Page 17 - Campus Technology, May/June 2018

ACCESSIBILITY
drill down to the class or the faculty member who may need help,” Olquin said.
There are still times when Ally can’t fix the problem with a document or when a course involves video content, so Chico has set up a support structure to help faculty mem- bers. “We assign instructors to a student assistant in our office who is their point of contact for anything they need,” Olquin said. “We enter a support ticket for open commu- nication and we will inventory your whole class for you. We tell them: ‘These seven items need further attention that your student assistant will work on, and these 15 items, which are mostly tagging images and giving them descrip- tions, we would like you to do and we will show you how to do that.’ That model has really worked well for us.”
Olquin said the Ally pilot has involved 50 faculty members and 150 classes so far and is now ready to expand to the rest of campus. “We are already scaling it really well,” he said. “We will ramp up to 200 classes and see how we do. Everything is on schedule for full release for fall 2018.” CSU has purchased a systemwide site license for Ally, so all 23 campuses will be rolling it out over the next several years. Chico and Cal State East Bay were the first two to go live.
Chico State also worked with software company Kaltura to inventory all video course content and set up a workflow to caption all of it. First, the video is sent into the Kaltura cloud, where it is auto-captioned using integrated transcrip-
tion service cielo24. Then it goes to captioners at CSU who fix up those auto-captions and push it right back into the LMS. “The faculty member would never know that it left their course,” Olquin said. “It all happens on the back end.”
Making Student-Created
Content Accessible
While many campuses are making prog-
ress with the accessibility of instructor-
created content, Wichita State University
(KS) is going a step further by tackling student- created content too.
In July 2016, WSU entered into an agreement with the National Federation of the Blind requiring that all content “created or used by a WSU department or professor in connection with any WSU course offering” be accessible by 2020. As they began to work on the implementation of that agreement, WSU accessibility officials realized “all content” includes student-generated content used for in- class presentations, including speeches, PowerPoints, vid- eos and training sessions.
“If students are evaluating each other’s speeches, those speeches need to be captioned,” explained Carolyn Speer, WSU’s manager of instructional design and access. “As we thought about content created for the student experience, we realized that we need to be work-
LiveScribe Echo Smartpen
ing on making that content accessible.”
Speer added that this effort should help students in their
presentations beyond higher education. “They are going to need to be able to create content in an accessible manner going forward no matter what industry they are in,” she said. “We can train them for future applications elsewhere.”
WSU is starting with an on-demand, online training course for faculty, staff and students, and developing a digital credential for students for completing that training. (The university already has a digital badge program with
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | May/June 2018