Public Speaking Online: Can It or Can’t It Be Done?

Business and professional communication is an essential skill, but it no longer takes place solely in person. An important component in preparing students to segue to a professional career is ensuring that they have a plethora of experiences—today, this should include working in a virtual space.  

Many industries offer telecommuting options, require global Web-based presentations, etc. Students who are charged with working in these organizations must understand the etiquette when communicating synchronously and asynchronously.

So developing an online course in public speaking must include a myriad of opportunities to create experiences that enable students to hone communicating in an online context.

As the instructional designer for this type of online course, I spent countless hours researching what strategies other institutions (higher education and professional industries) employ when teaching a public speaking course online (one of the more popular online courses) or communicating in a professional setting.

After sifting through several examples, I created sample projects segmented by synchronous and asynchronous solutions. It was important to distinguish between the types of solutions to ensure that students get experience working with each. See the sample projects listed in the table below.

Synchronous Presentations

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a web conferencing solution, create groups of students that deliver presentations in real-time to one another along with the faculty member.
  • Wimba
  • Adobe Connect
  • Blackboard Collaborate

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a video recording device, require students to obtain a set number of audience members and someone to film them delivering a speech.

  • Optional: Require students to pan the audience to ensure that the criterion is met
  • Camera phone/video camera
  • Flip camera
  • Video camcorder

 

Asynchronous Presentations

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing a video-recording device, require students to record themselves delivering a speech.
  • Webcam recording
  • Camera phone/video camera
  • Flip camera
  • Video camcorder

Sample Project Description

Examples of Technology Applications

Utilizing an application that enables audio narration, require students to create and record a narrated PowerPoint presentation. Students submit the PowerPoint.
  • Screencast software
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Voicethread

Each of these examples lends itself to creating different experiences for students to communicate professionally in a virtual space.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in global work settings, students who are acclimated to presenting in multifaceted formats are better equipped to deliver on-demand and work with a variety of technologies.

Follow Up: Creating Engaging Online Video

Last fall, I wrote about the challenges of creating engaging video for online courses. Disappointed with the end product I was getting by serving in a mostly advisory capacity, I declared that I would take a more hands-on approach. I was hopeful that by requiring early ideation sessions, script review, rehearsal, and on-site art direction I’d be able to get results that would meet faculty goals and that students would actually watch.

I’m still waiting for that happy day to arrive. I hadn’t anticipated that it would be so difficult to get stakeholders to deliver a draft of a script on deadline, let alone to find time for substantive review and iteration. Rehearsals? I haven’t been able to schedule one yet. As far as art direction, I’ve bumped up against the realities of working with media services that have limited abilities and capacities; without the resources to do extensive compositing and editing in post-production, there’s very little you can do with a static one-camera set up.

Still, the status quo is hard to defend. In the absence of sufficient preproduction planning and active involvement during the shoot, too often what’s created is a hard-to-watch presentation consisting of a speaker at a podium superimposed over hard-to-read PowerPoint slides. The effectiveness of this presentation approach in a live classroom is debatable, but it’s rarely successful online.

Even better-conceived productions suffer from lack of adequate planning and constraints. Rushed into production at the last minute, a recent shoot with two engaging professors discussing a topic dear to them failed because it was too long to sustain interest and relied too heavily on post-production that our campus media services were unable to deliver on deadline.

I’m still hopeful that a more hands-on approach will ultimately be successful. Building in lots more time for preproduction should help, and my department is taking steps to bring more production in-house for greater control of outcomes. I’m also hoping to find a way for our faculty to work with DePaul’s television studio and personnel; the ability to create multicamera interview productions would give us a powerful way to deliver engaging, high-quality online video.

Get Lazy and Automate

“But being lazy means you aren’t productive, right?”

Lies!

Being lazy is about getting as much done as you can with as little effort as possible. Think “task streamlining” rather than “task avoidance.”

The tasks that take the most time for me are repetitive text-manipulation tasks and responding to email, so those are the two things I’ve worked on automating the most.

