Major Trainings Ability Ally Foundations of Accessibility
Advanced Accessibility (Proposed)
The major trainings that are already developed could easily be modified by WSU’s Instructional Design and Access office for targeted delivery to students in an online and perhaps face-to-face format. That would include the disability awareness Ability Ally course and the full Foundations of accessibility online course. It could also include other major trainings as they are developed over time. Plans are underway to follow this course, and these larger trainings will be available to interested students during the spring 2018 semester and beyond. At this time, the plan is to administer these courses in the same way the faculty training is administered: using the office of Instructional Design and Access as online course facilitators.

11. Mini/Targeted Trainings for Students
Accessible speeches and lectures in online and F-2-F
Making handouts
Building a webpage
Running a discussion
Making a video
Making an audio podcast
Presenting a poster
Going to a conference
But in order to be useful, students also need targeted technical trainings that are chunked by subject. At this time we have decided to create mini trainings in the following areas with more to come over time:
Accessible speeches and lectures in online and F-2-F formats
Making handouts
Building a webpage
Running a discussion
Making a video
Making an audio podcast
Presenting a poster
Going to a conference
These will be fully technical trainings and may include some training on university resources such as scanner, audio capture equipment, and supportive software.

12. Using the “Digital Credential” Model
Credly credentials: provides extrinsic motivation tracking
In order to provide an extrinsic motivator and allow students to capture and explain this technical training, we will be awarding digital credentials through the Credly service. The credentials will be designed to capture and promote specific competencies that students acquire through their trainings. These credentials will be similar but distinct from the credentials offered to faculty who take similar trainings. By using the existing digital credential system, WSU can then track who has received the official university training, whether student or faculty, and these data can then be married up with analytics data to see the impact of the training at the course level for students.

13. The Plan
Offer and promote the trainings directly to students and also to faculty
Run parallel training offerings through Graduate School Professional Development
Focus on major trainings
Incorporated into an integrated “how to teach” approach
Face-to-face sessions and online
Pursue offering generic trainings to other universities and other constituents
Starting in spring, 2018, WSU plans to promote these trainings heavily by targeting both students and faculty. The idea is that students who are aware of the training may seek it out, perhaps in part because of the digital credential, and faculty who require students to create content will ask students to take the training before they develop that content. Ideally, they will follow up with assessment of the accessibility of the students’ content delivery. In addition, the Instructional Design and Access office is working directly with the Graduate School to incorporate these trainings in both an online and face-to-face delivery model to graduate teaching assistants and other interested graduate students. Finally, once the model is established, WSU has begun early plans to consider offering these same digital credential trainings through the existing “badge program”, which would allow students from other schools to receive the training and an official WSU digital credential.

14. Thank You…Questions?
Thank you for your time and attention. What questions can I answer for you? 14