Accessibility

As I review the various pages of my course, I am working to make sure everything is accessible. I went to a great workshop on accessibility in Canvas at the Washington Canvas Users Group conference in March.  The presenter, Terrill Thompson from the UW, said there were 5 key things that faculty could do to make courses accessible. One main one was to use headings instead of changing font sizes for emphasis and headers (here are my notes from that session). This seems pretty easy to do, I just have never really bothered to do it. So, as I'm revising my pages, I'm making sure everything uses headers.

I'm pretty good at using Alt Tags to identify images, but I'm trying to be more descriptive, not just describing the image, but explaining why I bothered to put the image. For example, instead of just saying "cat", I might say, "image of a cat illustrating how much people like to nap."  Now, if you were visually impaired, which one would be more useful? Exactly!

Also, and most painful for spontaneous me, I'm trying to write scripts for all of my videos. I put the script in each of the PowerPoint slides or write the script with screen shots to serve as an alternative to captioning, which is just too time consuming for me to tackle. From a pedagogical perspective, the hearing impaired person is still getting the content and I insert cues to note where slides or screens change.

Now, when I am less than one week out from the start of the quarter, this can seem like a bit much. But really, when am I ever going to have adequate time to do this? Never. So, now is as good a time as any. Here's to more accessible courses.



Resources:

• Accessibility in Canvas by Terrill Thompson – a 1 hour Tegrity Recording https://tegr.it/y/12ng3
• If you don't have an hour, here are my somewhat useful notes from the session 
• If you didn't make it to the Washington Canvas Users Group conference, it was really, really good. Fortunately, every session was recorded in Tegrity (thanks Tacoma Community College!!) Here is the recordings page. 

If you want to learn more about Gamification. . .

If you want to learn more about gamification, there is a seminar and a related MOOC coming up in a couple of weeks. I signed up - maybe I'll "see" you there. Thanks to the ITC Network for these announcements.
************************************

Free Webinar: Game Elements for Learning (GE4L)

June 26, 2013 - 2:00-3:00 p.m. eastern time

https://events-na3.adobeconnect.com/content/connect/c1/1002564123/en/events/event/shared/default_template/event_landing.html?sco-id=1185107464&_charset_=utf-8

What if you could build a course as a game, using native LMS features? What exactly are game elements for learning? How can the elements be applied to teaching? Do they add value to learning?

To answer these questions, Academic Partnerships Faculty eCommons presents a micro-MOOC, Game Elements for Learning (GE4L). Kicking things off is a free live webinar, hosted by Kenneth C. (Casey) Green of The Campus Computing Project, who will moderate a lively conversation with Dr. Gerol Petruzella, Coordinator of Academic Technology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Dr. Petruzella will discuss his experience designing, building, and teaching an introductory philosophy course as "Dungeons & Discourse," a quest-based roleplaying game.  This webinar is part of a professional development micro-MOOC, Game Elements for Learning (GE4L). GE4L introduces participants to game elements for teaching and learning through sharing, game elements, discussion, and participation in self-selected methods. For more information about the micro-MOOC, visit http://facultyecommons.org/game-elements-for-learning-ge4l-july-1-29-2013/

 

MOOC - Game Elements for Learning

from Academic Partnerships

July 1, 2013 to July 29, 2013

Cost per student: Free

https://www.canvas.net/courses/game-elements-for-learning

Gamification is the integration of game elements into a non-game setting — such as building online communities, education and outreach, or building educational apps. When used meaningfully, game elements can enhance the learner’s experience in an online course. In this professional development MOOC, you will learn how to utilize common game elements like collecting points or resources, quests, avatars, levels, social graphs to engage online students. The course covers the following topics: Introduction to Gamifying Your Course, Game Thinking and Dynamics, Game Elements, and Applying Gamification to your Course.

