Author: Lindsey Downs

What’s Up with Work-life Balance? Considering new ways of living well.

By Lindsey Downs

May 18, 2023

Did you know that May is Mental Health Awareness month?

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the U.S. has observed this since 1949. The month is a focused “national movement to raise awareness about mental health.” You can learn more about the movement on the Mental Health Awareness Month website. Mental Health and wellness impacts us all in many ways, both personally and professionally.

When you think about personal or professional wellness, what enters your mind?

Word cloud or collage with wellness related words:
Self-care.
Work-life balance.
Wellness.
Well-being.
Intention.
Mindfulness.
Authentic Self.
Grace.
Self-care.
Work-life balance.
Wellness.
Well-being.
Health.
Healthy lifestyle.
Relaxation.
Happy.
Positivity.
Mental health.
Emotional health.
Fitness.
Strength.
Adaptability.
Self-care.
Work-life balance.
Wellness.
Well-being.
Intention.
Mindfulness.
Authentic Self.
Grace.
Health.
Healthy lifestyle.
Relaxation.
Happy.
Positivity.
Self-care.
Work-life balance.
Wellness.
Well-being.
Happy
Mental health.
Emotional health.
Fitness.
Strength.
Adaptability.
Resiliency.
Resiliency.

Here are some of the words that pop into my head:

Self-care.
Work-life balance.
Wellness.
Well-being.
Intention.
Mindfulness.
Authentic Self.
Grace.
Health.
Healthy lifestyle.
Relaxation.
Happy.
Positivity.
Mental health.
Emotional health.
Fitness.
Strength.
Adaptability.
Resiliency.

I have been thinking about this a lot over the past few years. As I’m sure you remember, the COVID-19 pandemic changed our world in many (many!) ways. One of the bigger ways – a new focus on work and life-balance and wellness.

Where will this focus take us? Can we orient toward a professional environment that prioritizes the mental and physical health and well-being of staff but also ensures we meet our productivity goals? I believe we can. And, apparently, so do many of our colleagues in the WCET and higher education community.

That’s why WCET selected the topic of Leadership and Wellness for the month of May. To me, having strong, adaptable, and resilient team members means we accomplish some amazing work in our planned timeframes. However, without healthy team members, deadlines are missed, or mistakes are made.

What do people want when it comes to work-life balance?

View of two feet standing with one foot in sneakers standing on grass, one foot in professional shoes on a sidewalk.

Cindi Fukami, a professor in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver, has said that the need for work-life balance isn’t new.

But COVID “accelerated this trend and the conflict between work and life demands was front and center.”

The U.S., unfortunately, seems to outpace other nations in hours worked per week and employees have less vacation time and fewer benefits for working parents.

Fukami advised that people just want a “productive life along with a productive work life” (Ballard, 2022).

Why should we prioritize this?

The Great Resignation highlighted a voluntary and mass exodus of workers associated with the pandemic, yes, but there are deeper issues at play. Studies suggest that the trend of leaving jobs that didn’t offer exactly what employees want out of their work and their life, was happening before the pandemic. COVID just pushed it over the edge a bit.

More experienced workers used employment changes due to the pandemic as a time to retire.
Younger employees saw the potential impact of the pandemic on their life and health and decided they “have one life to live and they want to live it to the fullest.” That usually doesn’t include staying at a job that doesn’t make them happy or matter to them (Phipps, 2022).

Lack of benefits are often cited as reasons people quit a job. These can include:

Low pay,
Lack of advancement opportunity,
Feeling disrespected at work,
Childcare issues (many of which continue still),
Lack of flexible hours or choice of hours,
Lack or poor health insurance and paid time off (Phipps, 2022).

Simone Phipps, professor of management at Middle Georgia State University, offers that employers must focus on employee wellbeing and listen to what their staff tell them they need. By modeling wellness, boundary setting, and balance as a leader, team members begin to adopt these healthy behaviors. In turn, they become more productive, more creative, and more collaborative. I love that Dr. Phipps and others have said that we all need to focus on our “shared humanity” when it comes to navigating this new way of living.

Our Theme this Month

As I said, our theme this month is Leadership and Wellness.

To help you consider your own personal wellness and the wellness of your team (whether you are in a leadership position or just want to help role model wellbeing in the workplace for your peers), WCET will offer resources and events in this topic area.

May 19, WCET members are invited to join Christine Lustik, Leadership Development and Coaching Specialist, to discuss Wellness and Work during our May Closer Conversation.
May 24 – Free and open to all, join us for a #WCETWebcast on Balancing Leadership and Life While Supporting Your Team. This webcast features tools and resources for mindfulness and specific tips for leading in this area.
May Closer Look – releasing next week via wcetNEWS, our WCET Member-only Closer Look will be on Leadership Tips for Balancing Wellness and Supporting Your Team.

We hope you’ll join us in honoring May as Mental Health Awareness month by learning new ways to focus on your own well-being and perhaps help your colleagues as well.

References

Ballard, Janette. (2022). From Pandemic to Endemic: The Future of Work-Life Balance. University of Denver News. Retrieved from https://www.du.edu/news/pandemic-endemic-future-work-life-balance

Phipps, Simone. (2022). What Exactly Is “The Great Resignation?” Middle Georgia State University. Retrieved from https://www.mga.edu/news/2022/04/what-is-the-great-resignation.php

Leadership, Mental Health, Professional Development

Policy

Welcome to the Wild, Wild West of AI and the Higher Education Institution

By Lindsey Downs

May 11, 2023

Old horse barn, hitching post, and watering trough at Gammons Gulch, a recreated Old West town and the site of dozens of movies, commerical shoots and the like in the remote desert north of Benson in Cochise County, Arizona. The town was built piece by piece and with donations of vintage artifacts beginning in 1972 by Jay Gammons, a onetime security man at a movie studio in Tucson, northwest of here.

A general perusal of Inside Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, or the internet in general turns up countless fears that generative AI, especially in the form of large language models such as ChatGPT, will increase attacks on academic integrity.

A smartphone with a brief introduction of ChatGPT on it. — *Photo by Sanket Mishra on Unsplash*

Take Jeremy Weissman’s opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed where he compares ChatGPT with the early days of the COVID pandemic.

Calling ChatGPT and generative AI a “plague upon education,” Weissman opines “In these early days of the GPT spread, we are largely defenseless against this novel threat to human intelligence and academic integrity. A return to handwritten and oral in-class assignments—a lockdown response—may be the only immediate effective solution as we wait for more robust protections to arise.”

As a result of such fears, most of the discussion around generative AI and institutional policy has revolved around academic integrity, but there are myriad other areas that institutions need to be aware of and make policy to address.

Academic Integrity and Artificial Intelligence

Recently, WCET conducted a survey of college and university leaders regarding the use of generative AI on their campuses. Of the more than 600 respondents, only 8 percent indicated that they had implemented policies around artificial intelligence. Most of those policies, 21 percent, were around academic integrity. Of the 57 percent of respondents at institutions planning or developing policies:

70 percent were planning academic integrity policies,
51 percent policies around instructional use,
32 percent policies around data security,
27 percent intellectual property policies,
26 percent privacy policies, and,
.04 percent accessibility policies.

Note: Full analysis of this survey, including institutional recommendations will be published in June.

That lack of institutional policy is born out in research conducted by Primary Research Group earlier this year. That research found that only 14 percent of college administrators reported the existence of institutional guidelines and only 18 percent of instructors reported having policies and guidelines on the use of generative AI in their classes.

A Perusal of Current Policy Standings

A lack of other policies notwithstanding, academic integrity is often the first policy area that institutions and faculty address, and such policies run the gamut from completely outlawing any use of generative AI to allowing for its usage with appropriate attribution. For example, the University of Missouri’s general academic dishonesty policy states, “Academic honesty is fundamental to the activities and principles of the University… Any effort to gain an advantage not given to all students is dishonest whether or not the effort is successful.” The institution’s informational page on AI usage goes on to state, “Students who use ChatGPT and similar programs improperly are seeking to gain an unfair advantage, which means they are committing academic dishonesty.”