The tools I prefer are Autohotkey (free) for Windows or Text Expander ($35) for Mac. Both allow you to set up keyboard macros which will perform longer text-entry tasks. I will not go into incredible depth for either of them, but I will go into the basics of why they’re useful.

What Email Signatures?

We all have to sign our emails; it’s polite.

And it takes a while, especially when you add up the 10 to 20 seconds you spend per email every day. Today I sent fifty-six emails. Fifty-six emails multiplied by 15 seconds to sign the email (on the conservative end) is 840 seconds which is about 14 minutes per day spent signing emails.

But wait, I use signatures!

Well that’s great but it’s not flexible. My signatures vary depending on who I am emailing. To manage your email efficiently, finding a way to streamline or automate this process could save valuable time and make email communication smoother. I use formal signatures and informal signatures and all sorts in between.

For example, when I type “ssq”, Text Expander types:

If there is anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Regards,
Ian at FITS

This is great! Now I never have to think about how to sign off on an email again. I write what I have to say, type “ssq”, and send it off.

Or I can type “sse”, and Text Expander types:

Regards,
Ian at FITS

“Yeah but that takes no time to type—you must type really slowly.”

Nope!

It took me 4.8 seconds averaged over six attempts at typing it really quickly.

Don’t believe me? You try.

Actual Email Messages

Now think about the longer text you type over and over and over.

Here’s a sample short snippet I type five to fifty times per day:

Greetings,

Your add user request has been completed. Please log in and ensure that the user(s) appear as they should.

It’s a greeting and one line of text all of which takes about 16 seconds to write. So again, lots of time wasted writing the same thing over and over and sometimes I’d misspell things or send the wrong information or whatever further extending the time it takes to write.

The rate most people perform composition typing at is nineteen words per minute (Karat, et. al., 1999). If you compositionally type similar bodies of text regularly you’re wasting time.

Now imagine if that were two paragraphs consisting of three to five sentences typed two times per day. Times four per week (lucky you, working four days a week). Times four weeks per month.

Now let’s take my wonderful body of add-user text above, which is about twenty words. If compositionally you type nineteen words per minute, it will take you one minute to type that sentence, times three sentences per paragraph (low end), so at three minutes per paragraph times two paragraphs, you’re spending six minutes per day composing each email. If you have two students or coworkers a day who ask similar questions, you are spending 12 minutes a day doing unnecessary, repetitive work.

Multiply that by your generous four-day work week, times four weeks per month, and you’re spending 3.5 hours per month writing just that one email over and over. Now if you regularly compose five similar emails, it scales quickly.

Suddenly you are at 15 hours per month wasted.

And knowing you, everything is misspelled, has coffee spilled on it, and the really important bit of information got left out anyway.

Horrifying.

References

Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568-575.

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Cloning the Research Librarian and Other Solutions

Problem: Student–to–Research Librarian Instructor ratio is 60:1.

Solution: A collaborative effort between the faculty, research librarian, and instructional designer to design and embed online tutorials in the learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L)…quickly.

It is mid-October and the January 2nd winter quarter start date is fast approaching. Nursing 400: Theories of Nursing will be offered as a hybrid for the first time. The instructional designer and faculty have been working feverishly to produce narrated PowerPoint lectures, embed video clips, write content and assignment instructions, develop rubrics and engaging discussion prompts, and integrate images and graphics. The course hinges on a multistep research-project assignment and the librarian instructional time is vital for students to have a successful course experience.

How will the students become familiar with the massive amount of library resources available to them vital to their research-project assignment? The research librarian usually conducts face-to-face instructional sessions on information literacy (IL) and useful library resources. However, the number of students in the winter cohort is much larger. He figures he needs two to three clones of himself to conduct all the scheduled face-to-face sessions plus advise students and tend to faculty research requests.