• Provides video lectures
• Provides opportunities to interact with the instructor or students
• Uses discussion forums
• Contains external social networking participation or elements
• You will not be given a final grade in this course
• Intended for educators or professionals

Gamifying my class - Part 1

The only really new thing I'm going to try this summer is to gamify my class. Gamification is basically making elements of your class like a game as a way to get students to spend more time with the course material and to motivate them to do things they might not otherwise have done. It is also a non-grade way of rewarding students. Plus, it makes learning fun.

Now, I should confess that I am not a gamer. I don't play Angry Birds, I don't play Words with Friends, I never played Farmville. It's not that I have anything against gaming, it is just that, on the rare occasions that I have a few spare moments, gaming is not what pops to the top of my list of things to do. I have, however, watched my son and husband and their huge devotion to games. I see other people putting a lot of energy into earning points and moving up levels. I am fairly convinced that this will motivate at least some of my students to engage in class more than they otherwise might have.

So, step one was to read up on simple ways to gamify a class. I included some of the articles I read below. I've decided to have a badge based system, where students can do three kinds of tasks to earn badges, similar to a merit badge that one might earn in the Boy Scouts. Here are the three kinds of tasks, as suggested in A Teacher's Guide to using Badges in the Classroom by Keith Sorensen:

• Specific badges - basic tasks aligned to course outcomes. I'm thinking thinks like mastering the basics of Canvas, making substantive discussion posts on 5 days during a week, adding a website review to our course resources and the like.
• Random targets - random tasks aligned to course outcomes. I'm thinking getting question #7 right on 3 quizzes in a row, finding a mystery icon that I hide somewhere in each module, etc.
• Challenging targets - really hard stuff. I'm thinking reaching 100 people with your service learning project, having a viewing of a class related movie attended by 50 people, etc.

Now, once one earns the badges, what then?   In Education Levels Up! – A noObs guide to Gamifying your Classroom , Mr. Daley suggests letting students level up, earn experience points, and earn rewards. This all sounds like a bit much to me. I'm thinking of having some basic rewards like, earn 3 badges, get a late pass, earn 10 badges, get to drop an assignment, earn every badge and your grade will  go up one grade point. Daley also suggests earning class dollars for spending on rewards. I'm also pondering that idea - let them earn points for each badge and the points can be used to buy the rewards - giving the students a bit more control.

The next thing is how to organize this. All of the articles I read recommended Class Badges. I signed up. It's pretty basic and it seems like if I went with anything more complex than adding up badges, it would be more work for me. I then checked the Canvas LTI page for something that would plug right into Canvas. I actually found a couple of options including Open Badges and BadgeStack.  I like the idea of Open Badges, as I saw a great presentation from them at the Open Education conference last fall. I'm going to check that out. I also like the idea of whatever I use hooking right up with Canvas. BadgeStack required working with their development team, not an option 2 weeks out from the start of the course.  I'm going to a pre-conference session at InstructureCon on LTI's, so I should be a pro by next week.

More later as I continue to investigate gamifying my class.

Lesson Planning

In my ideal mind, I plan classes months out, with great thought and time. In reality, it is usually rather rushed, very close to the start of the next quarter. I'm two weeks out now from the start of Summer Quarter on June 24. Next week I'll be at the national Canvas conference InstructureCon  in Utah for most of the week and probably not getting a lot done on this class, so I really need to do some serious work this week if I want to implement some of my new ideas.

Over the weekend, I worked on my lesson planning template. As you may know, I spent the last two quarters teaching in the Education School at Seattle U, a class called Adult Education Methods. The class really stressed the importance of lesson planning in order to implement important aspects of teaching like Universal Design and the Kolb learning cycle, which appeals to adult learners with concrete experiences. It also stressed the importance of summative and formative assessment and critical thinking.

My Global Studies really needs a complete revamp and building it upon carefully planned lessons seems like a good idea, rather than the random compilation of good ideas that it currently is. So, I'm crafting a lesson planing template that I think will work for me.

This week's goal is to write the lesson plan for each of the 8 modules and to set the visibility dates in my Canvas class. I'll also write to my students with my summer welcome letter to get them preparing for what is to come.

As always, if you see something in my materials that is useful to you, please feel free to use and modify.