Pile of multicolored books. — *Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash*

The Ohio State University takes a slightly different tact by outlawing the use of generative AI tools unless an instructor explicitly gives permission for students to use such tools. The institution’s academic integrity and artificial intelligence page states, “To maintain a culture of integrity and respect, these generative AI tools should not be used in the completion of course assignments unless an instructor for a given course specifically authorizes their use… [T]hese tools should be used only with the explicit and clear permission of each individual instructor, and then only in the ways allowed by the instructor.” Most institutions crafting generative AI academic integrity policy appear to be adapting existing academic integrity policies as well as ceding the development of such policy to instructors.

Although there is currently no comprehensive directory of course level AI usage policies, Lance Eaton has begun to crowdsource examples of such policies. A perusal of this collection of classroom policies indicate that most policies can be categorized in two areas—bans of generative AI and use of generative AI with attribution. One such policy outlawing the use of AI reads, “Some student work may be submitted to AI or plagiarism detection tools in order to ensure that student work product is human created. The submission of AI generated answers constitutes plagiarism and is violation of CSCC’s student code of conduct.” Or, as one instructor from Northeast Lakeview College submitted for that institution’s ENGL 1301, 1302, 2322, 2323, an 2338 courses— “Unless otherwise explicitly instructed, students are not allowed to use any alternative generation tools for any type of submission in this course. Every submission should be an original composition that the student themselves wholly created for this course.”

Most of the sample policies catalogued by Eaton treat AI generated content as any other non-student generated content and require attribution if used. For example, for theater courses at one small liberal arts college, syllabi contain the following policy: “All work submitted in this course must be your own. Contributions from anyone or anything else—including AI sources, must be properly quoted and cited every time they are used. Failure to do so constitutes an academic integrity violation, and I will follow the institution’s policy to the letter in those instances.” While some policies, such as Ethan Mollick’s with the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania proclaims, “I expect you to use AI (ChatGPT and image generation tools, at a minimum), in this class. In fact, some assignments will require it. Learning to use AI is an emerging skill.” Mollick goes on to warn students, “Be aware of the limits of ChatGPT: If you provide minimum effort prompts, you will get low quality results… Don’t trust anything it says. If it gives you a number or fact, assume it is wrong unless you either know the answer or can check in with another sources… AI is a tool but one that you need to acknowledge using. Please include a paragraph at the end of any assignment that uses AI explaining what you used the AI for and what prompts you used to get the results… Be thoughtful about when this tool is useful. Don’t use it if it isn’t appropriate for the case or circumstances.”

Other Institutional Policy Areas

There are numerous policy areas beyond academic integrity that institutions need to take into consideration when determining AI usage on their campus. Perhaps chief among these areas is data privacy and data security. Large language model artificial intelligence is built on the ingestion of massive amounts of data. Data entered into current generative models (such as ChatGPT) could be stored. Thus, faculty and staff must be cautioned against providing generative AI with FERPA protected student data that might compromise student data privacy. Additionally, institutions may want to consider intellectual property policies that consider the creation of generative AI assisted works. There is currently considerable discussion around whether or not AI generated work can be copyrighted. Institutions would benefit from developing intellectual property policies that address intellectual property and generative AI. Finally, institutions should consider the ways in which generative AI can impact accessibility. Although generative AI can function as an accommodation for some students, not all generative AI tools are currently accessible to all users. As faculty begin to incorporate generative AI into their courses, institutions should consider what to do when an AI tool does not meet ADA accessibility requirements.

What Your Institution Can Do

Institutions cannot afford to wait to address generative AI and should begin developing policies now. As Daniel Dolan and Ekin Yasin write in their March 23, 2023 Inside Higher Ed piece, “A Guide to Generative AI Policy Making,” institutions should respond to generative AI with speed, strategic purpose, and “inclusive focus on equitable student value.”

Although WCET will be providing our members with more specific recommendations in the coming months, some general recommendations include:

Example of an old west hitching post - a wooden stand one could use to tie up and leave horses. — Old horse barn and hitching post by C.M.
Highsmith. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Create an institutional taskforce comprised of all campus stakeholders including faculty, instructional design staff, educational technology professionals, IT representatives, and students.
Determine your institution’s greatest challenges and biggest questions regarding generative AI. Once you have determined these, you can make an informed decision as to what challenges should be addressed with institutional policies versus what should be addressed with course level policies.
Review what other institutions are doing.
Make sure to take equity into consideration. For a general overview of ethics and equity in generative AI, consult WCET’s April 20, 2023 blog post “Equity in a World of Artificial Intelligence.”
Don’t pretend that the challenges surrounding generative AI are going away. Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and institutions need to address the challenges that it poses head on.

As one respondent in the recent WCET generative AI survey put it, “It’s the wild, wild west. And we don’t have any horses.”

Generative AI isn’t going anywhere. Already we have seen its use and complexity grow by leaps and bounds in just the last six months. Just as institutions have developed intellectual property, privacy, data security, academic integrity, and accessibility policies, now institutions need to revisit those policies considering generative AI.

We cannot afford to stick our collective heads in the sand. It’s time to saddle up and ride into the wild, wild west.

Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Higher Education, Policy

Practice

Personalized Adaptive Learning in Algebra-Based Introductory Physics Courses at the University of Central Florida

By Lindsey Downs

May 4, 2023

As we start our new awards season here at WCET, we’re thrilled to continue to feature our previous honorable mentions for the 2022 WOW Award. Our judges were so impressed by this project and the inspiration the team showed that we wanted to honor their work. Thank you to Archana, Baiyun, and Joseph for sharing your experiences with us!

As I mentioned, the 2023 awards season has recently started. Read today’s post and then visit our awards page to learn more about this year’s WOW Award nominations!

Enjoy the read,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

At the University of Central Florida, we have strategically implemented Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) courseware to enhance student success in large-enrollment algebra-based College Physics courses. These foundation courses are taught in studio- and lecture-mode format, which traditionally have high DFW (D or F grade, Withdrawal) rates. Powered by the Realizeit Adaptive Intelligent Engine, the PAL course is designed to address individual student learning preferences, identify those at risk in real-time, provide flexibility, offer unique pathways through the course material, and adjust media presentations and concepts based on individual student skills and preferences. By customizing the courseware to meet individual student needs, we aim to improve student engagement and promote academic success.

Starting the Transformation

Collaborating with instructional designers and programmers, Dr. Archana Dubey spearheaded a course redesign initiative aimed at transforming algebra-based introductory physics courses. The College Physics pathway consists of two courses, College Physics I (PHY2053) and College Physics II (PHY2054), which are offered primarily for students majoring in information technology, the biological sciences, and pre-health professions. Several students taking these courses plan to take the medical college admission test. Approximately 4,500 students take these courses each year. Post redesign and over the past three years, we have observed:

improved student success,
increased learning outcomes, and,
enhanced engagement with course materials.

These outcomes are a result of using the PAL strategy. This transformation has resulted in significant positive impacts on the students, ensuring they receive a quality education that prepares them for their future academic and professional pursuits.

Setting the Stage – the Course Design Process

To understand more about how powerful these changes have been, we’ll review some of the adjustments made to introductory Physics courses.

In the course pathway design process, Dr. Dubey:

Constructed the learning map for College Physics courses. Upon first entry, students are presented a collection of lessons that can be navigated in a predefined sequence. After students complete the Determine Knowledge quiz, the system unlocks one or more lessons based on the level of content proficiency demonstrated by students.
Chunked the learning content into modules and smaller lessons and established how those lessons interrelate for prerequisite and remediation relations, and cognitive and difficulty levels. Each lesson consists of learning materials, algorithmic worked examples, check your understanding practices, and summaries.
Applied alternative and effective delivery modalities for particular concepts, including text, images, videos, simulations, and interactive worked examples. Figure 1 showcases a lesson with two interactive examples that explained the problem-solving steps in detail.

*Figure 1: A Lesson with Two Interactive Examples*

Created a large bank of formative assessment and targeted feedback continuously to drive learning and to ensure competency acquisition. The assessments consist of both conceptual questions and algorithmic application problems.