In comes the instructional designer. What about embedding online tutorials right into the course so that you can focus on advising students and handling special requests? Ding-ding-ding! Of course, the research librarians have already thought of this. They created a YouTube channel with tutorials about general library resources; but for this course, tutorials are needed that specifically address the research needs of nurses. The librarian, instructional designer, and faculty decide on four topics crucial to nursing students who are at this stage in their study and research novices. After input from the librarian and faculty, we get to work on the scripts and create the accompanying PowerPoint slides. The British accent of the research librarian coupled with his witty humor creates an entertaining and authoritative sounding product.

Now where to place these tutorials? We decide to create a “widget” in D2L that resides on the course home page so that students see it every time they log in and it’s quickly accessible. The faculty clearly directs students within the introductory course announcements to the tutorials that also include a short video introducing the research librarian and providing his contact information. Mid-course, we nervously solicit feedback from students via an embedded survey within the course.

Select Survey Results

6 question survey; n=20

Question 2: Did you feel successful when researching your topic after viewing the tutorials?

Yes

95%

No

5%

Not sure

0%

Question 3: Given the option, would you have preferred online tutorials, in-person library instruction session, or both?

Online Tutorials

50%

In-person Instruction

5%

Both

45%

Open-ended Question: Would you change anything in the online tutorials? 

No, I thought the tutorial was very self-explanatory and covered all the necessary topics to adequately navigate through the DePaul library resources.

I think that everything was well covered

No, I thought it was enough to get me started, navigating things like this usually requires me to play around in it.

I thought it was very thorough. I like how it was broken up so that if we forgot something, we could go back and rewatch a section without having to rewatch the whole thing.

No, I think it would be beneficial to have the tutorials as an overview for an in-person tutorial.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it is helpful to look at a more comprehensive study of student content retention and the effectiveness of online tutorials versus face-to-face instruction.

Alison Brettle and Michael Raynor published a paper in Nurse Education Today titled “Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods” (2012) which looked at the question of whether an “online tutorial was as good as face-to-face training for teaching IL [information literacy] skills to students nurses.” (p.2) The study of seventy-seven students added evidence to the previous claim by Carlock and Anderson (2007) that suggests online tutorials and face-to-face instruction of IL and research skills are equally effective methods.

The small student sample from NSG 400 seems to validate these findings.

We will continue to iterate the online tutorials based on student feedback and performance. It is also important to listen to that 5% who do not find the tutorials equally as helpful as face-to-face instruction; where are the gaps? We will look for solutions that capitalize on the scalability of online tutorials while integrating the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction. We can’t clone the research librarian, but we will continue to seek other solutions.

References:

Brettle, A., Raynor, M. Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods, Nurse Edc. Today (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2011.12.003

What Happens to the Self-Published When We Go Paperless?

I have a particular penchant toward the self-published.

You see, I grew up with printed pages still warm from a Kinko’s copy machine. I was taught with manifestos stapled sideways, printed in perfect punk-rock attitude and do-it-yourself aesthetic. A girl who was awash with the unspoken mission statement of “anyone-can-do-it” chanted by movements like Riot Grrrl and Act-Up, I learned that you didn’t have to hit the New York Times Best Seller List to be considered an author. I learned that, given time, a typewriter, and some dimes for the copy machine, you could print your own stories, your own news, and your own ideas. I learned that my voice and thoughts counted. I learned the magic of self-publishing.

So it’s no wonder that when I went to teach for the first time, I was influenced by pedagogical tactics that pushed for decentralizing knowledge. When setting up our reading list, I worked hard to use anthologies, collect stories from multiple voices, and use small-press books by relatively unknown authors.

Moreover, I wanted the texts we read to exist outside of the echo chamber that can be created in academia. The feedback of one text calling to another, that text calling to a next, all reverberating until the topic at hand is buried beneath layers of rhetoric. I wanted fresh views, even if the topics we were discussing were well known. I wanted my students to hear the poetry in knowledge, the lyricism in all our different epistemologies. So, I brought them zines, written by local authors, and even brought in my thesis, which a friend of mine had formatted into a folded-in-half, 8”-by-11” zine. Basically, I wanted my students to tap into a more creative, yet still academic means of learning.