The PAL assignments for the College Physics pathway courses are structured as focused lessons that interrelate prerequisite and remediation relations. Once opened, these assignments are available to the students to work on until the day of the final exam, which helps students to progress at their own pace and on their own time. To encourage fearless perseverance, students are allowed multiple-attempts and submissions. The highest score is what counts as the final grade. This motivates students to improve their scores, which improves their learning as well.

Every time a student logs in to work on an assignment, the system selects questions from the question bank designed by the instructor especially for that section. This means that the students work on variety of problems and concept questions that are relevant for their specific class and section. The numerical values in the problems are randomized and the questions are in multiple-choice and ‘enter the answer’ formats. The multiple-choice problems have eight answer choices. Students have the option to flag questions they struggle with, and the ‘instructor feedback’ option facilitates timely intervention. Additionally, the just-in-time instructor dashboard helps the instructor address student questions, customize in-person lectures accordingly, and provide personalized remediation or accelerated interventions. This approach enables students to receive timely and targeted support, which helps to improve their learning outcomes and overall academic success.

Outcomes

The redesigned adaptive College Physics I course has been delivered to students since the fall of 2019. Since the initial implementation of PHY2053, Dr. Dubey has evaluated students’ learning outcomes and made enhancements to address students’ difficulties.

example assignment/question with digital version of graph paper — *Figure 2: Widget question on vectors.*

For instance, videos and Physics Education Technology (PhET) simulations have been incorporated to provide students with interactive visual aids that can help clarify concepts. Students often struggle to solve problems where they have to follow a number of steps to get the answer. Hence, step-by-step interactive example problems have been created to guide students through problem-solving process. In these examples, students answer a sequence of questions designed to reinforce problem-solving strategies. Additional graphing questions (Figure 2) have been added to help students practice their understanding of vectors, which has resulted in a continuous improvement in their learning. These enhancements have been well-received by students, who report a better understanding of the material and an increased ability to apply what they have learned to solve physics problems.

The College Physics II course, PHY2054, was launched in fall 2022. In this course, students receive individualized remediation lessons from PHY2053 based on their performance. This approach allows students to review and reinforce concepts from the previous course to better prepare them for more advanced material. The personalized approach to learning, coupled with the incorporation of new instructional materials, has led to significant improvements in students’ understanding of physics and their academic success.

What’s Next

Here at UCF, we’re so proud that our personalized approach has led to these improvements and successes. We believe that this type of course redesign can be beneficial for many types of courses and institutions.

Adaptive/Personalized Learning, Managing Digital Learning, Online Learning, WCET Awards, WOW Award

Practice

Our Commitment to Improve – An Accessibility Review of WCET’s Website

By Lindsey Downs

April 28, 2023

In this post, Rosa Calabrese (WCET’s Manager, Digital Design) and Russ Poulin (WCET’s Executive Director) share our organization’s journey over this past year in improving our website. We have made much progress and there is still more to be done. We hope that this story will inspire some of you to take the first steps to follow us on your own web accessibility journey. We also discussed this journey in a recent WCET Webcast. Your students, staff, and community members deserve no less.

– Rosa and Russ

WCET has long been dedicated to creating resources that are accessible to everyone by doing our best to maintain AA standards on our website and other online materials. We also have long advocated that our members should ensure that their web services and online courses similarly meet the accessibility needs of their students.

In 2019, I (Rosa) wrote a two-part blog about the accessibility of our then-current website based on standards and guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website. Over the course of that review, I found some issues on our site, and learned how to rectify some of them as well. Though, as anyone who has ever worked with web accessibility probably knows, accessibility is an on-going process rather than a single task that can be completed and checked off, so we have continued to work on accessibility in many more ways since then.

In 2021, WCET launched a new website. This launch included a move from our previous hosting site to WordPress, a branding redesign, and a substantial restructuring of content. While we paid attention to accessibility best practices in building the site, we still wondered how well we had accomplished our goal. Therefore, we took a gulp and decided that it was time for an independent, third-party review.

Less than a year after the formal launch, we contracted with WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) to do a formal review of the accessibility of our website. This work provided us with significantly more detailed results than my 2019 amateur review. Based on the WebAIM review, we have spent the last 10 months working to update our website to create a better online experience for users with disabilities…and all our users.

First Steps

hands drawing a wireframe — *Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash*

Once Russ initiated the connection with WebAIM and we drew up a formal contract, we began the project by selecting web pages to be reviewed.

We picked 15 pages that we felt formed a good representation of different types of content and features on our website. Among those 15 pages, we chose a combination of pages that are unique but frequently visited as well as pages that use common content types and structures. Through those pages, most of the content types on our entire website were reviewed.

After the original phase of the project, we came to realize that it would also be prudent to ask WebAIM to review a couple PDFs for us, as PDF accessibility requirements differ from the accessibility requirements of webpages. We chose two PDFs from recent reports that we believe are representative of many of our other PDFs.

Initial Results

WebAIM’s accessibility review of our website contained a 20+ page document that detailed our website issues and suggested possible remedies, both to the specific pages that we provided and to “global features” like our menu or footer. WebAIM ranked the severity of different issues on a four-point scale from 1 (indicating “Critical”) through 4 (indicating a “Recommendation” only).

The subsequent reviews of our PDFs were explained in two new, shorter documents that were equally detailed in evaluation and recommendations.

Once we received this document, we compiled the findings in a spreadsheet and indicated which tasks would be fixed internally by WCET staff and which tasks would be fixed by the WCET web developers under WCET supervision. We coordinated with our web developers to further breakdown their set of tasks into changes that could be made to our website alone. Additionally, since our website used WICHE’s (our parent organization’s) web template, we created a set of tasks that had to be completed in partnership with the WICHE web team.

an individual using an assistive technology device

While WCET’s website was built using WICHE’s template, we made changes to the styles of the site and to certain content types to better fit our needs. Even so, many aspects of our two sites remained the same and used the same root structure. This took some easy negotiating with WICHE staff, but it ultimately resulted in improvements to both sites.

Since breaking up the tasks into these three groups (internal, external WCET, and external WCET & WICHE) we have been moving forward with tasks for each group simultaneously.

Meanwhile, our contact at WebAIM remains available to provide more assistance whenever anyone on our project has any questions. Furthermore, we are planning for WebAIM to re-review certain pages on our website once we have completed the corrections so that we can ensure that we have been successful.

Examples of Identified Issues

The types of issues that WebAIM identified on our website were quite varied. While not an exhaustive overview of all of our issues, we have listed below several accessibility issues that we had on our website that we are currently working to address.

Alternative Text. Unfortunately, the review identified the incorrect use of alternative text in several places. While we knew that alt text needs to be provided for things like images, and that decorative images that provided no real value to the page could be designated with a null tag (which a screenreader would not read aloud) we did not always write these correctly.

First, the alt text of logos should always include all text that is in the logo.
Additionally, while we had been applying double quotation marks, which indicates a null tag for all decorative images, in our site the resulting alt text was incorrect. Our site is hosted on WordPress, which automatically adds quotation marks around all alternative text, so by adding our own quotation marks, the result was that screenreaders would read out the alternative text of four quotation marks. Plus, null tags would not be marked as decorative unless the alt text field was actually left empty. It’s important to understand the technical requirements for this process for your specific site.

Color and Contrast

Although we did our best to make it so that all text had appropriate contrast with the background so that it would be easily readable, there were a few places on our site that we missed, such as when blue hyperlinks appeared on a background that is a color other than white. We’ve are now looking for solutions on a case-by-case basis to make sure this isn’t a problem, and fixing the issues by darkening hyperlink text in certain locations, or by removing a background color and replacing it with white.

Not Relying on Color Alone

We learned that elements such as hyperlinks need or arrows keys need to be differentiated from surrounding imagery by more than just color. For example, hyperlinks are often distinguished from regular text using underlines and colored text. We were missing underlines from several hyperlinks.

Menu Items

We learned that pages within the primary (or main) menu that have drop down menu items should contain links to all the sub-pages from that landing page. In other words, there must be links to the child pages on the parent page. We had trouble with this on our “For Members” page, for example, which didn’t include links to its sub-pages, We’ve altered the page content now so that it reflects the menu architecture.

Movable Features

Website features that move on their own – such as the carousel of banners at the top of our home page or the carousel of sponsor logos at the bottom of our home page – need to have the ability to be paused or stopped. We’re still in the middle of this fix! Come back again soon to see the final results.

Keyboard Navigation

All website features need to be available via keyboard navigation. Before we started this process, we had several content types that had hover-over functionality that was not reachable using keyboard navigation. Now we’ve addressed a lot of the issues but are still in progress on others.

The Journey Continues

We’re not done addressing the known issues yet. We certainly have ideas for the next steps once we have finished completing the tasks from WebAIM’s review.

We won’t be checking a box saying that we’ve finished making our website accessible and that we are done with it now. Instead, we will continue to make sure that our website stays accessible as we add more content, design new features, and otherwise expand our online presence.

Based on the WebAIM review, we will create a list of best practices for adding new content to our website, which will include rules for color contrast, headline structure, and rules for creating alternative text. We will also apply lessons learned from this project to the websites of WCET’s divisions, the State Authorization Network, and Every Learner Everywhere. And we will work to apply the accessibility standards that we learned through the course of this project to other online tools that we use, such as wcetMIX.

And can we inspire you? It is certainly a gut check moment for you to assure your institution is meeting student accessibility needs. We understand that your web presence might be part of a bigger website, but (as we did) you can make a start and identify issues that are wider spread.

We have made the commitment to improve. Come join us. If you do, share your story with us!

Accessibility, Managing Digital Learning, Professional Development, WCET

Practice

Why Not Both?: It’s time to teach accessibly AND teach accessibility!

By Lindsey Downs

April 27, 2023

This month WCET has focused on accessibility. As you may or may not know, we’ve been undertaking an accessibility review and revision of our entire website and document development practices. We held a WCET Webcast this month to feature the lessons we have learned during this process, which included WCET’s Manager of Digital Design, Rosa Calabrese, our Executive Director, Russ Poulin, and John Northup, the Director of Evaluations with WebAIM, which we have contracted with for our web review. You can watch the recording of the webcast to listen to the discussion and learn from our journey! We’ll continue this work moving forward, and I know our team is excited to continue to build upon this experience. In fact, stay tuned here at WCET Frontiers for a post from Rosa with more details on our website review journey. We will also be releasing additional resources around this topic soon and hosting a WCET Closer Conversation on Improving Access for All Learners.

As we round out the month, we’re thrilled to be joined today by Kate Sonka and Rolando Méndez from Teach Access to discuss the differences between teaching accessibly and teaching accessibility. Next month Teach Access will release a report about the gap in accessibility related skills in the workforce, and today Kate and Rolando share a preview of those results with us. I also really appreciate the ideas for including accessibility in student experiences. Thank you Kate and Rolando!

Enjoy the read and enjoy your day,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

Let’s have an honest conversation

What did you learn about accessibility when you were in school? We are guessing that the answer is probably “nothing” or “very little.” Odds are if you are working in higher education, you have heard the term mentioned a few times. Although accessibility is a legal obligation, that alone should not be the main driver for us to know about it, care about it, or do something about it.

Textbox: "Accessibility is about removing barriers for people with disabilities and ensuring they have equitable access, interaction, and participation."

Accessibility is about removing barriers for people with disabilities and ensuring they have equitable access, interaction, and participation. As practitioners and leaders in education, we shouldn’t only be concerned about transferring our disciplinary knowledge and experiences to students, but also ensuring that they are equipped with the concepts and skills needed to be successful in their personal and professional lives. Teaching “accessibly” and teaching accessibility is part of that equation.

Teaching “accessibly”

Icons for CC captions, a screen with an arrow indicating press to play video, and an accessibility tools icon.

The discourse in higher education has mainly been focused on teaching “accessibly.” This involves making sure that our educational materials, technologies, activities, and courses are accessible to students with disabilities. Perhaps you have heard your favorite instructional designer tell you that you need to add captions to your videos, add alternate text to your images, and to start using descriptive hyperlinks. They might even point you to some helpful resources such as websites, apps, standards, and rubrics. Certainly, these practices and resources are very important components of teaching accessibly, but they are only part of what we could and should be doing.

The truth is that accessibility and teaching accessibly are not bound to technologies, checklists, or specific moments in time. They are continuous and collaborative processes that require a lot of learning and unlearning. Yes, the process can sometimes be uncomfortable as it requires us to reflect on – and in some cases, abandon – our frameworks, practices, and language. Hey, it also involves making mistakes and learning from them! But the bottom line is that through this process we become better educators and we help our students become better learners.

The accessibility skills gap

Many institutions have been making great efforts to make teaching accessible. However, there is still much work to be done to ensure that students understand what accessibility is and how it informs their disciplines. A study conducted in 2017 by the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology (PEAT) revealed a gap in accessibility skills in the tech industry. Two figures from this study worth highlighting are that:

63% of respondents said their current staff didn’t have the necessary accessibility skills.
60% of respondents said it was difficult or very difficult” to find candidates with needed accessibility skills.

In fall 2022, Teach Access revised the study and distributed it to various industries to capture an understanding of the current state of accessibility skills within the workforce. Spoiler alert! Six years later the accessibility skills gap still exists. The full report and findings will be released in May, during 2023 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), but as a sneak peek some preliminary data from this study revealed that:

52% of respondents said their current staff didn’t have the necessary accessibility skills.
56% of respondents said it was difficult or very difficult” to find candidates with needed accessibility skills.

So, what can institutions do to make sure their students are equipped to enter the workforce with the skills they need? The answer is to teach accessibility.

Teaching accessibility

the word "TEXT" written in light blue on a light background, in distorted typography. Highlighting the importance of using a font and color that is easy to read for everyone.

Teaching accessibility can take many forms. It can be as straightforward as introducing a lesson or activity on accessibility, accessible design, or disability in one of our courses. For example, in a graphic design course we could talk about accessible typographies, layouts, and color contrasts, or in a writing course we could teach our students about plain language and anti-ableist language.

If you are not sure how or where to start, we would recommend perusing the Teach Access Curriculum Repository, a free collection of open educational resources (OER) developed by faculty to support teaching accessibility to students. This repository contains a variety of teaching tools, including syllabi, slide decks, assignment prompts, discussion questions, and quizzes, among other resources. We would also recommend reaching out to people and organizations in the field of accessibility. As you will probably find out, this community is all about collaboration!

all letters from the alphabet in different shades of blue and grey and different typefaces and font size.

Teaching accessibility can start in your classroom, but consider the impact of integrating the teaching of accessibility into the curriculum and more widely across the institution. Some examples of next-level transformations we can make include:

incorporating teaching accessibility and teaching accessibly across the curriculum,
creating an introductory course about disability awareness and accessibility,
promoting accessibility as topic for research and creative projects,
including teaching, researching, and publishing about accessibility a requirement for faculty tenure and annual reviews,
incorporating teaching accessibility and teaching accessibly in institutional policies and practices.

Lessons learned

Since Teach Access began in 2016, our work has focused on engaging students and faculty, through our different programs (Study Away, Career Development Series, and Faculty Grants). One of the most important lessons we have learned is that teaching accessibly and teaching accessibility require sustained, intentional, and scalable engagement and support. This is why we have been building our new programs around these principles.

For example, this semester we are piloting the Faculty Fellowship Program in partnership with California State University Northridge and College University of New York. Through this program, we are engaging faculty and staff from across disciplines and institutions in learning about accessibility and inclusiveness, as well as supporting them in the creation of course materials and activities and in the adoption of accessible pedagogical practices. In the Fall, we are planning to pilot two additional programs: the Student Ambassadors Program and the Faculty Pathways. The past couple of months we have been conversing with faculty and students across the country to learn more about their interests, needs, and preferences. These conversations have helped us assess the programs we have been offering, as well as shape the ones that we are building. Hopefully, your efforts and ours will help ensure that the next time someone asks “What did you learn about accessibility when you were in school” question, the room will be full of raised hands.