But now? Now, I’m a little worried. What will happen to the self-published when we all go paperless? It’s hard not to hear the clamor of eBooks and digital readers, let alone not see them in the hands of all the morning commuters. I’ve heard all about how libraries across the country are digitizing their catalogs; I’ve seen how the old paperback novel is now kindling the fires of online eBook sales. It’s hard not to see that every nook of the Internet is saturated by the phenomenon.

But, for a girl like me? A girl who not only self-publishes her work, but is a hopeless consumer of zines and small-press works, well, I worry about the impact on small-press and indie authors when we go fully digital and paperless.

But there is hope. If you search the Internet a little bit, multiple web-based zine libraries are popping up, all with digitized archives ready to be downloaded and consumed. (If you’re interested, check out the list of zine archives from zinebook.com.) For indie authors, Smashwords.com is the place to go, with its wide selection of self-published eBooks. And then, of course, there is Apple’s release of iBook Author, the Mac-based application that allows anyone to create their own multi-touch textbooks. So, suffice it to say, at the moment, there seems to be space still for the self-published, ready and waiting to fill your digital bookshelf.

Online Learning for Free?

I recently signed up to take a free online course, Human-Computer Interaction, through Stanford University. While I already have my master’s degree in HCI, I thought it would be a fun way to stay engaged and gain new insights into the field. That it was free certainly didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for the course to get off the ground—what was originally a January start date, was pushed back to March and has now been shelved as “under-development.” I’m still on the mailing list and hopeful that the course will be offered soon.

In this month’s Wired, writer Steven Leckart chronicles his experience taking another free Stanford University online course. This course, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and what started as an experiment of providing the course free to whomever wanted to take it quickly turned into something else—an astonishing 160,000 students signed up.

In both cases, the aim of these courses is to make learning accessible and free, opening up opportunities those who might not otherwise have them.  Coursera, the site the HCI course is offered through has several other courses available from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of California–Berkley. While Thrun is spinning his course into a new company, Udacity devoted to creating a new education institution made entirely of free online courses, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also currently exploring this concept with their own initiative MITx set to launch in Fall 2012.

How these courses and programs will affect the future of online learning, we can’t know, but it does bring up some interesting ideas. I’m not suggesting that DePaul should start offering free online classes, but I do think it will be interesting to watch as these programs evolve and expand. I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.”

How am I doing?

As an instructor in an online or hybrid course, I want to know how the students feel about the content as well as the structure of the course. I have given a number of surveys for both my hybrid and online courses that include both an initial survey and an end of quarter survey. While the university has an official assessment instrument for the evaluation of instruction, I find an informal, anonymous survey in my courses has helped me fine-tune the course for the next time it is offered. In this survey, I not only ask about the content matter, but also about the format and structure of the course. I ‘bribe’ the students to take the surveys by giving participation points or extra credit for completion.

Attitude and Demographics

As a matter of course, I ask a few questions at the beginning of the quarter to gather some demographic information as well as some attitudinal questions. I repeat the attitudinal questions at the end of the quarter to see if there have been fundamental shifts in the mindset. Here are some example results from a large lecture Mathematics class that was conducted as a hybrid (semester results)

(Click for a larger version.)

Course Content

At the end of the course, I ask a number of questions relating specifically to the course content as well as the layout and structure of the course. Course content is, of course, specific to the material being taught, but I also ask questions directly related to the layout and structure of the online materials. Here are some sample question with results from the same hybrid course (with a few content specific questions).




Free response questions

In addition to the standard survey questions, I ask students several open-ended questions that, for me, provide the greatest insight to their feelings about the course. Knowing that the results are anonymous allows the students to open up, and I have found that they really don’t hold back. Here are a few sample open-ended questions with a few student responses:

What do you think was the biggest factor in your success or failure in this course? Your response is anonymous

“being able to watch the videos over and over…but there sometimes needed to be more videos with more examples not just one because sometimes everything wasnt worded the same as how its written in the book”

“I tended to put all of my homework off until the night before class.”