We are optimistic that this blog post will help spark the interest in some and fuel the passion in others, to push for significant changes in curriculum and pedagogy. These changes will help ensure that products, services, technologies, and events are born accessible.

Accessibility, Distance Education, Managing Digital Learning, Online Learning, Student Success

Practice

Equity in a World of Artificial Intelligence

By Lindsey Downs

April 20, 2023

Since our last blog in January on generative artificial intelligence (AI), the field has changed by leaps and bounds:

Open AI released GPT4,
Microsoft released its AI empowered Bing, and,
Google recently released Bard.

The higher education press continues to increase its coverage with multiple articles, blogs, and op-ed pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education among other outlets. Much of that coverage, though, continues to focus on the pedagogical implications of generative AI, including academic integrity concerns. Equally important, but discussed very little, are the equity considerations around how AI can and should be leveraged in higher education. Today we’ll look at both the positive and potentially negative aspects of generative AI in higher education as it relates to educational equity.

AI as a Tool for Equity

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, “Technology can be a powerful tool for transformation learning. It can help affirm and advance relationships between educators and students, reinvent our approaches to learning and collaboration, shrink longstanding equity and accessibility gaps, and adapt learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.” Artificial intelligence, when used deliberately and carefully, can advance equity by improving educational accessibility and assisting second language learners, among others.

Type writer with paper that reads "artificial intelligence" — *Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash*

AI can be especially powerful when addressing learner accessibility. For example, students with dyslexia can benefit from AI as a December 10, 2022, Washington Post article demonstrated when it described how ChatGPT is being used by a British landscaper with dyslexia to rewrite emails so that they are more professional and more easily understood. Additionally, students and faculty with AD/HD are finding generative AI useful in approaching research and writing. As Maggie Melo wrote in her February 28, 2023, op-ed in Inside Higher Education, “My thinking and writing processes are not linear. ChatGPT affords me a controlled chaos.” Melo goes on to describe how the need to create an abstract can feel overwhelming despite having having done so numerous times. However, after asking ChatGPT “How to write an abstract,” she received an outline that, as she put it, “provides my mind with an anchor to focus on and return to.” And much like our British landscaper, non-native English speakers may also benefit from ChatGPT’s ability to revise and rephrase text. ChatGPT can be used to revise text for grammatical correctness and clarity.

Challenges to AI as a Tool for Equity

Algorithmic bias and the “New Jim Code”

In her 2019 work, Race After Technology, Princeton University sociologist Ruha Benjamin wrote about what she calls the “New Jim Code” and the problem of data and algorithmic bias.

Benjamin defined the “New Jim Code” as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (5). Generative AI is trained on large existing data sets, mostly scraped off the internet. This means that models are ingesting biased information as well as information that is likely to over-represent certain groups such as white, economically well-off individuals. As the old adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

The result is algorithmic bias. Algorithmic bias “describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one arbitrary group of users over others. Also, occurs when an algorithm produces results that are systemically prejudiced due to erroneous assumptions in the machine learning process.” In addition to challenges with training data, algorithmic bias is also impacted by the implicit bias of generative AI developers, a field in which white men are over-represented and women and some racial groups such as Blacks and Latinos are under-represented. As Henry Kissenger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher wrote in Age of AI: And Our Human Future, “The algorithms, training data, and objectives for machine learning are determined by the people developing and training the AI, thus they reflect those people’s values, motivations, goals, and judgment” (77).

Student Access and the Expansion of the Digital Divide

In addition to challenges around algorithmic bias, AI also experiences challenges of access. According to the 2021 American Community Survey One Year Estimates, “Types of Computers and Internet Subscriptions,” of the 127,544,730 households in the United States, 6,320,698 (4.9%) had no computing device including a smartphone and 12,374,652 (9.7%) had no internet subscription including no cellular data plan. This digital divide is especially acute for low-income Americans with 15.3 percent of Americans with income less than $75,000 lacking internet access. And a Pew Research Center 2021 study found that 15 percent of all American adults were smartphone only internet users but that number rose sharply to 28 percent when looking at 18-29 years old. Even then, that number is not equally divided among all racial groups. 25 percent of Hispanic young adults and 17% of Black young adults were smartphone only internet users as compared to 10 percent of White young adults.

Why does the digital divide matter when we explore equity and AI? Simply put, most generative AI is difficult to use without an internet connection. Although text based generative AI like ChaptGPT can run on mobile devices, its response time may be slower than one would experience when using a high-speed internet connection. Making more sophisticated queries with long outputs would be difficult, at best.

In addition to challenges resulting from the digital divide, there are challenges associated with the cost of using generative AI tools themselves. Chat GPT, which started out free, is now partially behind a paywall begging the question of how much longer these tools will remain freely available. In fact, the economic realities of the astronomical costs of running generative AI almost guarantees that such paywalls will become more common. CNBC reports that just training a large language model could be more than $4 million. Some estimates of daily cost to run it put it at $100,000 per day or $3,000,000 per month.

What will be the result of fewer students having access to generative AI? We run the risk of the digital divide turning into an AI divide. Some students who lack sufficient access will not gain the skills related to working with generative AI that will be increasingly necessary as we enter an age of hybrid human/AI work.

What Does this Mean for You?

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize society, including higher education, in ways that we still are determining. But as higher education professionals, we need to be cognizant of how we leverage generative AI. How can you build upon the promise of generative AI while mitigating some of its challenges?

Explore the ways that generative AI can be leveraged to improve learner accessibility. This may mean working with various offices on campus including the office that handles student accommodations.
Be especially cognizant of the limitations that students may have accessing generative AI and plan accordingly. This might mean ensuring that there are adequate campus resources and, for face-to-face and hybrid courses, even consider focusing on AI usage during class via campus computer labs or in-classroom device loan programs.
Help students think critically about the results of generative AI, especially large language models trained on biased data sets. A key piece of data literacy in the age of artificial intelligence needs to be a discussion of algorithmic bias and the New Jim Code.

a person typing on a laptop computer — *Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash*

As we continue to explore the ways in which generative artificial intelligence can impact higher education, it is critical for us to remember that no technology is neutral.

As Kate Crawford in Atlas of AI puts it, “Artificial intelligence is not on objective, universal, or neutral computational technique that makes determinations without human direction. Its systems are embedded in social, political, cultural, and economic worlds, shaped by humans, institutions, and imperatives that determine what they do and how they do it” (211). Does this negate the potential advantages of generative AI and the ways that it can improve educational equity? No, but it does mean we should be cognizant of the potential for further educational inequity and work to counter that potential.

Artificial Intelligence, Digital Divide, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, Technology

Practice

Thinking Strategically About Student Belonging in Online Learning

By Lindsey Downs

April 13, 2023

The feeling of belonging is, in my opinion and experience, a truly important factor for anyone’s success in an educational or even professional environment. The courses that I remember the most, the ones that I felt made the greatest impression upon me and my career, were those where I felt connected to my classmates and instructors, regardless of the modality. As our author today reminds us, developing a classroom sense of belonging can be an incredibly important element for a class, but it is especially for online courses.

Thank you to Katy Kappler, Co-Founder and CEO with InScribe, for today’s post considering the importance of student belonging for online courses and the suggestions for ways to enhance student belonging for online classes.

Enjoy the read,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

Creating a sense of belonging for students is uniquely challenging when it comes to online learning. We know that sense of belonging is a critical component of student success, and that when students feel disconnected or unsupported, they are more likely to disengage from their coursework or drop out. More than ever, educators need to think strategically about how to cultivate a sense of belonging in their online courses.

The significance of student belonging in the online learning experience can’t be understated. The lack of physical presence often limits opportunities for organic relationship building that are inherent in traditional higher education settings. Telling online students that they belong is not enough; institutions must proactively create opportunities for interactions that foster connections with peers, faculty, and the institution as a whole. In a recent dialogue with educational leaders, hosted by InScribe, we discussed their perspectives on student belonging and the measures their institutions are taking to promote it. In this article, we’ll share five strategic ways to enhance student belonging in online learning.