Please add any information that you think will me improve this course for the next semester. Your response is anonymous

“ALL ONLINE. Teach the students how to use the online site before you start giving them assaignments on it. I was really confused in the beginning because no one said how to use the website, but now i understand it. “

“no global warming assignments, there are bigger issues to worry about no body pas [sic] attention to global warming anyway. make this class easier, this type of math isnt important for some majors, it just creates stress and wastes students time. as long as people can do basic adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing they will be good to go in life.”

ED NOTE – this is common

Conclusion

I have found these surveys to be an invaluable tool in reworking my course for the next time it is offered. I generally do not share data with anyone else, but I believe it provides a valuable insight to where any potential trouble spots are. If you wish to add a pre-post survey to your course, your instructional designer can assist in putting an anonymous survey in place.

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Desire2Learn: Rethinking the Online “Course Site”

Here at DePaul, we’ve got a well-established learning management system. For many faculty, this provides a means to deliver content in both text and multimedia forms to students anywhere in the world. Some faculty are using their course sites in really excellent ways, delivering lecture content, videos, discussions, and assessments entirely online. Many others, though, do not want to or believe they need to use the system. On first glance, a number of disciplines don’t seem to benefit from having this system in place; for example, a music instructor whose sole purpose at DePaul is to teach private lessons might not see the value in having a course site available, since they don’t have a syllabus and each student’s lesson content is different. A foreign-language instructor might not see the immediate value of a course site beyond being a syllabus repository, if the majority of the course content will be conversational speaking. However, there are many ways to leverage the technology available in the Desire2Learn system to avoid the woes of the “common course site.” In order to take a course site to these new places, we first have to break down exactly what the words “course site” mean to us as instructors and designers, and from there we can use the available tools to produce something truly beneficial to students.

A Desire2Learn course site is, in its simplest definition, nothing more than a website. When you access your course site, you are accessing a collection of Web pages associated with your course and a collection of students who have access to it. As you create content in your class, you are really creating a series of web links and web pages to convey your information. D2L does a great job of hiding most of the tough stuff from you, so for the most part the system really is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). You don’t have to know any code or special tricks to get the basics to happen. In a broader sense, a “course site” becomes that collection of web pages that, taken as a whole, comprise the learning materials for your course.

What if your course content doesn’t seem very internet-friendly? What if you’re working in a typically “analog” discipline that historically doesn’t make much use of Web resources? Keep reading for a few ideas that might help you rethink how you configure your class for online learning:

Idea 1: Lecture Delivery

Consider how much time you spend lecturing to your class. How many hours a week/month/quarter do you use in class for this? In order to maximize in-class discussion and reflection time, consider creating online lectures. You can record them yourself using screencasting software like ScreenFlow or Camtasia, or using online software like Screencast-O-Matic. Screencasting software essentially records whatever’s on your computer screen at the time, along with audio and/or video, and produces a video file that can be used in your course site. Students could be watching your lecture before they come to class, and then you can spend your class time discussing what they already know instead of having to present it for the first time. You can also be sure that they will get all the necessary information because they can stop, rewind, and watch over and over. You could use your course site to be the main delivery system for your lecture content.

Idea 2: The Listening Room

Suppose you are an instructor who needs to use numerous audio files for your instruction. This could be someone in music creating listening lists, someone preparing broadcasting examples for a journalism class, or a foreign-language professor providing conversation and pronunciation excerpts. D2L handles audio excellently, and can be used to present one or many examples at once. You can create content pages with audio files that will play back directly from within the page. If you have multiple examples that need to be grouped together, your FITS consultant can create a “channel” on our streaming server, so you can present a group of items as a unified whole (for example, if you wanted to present an entire Beatles album at once). There are a number of resources out there for audio files, but one of the best for music is the Naxos Music Library, which DePaul subscribes to. You can stream music directly from this collection and link to it in your course site, so students don’t have to go looking for the music. Giving your students audio examples directly in the course site will increase the availability of those materials to them for study: no more sitting and waiting for a recording to become available in the language lab or music library, and they can play and replay these files an unlimited number of times. You can embed audio in a page with descriptive text as well, so they will know a little more ahead of time about what they will be listening to.

Idea 3: The Theatre

It’s always a nice change of pace to show a film in class. This can help break up the monotony of lecture-response-lecture-response. However, what if films and film clips are a major part of the class? Consider a Television News class, where students may be frequently viewing historical newscasts or those of their peers, or a Literature in Film class, where students will be frequently viewing old films or film clips and making comparisons to the literature it is based on. If a clip is shown only once in class, it can be more difficult to ensure that students really got what you wanted them to get out of it. D2L handles video in much the same way it does audio; you can post a video clip in your course site and it will provide a player for you, so you can view it online. D2L can handle directly embedding clips from other websites like Vimeo, Viddler, and YouTube as well. You can also have channels built for your video clips if you want to show a specific set to students. Much like the lecture-delivery idea, this enables you to have students watch clips before class, so you can jump right into discussion of the clips instead of having to sit through them all in class. It also keeps those materials available to students, so they can watch them repeatedly to study for an upcoming exam. You can also embed a video clip in a page with some descriptive text content; this way they won’t just watch, but will watch for specific things.

Idea 4: The Gallery

Remember how much photocopying we used to do before each class? Every student needed to have a copy of every necessary page. In the case of instructors using images in class, sometimes this meant an awful lot more copying to show them, one to a page. Worse, a copy machine doesn’t necessarily reproduce images entirely accurately, so photocopies of the great works of western art probably don’t have the same effect as the originals. These days, digital copies of the images can be obtained and simply displayed online in your course site, where they will be available in perpetuity in a more authentic-looking form than a copied page. You can insert pictures one at a time into a content page, or you can use software like SoftChalk (available free at this link for DePaul users) to create an album that can be embedded and flipped through in a single content page. You can also embed photo galleries from other services such as Flickr into a content page; this can be a great way to create a gallery of student works that can then be displayed for the whole class after students upload to the external site. Imagine you’re teaching an Art History class. Wouldn’t it be great to have high-resolution images of the works you will be studying available right from within your course site? It would be a great help to students as they studied for exams, especially in those cases where they were studying things that weren’t necessarily in the book. Being able to do a side-by-side comparison in a flippable album would also reduce the amount of paging through the textbook a student would have to do to accomplish the same task.

Idea 5: The Tester

You’re probably aware that there is a pretty robust testing system inside D2L. It’s possible to do many things, including timed and randomized exams and surveys that vary their questions asked based on answers given. However, did you know that it is possible to use almost every type of content you can use anywhere else in a quiz question? That’s right, you can use images, audio, and video in a quiz question, as well as outside Web resources. An art professor could give an identification exam online by showing the work of art with each question. A Chinese language professor could give an exam in which students need to listen to an example and match the audio to the Chinese characters displayed. A professor teaching a film class could ask a question about a specific clip, and embed it right into the question; a music-history professor could give a listening exam online by providing audio examples for each question. If you’re using D2L for your classes, but not making much use of the Quizzes or Surveys tools, it might be a good idea to take a second look at the possibilities these tools offer. The reality is that almost every exam you could give on paper, you could also find a way to deliver online.