Enhancing Student Belonging in the Online Classroom

1 – Student belonging is not the result of predefined criteria, rather it’s a feeling unique to each individual.

There is no one-size-fits-all formula to create a sense of belonging among students that can meet the unique needs of each learner. According to Dr. Omid Fotuh i, Director of Learning Innovations at WGU Labs, “How we see ourselves and who we identify with is largely driven by the places we think we belong.” Dr. Fotuhi has done a great deal of research on the concept of belonging. “When we talk about belonging and how to foster it, there isn’t a checklist of things to do that will guarantee students will feel like they belong. It can’t be forced. It has to be genuine, and it has to be felt,” he says.

That said, giving students access to different environments and channels where they can form authentic relationships and engage at whatever level they feel most comfortable is a great first step in fostering a sense of belonging. These spaces allow students to have conversations, find common identities, and create connections, all of which can further fuel that feeling of personal connection.

2 – Student belonging is not a point-in-time event, rather it is constantly shifting and evolving.

Student support and motivation can be more relevant or felt more deeply at different points throughout the student experience. Dr. Andrew Feldstein, Assistant Provost for Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies at Fort Hays State University says, “Belonging is not a one-dimensional concept. At Fort Hays, we focus on practical ways for students to connect. These different ways, or bridges, keep students engaged with us and the learning process.” For example, the University’s ‘Tiger-to-Tiger’ online student community empowers students to form connections and build relationships so they don’t experience loneliness or lose motivation at any point in their educational journey. Students themselves are empowered to be the leaders and caretakers of this ever-evolving virtual space, which strengthens their student engagement, connection, and emotional well-being.

3 – Insecurities are real and can have a big impact on student belonging.

How an institution helps students to feel a sense of belonging can take on various forms. At New Mexico Highlands University, leadership and faculty alike consider the institution’s different student populations, their backgrounds, and how they got to where they are. “So many of our students come to school with Imposter Syndrome; they feel like they don’t belong in class,” says Roxanne Gonzales, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs. “For our students to be successful, we have to acknowledge that a lot of them don’t even think they should be here, and we have to find a way to move forward with them individually,” she notes. There’s no simple formula for fostering that sense of belonging from the onset. Many of the University’s faculty now recognize how this notion of belonging can grow in the classroom and find ways to make individuals feel comfortable, whether it’s through the curriculum, learning communities, or other approaches.

4 – Faculty can increase a student’s sense of belonging.

*Photo by Kampus Production from Pexels*

Faculty are a great asset when it comes to fostering student belonging. Dr. Tawnya Means, Assistant Dean for Educational Innovations and Chief Learning Officer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, describes how their faculty create opportunities for students to interact in different size spaces with different people and in different ways.

For example, some online classes offer small online breakout groups or divide the class in half for interactive lessons. This allows students to share with the larger class what they learned in their smaller groups, and it helps faculty get to know students and students get to know each other better than they can in a large face-to-face setting.

Additionally, Dr. Fotuhi encourages faculty to notice who isn’t participating, not just those who are. “It can be hard to identify those students who don’t feel like they belong because they don’t reach out or engage. Faculty need to look for these voids,” he says.

5 – It’s never too early to start thinking about student belonging.

While faculty and staff can be proactive in welcoming students, explaining mutual expectations, and helping create confidence, there are opportunities to be deliberate about fostering belonging before students even begin classes. Dr. Means says, “That feeling of belonging can be influenced long before a student comes into a situation. As instructors and designers, we should be doing things that identify where there are gaps or where students might feel like outsiders, and specifically address those concerns.” Dr. Means also believes that the intentional design of an online learning space can help increase feelings of belonging. “In a face-to-face class, we rely on proximity to each other to feel a sense of belonging. In an online space, we need to look to immediacy. Students need to know that if they reach out, someone will respond, and they will respond quickly.” In the early stages of the course creation process, faculty and designers should be thinking about interactivity, logistics, and timeliness for posts and responses.

Fostering Student Belonging is Everyone’s Responsibility

Feeling isolated is a daunting experience for students, whereas feeling included and valued is reassuring. Providing students with tools and channels to connect, find common ground, and support one another can serve as the motivation they need to remain engaged and persist in their studies.

Fostering a sense of belonging in students involves multiple stakeholders, and no single person or department can take sole responsibility for it. Institutional leadership, staff, faculty, and even students themselves can contribute in various ways to promote a sense of belonging. It is a collective responsibility, and a significant one, particularly as the scope and scale of online learning continues to expand.

Distance Education, Online Learning, Student Success

Practice

Increasing Access to Learning by Creating a Custom Online Lab Platform

By Lindsey Downs

April 6, 2023

A few weeks ago we started our feature of recent WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) Award winners. Today we continue that feature with one of our WOW Honorable Mentions – Oregon State University Ecampus and their outstanding work developing a custom online lab platform. Thank you to Karen Watté, the Director of Course Development & Training with Ecampus for sharing about the platform and the team’s design journey!

Enjoy the read,

Lindsey Downs, WCET

For years higher education has grappled with the question – how do you teach labs online? For many faculty this has felt like an insurmountable hurdle. However, the Oregon State University Ecampus course development team was able to bound over this hurdle for chemistry courses taught online through a multi-year collaborative effort with Oregon State’s Department of Chemistry. The result was the development of a robust online chemistry lab platform that is now used in 10 online chemistry courses serving approximately 1500 students annually.

The Makeup of an Online Lab

Our online chemistry lab consists of both a digital workbench and notebook. It is designed in many ways to replicate what one would see in a physical lab. For example, the balance uses a variable weight scale tare function and students are required to actually close the balance door prior to recording an accurate measurement. They are also required to swap pipette tips between drawing and dispensing solutions. This level of detail creates an extremely realistic virtual experience. The user-friendly design means that the technology disappears into the background and learning takes center stage.

Screen shot of the online lab notebook and workbench

Labs conducted through this platform meet the same learning outcomes as required for on-campus labs and students leave the online courses well-prepared for future coursework and lab experiences. At the time of its launch, the online lab platform actually covered a wider range of experimentation and data analysis than the on-campus lab experience, according to Mike Lerner, previous chemistry department head. The platform was designed to be scalable, so new labs can be added and existing labs can be revised. This ability to respond quickly to changing needs provides a significant advantage over out-of-the-box solutions.

Our Custom Design Journey

The journey that ended with this complex simulation began with a number of key decisions, the most important of which was whether this was a project that we could, and wanted to, develop in-house. Previous experience with an external vendor had resulted in a product that wasn’t as flexible as hoped. Reliance on an outside vendor also brings business continuity risk as ownership and support for a product can shift over time. Our Ecampus team had programming capacity and expertise, but we also considered a number of other factors before deciding to develop this platform internally.

Critical questions before starting a custom media project

Based on our experience, here are some critical questions that you might consider before tackling a large, custom media project like this one.

Do you have strong faculty partners who are able to invest time and energy into clearly articulating their requirements and providing feedback and testing along the way?
Are the learning outcomes to be achieved by this project well-defined?
Do you have a programmer(s) available to support the work over the period of time required? This might mean hiring additional staff or being prepared to place other projects on hold during the course of the development.
Have you provided for redundancy? For example, in a long-term project like this do you have at least two programmers who are well-versed in the design and programming of the project to ensure continuity through unexpected events?
Are the programmer(s) and the faculty sponsor(s) willing and able to take the conversation ‘into the weeds’ when needed to ensure that all details are clearly scoped? The more details and alternative paths for learners that can be mapped out in advance, the more opportunity to provide a robust and realistic end product.
Do you have an individual who can serve as a project manager? For complex media projects a project manager serves an important role in ensuring that the requirements are well-defined, the project moves forward in a timely way, and the many stakeholders involved are kept up-to-date.
How do you anticipate maintaining the project once it has launched? Every custom media project requires at least some time allocated for maintenance or troubleshooting work. This becomes even more critical as the number of students who rely on the tool increase.

Four advantages gained from custom lab development

What are some of the advantages that we’ve realized at Oregon State as a result of creating a custom lab platform? Here are a few:

textbox: This tool has allowed Oregon State to reduce student learning barriers and provided a more equitable approach to learning chemistry.

Flexibility – A custom lab platform provides ultimate flexibility for faculty since they are able to request changes without having to enter into negotiations with an external vendor.

Accessibility – For students who need certain accommodations to work in a physical lab, an online lab can often meet this need. From another perspective, students who would otherwise be unable to attend an in-person lab (i.e. active duty military) have the opportunity to complete the course of study.

Cost savings – Physical space is not only costly but often at a premium at most institutions. Being able to support a certain percentage of lab-work online means that physical labs on campus can be used for highly specialized or upper-division coursework.

Security – An in-house platform takes advantage of the security infrastructure and policies within the institution which helps ensure that student data remains secure.

The primary benefit: Increased access to learning

The development of an online chemistry lab platform was a significant undertaking involving two full-time programmers, a project manager and part-time graphic design support over the course of two years. The results, however, have been extremely positive.

As a land grant institution, access is a high priority and part of our mission. The virtual lab platform has improved access to our undergraduate chemistry courses, and it offers even more value to students because it’s free. Students don’t pay any lab or licensing fees.

This tool has allowed Oregon State to reduce student learning barriers and provided a more equitable approach to learning chemistry.

Digital Learning, Distance Education, Lab Courses, Managing Digital Learning, Online Learning, STEM, Student Success

Practice

The Shift in Digital Learning Modalities: Is Higher Education Ready?

By Lindsey Downs

March 30, 2023

As we travel further into this post-pandemic era, I am struck by a recurring theme. The mix of courses with digital components demanded by students and offered by institutions has changed. And this shift is having real impact on campuses.

In this post, I will reflect on that theme plus highlight a new WCET publication. This new report, released today, details the results of a survey on faculty and student desires regarding digital learning offerings and faculty readiness for the digital learning shift.

And, not to give away the ending right at the beginning of the post, but some big questions still loom:

Are we ready for the shift?
Why aren’t we talking about this shift more?

Is There a Shift? What Does it Really Mean?

Whether hearing from people in states that are big, small, east, or west, I have been in meetings over the last year where the conversations are eerily similar. For many institutions, enrollment patterns in online, hybrid, and in-person courses are not what they were pre-pandemic. The online and hybrid registrations remain higher than in pre-pandemic days. This has had some real impacts. Some senior faculty are not able to fill their course loads during in-person traditional timeframes. Some faculty and staff now live in other states. Buildings feel a bit emptier. Legislators are noticing. An accrediting team questioned an institution as to why faculty development was not keeping up with increases in digital courses. And how do we pivot student services to meet student needs where (and when) they are now?

The numbers support the idea of a shift. Phil Hill, of Phil Hill & Associates (formerly MindWires) and the publisher of the On EdTech blog, analyzed the U.S. Department of Education’s Fall Enrollment survey statistics. The graph below (used with permission) tracks the trends of fall enrollments of students taking at least one online course.

Graph showing percent of US higher ed enrollment fall 2012 - 2021, of students taking at least one online course (from IPEDS database). In 2012 the enrollment of No DE courses starts at 74.5% and at least one DE course starts at 25.5%. Students taking one online course steadily increases through 2018, then sharply increases to 74.7% in 2020 before decreasing to 60.9% in 2021. Students taking no DE courses steadily declines with a large drop in 2020 (to 25.3%).

The COVID-plagued year of 2020 was an anomaly as institutions pivoted to “emergency remote learning.” It seems apparent that many institutions reported these courses as “distance learning,” even though IPEDS instructed them not to do so. Admittedly, we might see some of that same misreporting in 2021, but colleges and universities were starting to, and please excuse me for using this phrase, “get back to normal.”

The statistical data backs the non-scientifically collected anecdotes that were forming a pattern in my mind.

What are the Perceptions of Faculty and Administrators about Flexibility in Courses?

It turns out that we asked these questions last year in WCET’s national survey of faculty and administrators regarding their agreement with definitions of digital learning terms (i.e. online, hybrid, hyflex, and in-person). In that survey, we were somewhat surprised with the overwhelming level of agreement on all the terms except for hyflex, which was the newest concept.

Agreement with digital learning definition survey - 92% agreed with the definition of in-person learning, agreed with definition of online learning, 95% with definition of HYBRID learning, and 71% with definition of HyFlex learning.

As we release our second report based on the survey, we wanted to highlight some of the additional results.

But first, WCET staff thank Jeff Seaman, Bay View Analytics, for conducting the survey, and Nicole Johnson for performing the analysis. The questions were based upon definitions Johnson developed for her organization, the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association (CDLRA). Along with CDLRA, we are grateful to the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), Quality Matters, and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) for their assistance in soliciting respondents and disseminating the results.

Participants in this study consisted of 987 higher education faculty and 1,051 administrators representing 870 institutions from all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

The second report (released today) focuses on survey results regarding technology trends and asked some key questions about shifting perceptions and planned uses of academic technologies.

The results add more insights into faculty and staff desires regarding learning modalities.

Surveyed Statement: Students Want Greater Choice and Flexibility in How They Access Their Courses (e.g., Hyflex, Comodal, Multi-access learning)

Yes, they do. Admittedly, this is not a direct survey of students’ wants and needs, but the perceptions of faculty and administrators. It is notable that they are largely in lock step with those perceptions. More than three-quarters of all responding groups either strongly or somewhat agreed that students now seek more flexibility in how they access their courses. More than half of the non-faculty groups strongly agreed.

Surveyed Statement: Faculty Want More Flexibility in How They Deliver Their Courses

Most participants agreed that faculty want more flexibility in how they deliver their courses, although the agreement was not as pronounced as for students. It is important to note that senior administrators and faculty, themselves, were most likely to report agreement about the desire for flexibility. More than 40% of faculty strongly agreed with this statement.

Along with the anecdotes and student enrollment numbers, this survey showed both faculty and (perceived) student interest in having options beyond the traditional in-person, lecture modality.

Are We Ready for this Shift?

Another question that we asked in the survey probed the readiness of faculty for teaching in different modalities. The results of questions around faculty readiness and related questions around specific technologies they use in each modality are included in the new report released today.

Surveyed Statement: Faculty Have the Skills and Know-How to Effectively Deliver Courses in Multiple Modes

The percentage of respondents who strongly agreed with this statement was very low. The combination of strongly and somewhat agree was below half for all categories and differed by group.

Graph showing how many respondents agreed with the statement "faculty Have the Skills and Know-How to Effectively Deliver Courses in Multiple Modes." The respondents who agreed was very low compared to other statements.

From the report:

“Despite the increased use of digital resources and technology along with the desire for increased flexibility, most participants did not agree that faculty had the skills and know-how to effectively deliver courses in multiple modes. Faculty were more likely to perceive themselves as having the necessary skills and know-how than participants in other roles.”

As for the faculty not being ready, we should not flog ourselves over this result. The shift has been sudden. We are still in a bit of shock and recovery mode from the pandemic. It will be a difficult task to assure that the skills necessary to keep up with the perceived desires for both faculty and students. And this new set of skills is not solely on the shoulders of faculty, but also needs to be part of the thinking of administrators at all levels and policy-makers both inside and outside of higher education.

Why Aren’t We Talking About This Modality Shift More?

Maybe this discussion is happening on campus, but I have been surprised that this issue has been relatively absent among higher education organizations, policymakers, the press, and the public, at large.

Maybe I missed it somewhere? If it is not being discussed, I am at a loss as to why. This shift is changing college and university operations and economics…in a dramatic way for some institutions.

What is your experience?

We hope that the results from the survey report released today help fuel the discussion.

I understand that it takes time to regain our equilibrium from a sudden shift. To move forward in a world where the demand for course modalities has changed, we need to gather ourselves, collect the data, organize our thinking, and talk about it so that we can map our new direction.