Idea 6: The Studio

Many applied courses such as internships, practicums, and private lessons don’t often make much use of a course site since so much of the course’s content is really about the student’s individual work and cannot be quantified on the same level as his/her classmates. Many of these sites end up with a syllabus and a few other general course documents and that’s about it. However, there are many reasons to use the system to make the site a resource even though not much “teaching” will happen through the site. For example, students enrolled in private music lessons not only have a weekly private session with the instructor but also one or more times a month meet with all the students of the same instrument/voice part for “studio class,” where they perform for one another, have guest speakers, and share common experiences. In this case, a course site for the entire “Trumpet Studio” could serve not as an instructional site (since that’s what happens in lessons) but as a repository for all students of that type. Sheet music and audio and video examples could be posted for general consumption by all enrolled students; since students at many different levels share the same studio class, there would be a wealth of knowledge and material available for younger students as they progress through the program. Studio class or concert performances could be recorded and then shared through the course site for the rest of the studio. As another example, a professional internship course site could be a repository for the most useful materials for students in that discipline rather than a teaching site. They know what they are supposed to do, but you can use your site to help them do it!

 

As you can see, there are multitudes of ways to make use of the Web space you have been given just by teaching at an institution that offers it. Just because you haven’t used a course site before for a course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t; with a little imagination you can turn a ghost town of a course site into a vibrant and truly useful resource that your students will keep using again and again. It’s our department’s job to help guide you through the selection, design, and production process to make your course site sparkle; just get in touch with your Instructional Technology Consultant or let us know at fits@depaul.edu whenever you’re ready to take that next step.

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Making Online Courses More Accessible by Design

Many years ago, before I moved to Chicago and began working at DePaul, my supervisor at a previous job took me on a field trip to a nonprofit service organization for the blind. At that time, I had never seen someone with a serious visual impairment use a computer. I had no idea how a screen reader worked, and all my knowledge of accessibility best practices came from second-hand sources I’d found online.

At one point during our tour, we asked one of the volunteers to show us a website that was difficult for her to navigate. The site she chose contained a large navigation menu composed of at least fifteen tabs at the top of the screen. As she moved her cursor from the upper left corner across the links, each one was read aloud. She explained that, because this site had no link for keyboard users to skip the main navigation, she had to navigate through every link before she could access the more important main content below.

Once she made her way to the main content of the page, she moved from link to link, trying to find a specific document she needed to access. Each time she advanced to the next link on the page, the screen reader would read it aloud, and she would pause to listen to the first few syllables before deciding whether or not to move on. At one point, the screen reader simply said, “Click here,” and then read the URL of the link aloud, which was long and incomprehensible. Because the linked text didn’t describe what it linked to, our volunteer had to stop and listen to all of the text around the link to determine if the link would take her to the document she needed.

For some reason, this portion of the field trip stuck with me. Perhaps it was etched into my memory because it seemed like such an easy issue to fix. All the site’s author needed to do was link the actual title of the document or destination page instead of ambiguous terms like “Click here.” Or perhaps I remembered it because this small change provides two benefits. In addition to helping blind users navigate a page more quickly, clear link titles reassure all users that clicking a link should take them to a page or document with a title that matches the link. This might seem like a minor benefit, but considering how often links change and break in an online course, anything we can do to clarify where a given link should go is probably worth the extra minute it might take to reword it.

Ever since that day, I’ve tried to sing the praises of link titles that match the titles of their destinations. Of course, it’s always helpful to have a well-written piece of supporting evidence from a trusted source. So, you can imagine my joy when a friend recently sent a link to this excellent information graphic.


Source: “Web Accessibility for Designers,” Info Graphic from WebAIM.org

What I love about this info graphic is it reminds me that accessible design isn’t just beneficial for the disabled. Much of what makes content more usable for the disabled also makes it more usable for everyone. To illustrate my point, here are a few guidelines from the graphic with examples of how each one can benefit all users.

Plan heading structure early. Clear headings help break up long blocks of content into more digestible chunks, making it easier for students to take a break and pick up where they left off. They also make text easier to scan for key information when students review something they’ve already read.

Provide good contrast.  Low-contrast text isn’t just a problem for users with visual impairments or color blindness. High contrast color combinations are easier for everyone to read, particularly when text runs more than just one or two lines.

Watch the use of CAPS. In addition to creating a problem for screen readers, text in all caps is difficult to read and implies the author is shouting.

Use adequate font size. No matter how good your vision, tiny font sizes lead to eye strain and frustrate all users.