Digital Learning, Distance Education, Online Learning

Policy

New SARA Reciprocity Policy Modification Process Yields Proposals Intended to Increase Student Protections

By Lindsey Downs

March 21, 2023

Providing uniform consumer protection for distance education students located in all member states is a hallmark of the interstate reciprocity agreement known as the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (SARA). States that chose to join the agreement, often through state legislation signed by their governor, direct that the policies and procedures of the reciprocity agreement are to be followed for purposes of state institutional approval to offer distance education related activities to students located in states that are members to the reciprocity agreement.

As we reported in December, the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (NC-SARA) is facilitating the new SARA Policy Modification Process. This process began in January 2023 with proposal submissions. This newly approved process increases transparency and public engagement to address revisions and improvements to SARA Policy to manage reciprocity and consistent oversight of participating institutions serving students in 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. During the January proposal submission window, more than sixty policy modification proposals were submitted from representatives of higher education regional compacts, postsecondary institutions, higher education organizations, and consumer advocates.

Why This is Important

State authorization requirements, if any, must be met by institutions in states where students are located when the institution offers interstate distance education.
Compliance with state requirements is required by federal regulation to participate in Title IV financial aid.
Reciprocity through SARA is accepted by federal regulation as an alternative to state-by-state approval.
SARA has been represented as being a “negotiated compromise” of state requirements in SARA Policy to provide uniform oversight of institutions and protections for students in SARA member states.
SARA Policy is reviewed and revised through the SARA Policy Modification Process.
Policy proposals approved through this process could compel new compliance requirements for institutions to participate in SARA as well as provide new oversight responsibilities of SARA member states.

Short History of SARA Policy

The SARA Policy Manual was developed to implement the Unified State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement which was signed by all four regional compacts and NC-SARA. The policies and procedures found in the SARA Policy Manual provide the responsibilities of the institutions, states, regional compacts, and also NC-SARA as the entity facilitating collaboration of the regional compacts to implement SARA. Modifications to the policy have occurred since the origination of SARA as submitted to and approved by the NC-SARA Board of Directors. In June 2022, the NC-SARA Board approved the new SARA Policy Modification Process that was developed by representatives from each regional steering committee. This new process encourages opportunity for the public and state voices to improve upon SARA Policy to implement reciprocity and offer ability to enrich student consumer protections.

SARA Policy Modification Process Steps

The new SARA Policy Modification Process follows several designated steps. For 2023, we highlight several dates in the chart provided as we encourage you to participate in certain steps of the process by reviewing proposals, listening to the two public forums, and providing written comments during the 30-day comment period. From the NC-SARA Participate in SARA Policy Modifications webpage, you can access links to review the list of proposals, gain access to registration for public forums, and receive direction to submit written public comments.

Note that the final step in the annual proposal process is the release of the revised SARA Policy Manual at the end of the calendar year. My holiday wish is that the policy manual will be released in web form with a PDF-only version for download as an option.

2023 SARA Policy Modification Key Dates

January 3-February 3, 2023          Window to submit SARA Policy Modifications

March 1, 2023                                 SARA Policy Public Forum #1 (available to the public to hear proposals)

April 5, 2023                                     Deadline to amend or withdraw proposed SARA Policy modifications.

April 17 – May 17, 2023 Call for written public comments on proposed SARA Policy modifications

June 7, 2023       SARA Policy Public Forum #2 (available to the public to hear proposals)

July 5, 2023                                       Deadline to amend or withdraw proposed SARA Policy modifications

September 1, 2023                         Deadline for Regional Compacts to review and vote on proposals.

October 23-25, 2023                      NC-SARA Board vote on proposals approved by the regional compacts

December 31, 2023                        Revise SARA Policy Manual published on the NC-SARA website.

Summary of the 2023 Proposals

The central theme present in many of the submitted proposals for this 2023 policy modification proposal year is the enhanced oversight of institutions to provide increased student consumer protections. Protections should be found in clear policy language for institutions to comply in support of their students, strong state oversight of SARA participating institutions, and strong regional compact oversight of SARA member states. The proposals generally fell into several categories including:

Technical Corrections,
Definitions,
State Responsibilities, Oversight & Renewals,
Institution Eligibility, Oversight & Renewals,
Consumer Protection, and,
Coverage & Limitations of SARA (including Professional Licensure).

The largest number of proposals address the eligibility and responsibilities of the SARA participating institutions including the process and expectations for institutions when the state provides the annual participation renewal. Regional compacts and consumer advocates strongly recommend the importance of sufficient state enforcement capacity and more state specific oversight and authority by the state portal entity to hold the institutions accountable. Multiple proposals focus on the increased parameters if the state places an institution on provisional status. Additionally, several proposals suggest the need for transparency on the NC-SARA website to share the status of SARA participation, if the institution is placed on provisional status, as well as to provide student complaint data for each SARA participating institution.

Other proposals suggest revisions to professional licensure notification language and several, including one of our proposals, address removal/replacement of the C-RAC Guidelines. Additionally, we submitted a proposal to the Definition section to define “Explanatory Note,” in order to address the authority of advisory language that has not been vetted and approved through the SARA Policy Modification Process. Another of our proposals suggests increased regional compact oversight, including authority to place a state on monitored provisional status under certain circumstances when functional responsibilities are not met by a state. Conversely, another proposal suggested extending the regional compacts’ reviews of member states for membership renewal from biennially to every five years.

First SARA Policy Proposal Public Forum

A woman participating with a video conference on a laptop. — *Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels*

Two weeks ago, approximately half of the proposals were presented by their submitters in a livestream public forum hosted by NC-SARA. Submitters were allotted three minutes to publicly share their proposed language and offer the rationale and importance of their proposal. Many submitters requested viewers reach out to them to offer suggestions for improvements for their proposed language. Submitters may amend their proposals and participate in a second public forum later in the spring.

While submitters of proposals offered the rationale for their language in the written proposal submission form during the initial proposal period, the verbal presentation, in many cases, offered the opportunity to share additional context and motivation for the proposed language. Additionally, some submitters provided support data and explained the interrelationship of multiple proposals on related policy.

The Next Steps in the Process and How to Participate

Consider providing a written comment during the public comment period April 17-May 17, 2023. In order to prepare a written comment, institutions and other interested parties should review the list of policy proposals to determine which proposals may be particularly applicable to your role in the SARA ecosystem. The list of proposals identifies the proposal name, affected SARA Policy sections, and the organization name. We think proposals of note to review include those:

addressing enforcement of state consumer protection laws,
ensuring states’ enforcement capacity,
related to C-RAC/21^st Century Guidelines,
related to professional licensure, and,
multiple proposals addressing institutional provisional status.

Please consider these proposals and determine how each policy change could positively or negatively impact students or your role as associated with the implementation of the SARA agreement.

A second public forum will take place on June 7th following the public comment period. The submitters will have an opportunity to consider the written comments and revise their proposals in advance of the second public forum for which we encourage you to register and attend. During the public forum, many submitters are likely to express their interest in direct feedback from listeners offering you another opportunity to share questions, concerns, or support for the proposal(s) before the final deadline to amend proposals.

Conclusion

Your input is important to this process. The opportunity for increased participation was intentionally placed into the new modification process in order to hear voices of all stakeholders affected by SARA Policy.

Green oval with the text "comment" and a comment bubble icon

In regard to public comments, we would like to share some advice. Your constructive comments are essential! Submitters will appreciate comments in support as well as comments that address questions and concerns about their proposals. The comments will be available for public review on the NC-SARA website.

If you comment on behalf of your institution or organization, make sure you have the authority to do so. If you comment as an individual, you can’t use your institution or organization letterhead. You can supply your name, title, and employer as context as an indicator or your experience on the topic. Remember this is your importunity to provide input to SARA policy. If you have questions, concerns, or just need clarity, please raise them!

SAN and WCET will continue to share more information as we watch and participate in this first year of the new SARA Policy Modification Process. Watch for us to share more soon!

Distance Education, Managing Digital Learning, Professional Licensure, SAN, SARA, State Authorization, State Authorization Network, Student Success