Make sure links are recognizable. Cascading style sheets make it possible to spice up a course with all sorts of unique visual formatting. However, when it comes to links, the universal standard of blue, underlined text is usually best.

While this graphic was created to highlight accessibility issues that would be most relevant for designers, there are other best practices that instructional designers have to consider. In some cases, it can be difficult to justify designing online courses with complete accessibility because it’s more cost effective to address certain issues when accommodations are needed for a specific student. Audio transcription for the hearing impaired is a common example of an accessibility feature that can be difficult to justify if a course includes a large amount of audio content, such as PowerPoint narration, YouTube clips, full-length films, or podcasts.

In some cases, it’s just not feasible to transcribe everything in advance. However, there are advantages to including transcripts in the initial course-development process even if a disabled student never requests them. For example, ESL students might read the transcript as they listen to help them identify words that were difficult to understand through audio alone. In addition, students might prefer to review a transcript when preparing for an exam instead of trying to locate the portions of a video that they need to watch again.

While it can feel overwhelming to design a course that follows every accessibility best practice, keep in mind that many are easy to follow with little extra effort, assuming you’re aware of them early on. For guidelines that feel daunting, it might make sense to accommodate disabled students on a case-by-case basis. As you evaluate each challenge and determine what merits extra effort up front, keep your audience in mind. While it’s easy to feel that all accessibility accommodations are a big investment for a relatively small group of users, the impact of many accessibility improvements are seldom limited to students with disabilities. And if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who has pushed a baby stroller down a sidewalk in the last few decades. They can tell you how helpful curb cuts are, even though they might not realize they first appeared in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1940s as an accommodation for wheelchair-bound veterans.[1] Now those helpful little ramps are a standard feature that you’ll find at either end of every crosswalk in America, and I’m grateful for them every time I take a heavy suitcase to the airport.

  1. “Curb cut.” Wikipedia

Do you Pin?

The first step is admitting you have a problem, but if I have an addiction to Pinterest.com, at least I’m in good company. Though Pinterest has not released its total number of users, it estimates a 329 percent increase in unique visitors from September to December 2011, and social-media agency Ignite estimates over 4 million registered users. This infographic shows Pinterest’s impact in the social commerce arena and highlights how referral traffic from Pinterest is much greater than Google+. Pinterest also just won Best New Startup at the fifth annual Crunchies awards this week.

So What is Pinterest?

The site’s About page describes Pinterest as a virtual pinboard that:

…lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Why Do I Pin?

So much of what we consume on the web is visual, and “pinning” an image to my board that is linked back to an original source has been a great way for me to organize different interests and areas of my life. I used to e-mail links to myself, take a picture with my phone, or in extreme circumstances print out an image. All of this information was scattered and not necessarily connected to its source if I needed further information. In addition to organizing my own life, the site helps me feel connected to my friends’ wedding plans, do-it-yourself projects, and favorite new recipes—in a more efficient and enjoyable venue than Facebook provides.

I knew Pinterest had become an extension of myself when in one day I used it:

  • on my phone to show the hair stylist a celebrity haircut I had pinned
  • on my Nook Color to pull up a healthy recipe for dinner
  • on my laptop to show my husband decorating ideas I had gathered

Does Pinterest Have a Place in Education?

While I am always eager to explore the potentials of a mainstream technology for effective use in education, I’m not yet convinced that Pinterest is a good fit, but hope to be proven wrong. Certainly for design-related coursework, or maybe a nutrition course where recipe-gathering is appropriate, Pinterest could be a natural organization solution. I am interested to know if educators are finding meaningful uses with their students, or perhaps in presenting content. I once had similar doubts about Twitter and Facebook for use in education and have since seen examples where these mainstream technologies were leveraged effectively. The way Pinterest allows users to easily connect with others who have similar passions and interests could have a place in developing professional learning networks, especially for those in creative fields. For now I will keep up my own pinning and watch to see how the increasing consumption and sharing of visual information is addressed in the education sector.