The University of St. Thomas’ Digital Learning Success Team’s soft launch of their Digital Accessibility Lab in December, will mark its next phase in expanding digital accessibility.
Located in O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, the lab will further teach students and faculty about digital accessibility and ways they can start to create more inclusive digital content, learn about assistive technologies, and give input on the lab.
“In a nutshell, a space where we can offer training, consultation, live learning, and it’s really just the new support that people are looking for in terms of accessibility,” Khupe said.
Jessica Khupe, a graduate student and the team’s digital accessibility content assistant, represents digital accessibility on campus since the team began working on alternative formats.
Alternative formats convert course materials into formats including PDF, immersive reader, e-book, audio format, and optical character recognition format. On Canvas, it can be accessed through the blue circular symbol next to specific assignments.
“Where this whole initiative started, was two summers ago when the school launched Yuja Panamera,” Khupe said. Yuja Panamera is a learning management system that allows access to alternative formats.
The Digital Learning Success Team works under the Digital Accessibility Service Team at St. Thomas. From multiple university departments, such as marketing and disability resources, along with stellar student employees, this team works to make PowerPoints and additional class resources accessible, and drive new accessibility efforts.
Through the Digital Learning Success Team at St. Thomas, studying online provides more for students’ learning.
Many textbooks used by St. Thomas are online, along with many additional readings. While online course materials are more accessible, they may not be best for learning. A review of Dynamic reading in a digital age: new insights on cognition, published in volume 28 of
Trends in Cognitive Science, has found that when reading online, comprehension is less developed and we understand less than if we read on paper.
“There’s this power in having different formats to learn, because you’re involving more of your senses,” Khupe said. “You’re more engaged with the content because you’re listening, you’re reading, you’re following along.”
With the immersive reader format, Khupe said students can highlight nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Students can also search up words, change text size and font and use line focus. It can be catered to each student’s needs. Smartbooks are similarly interactive, ensuring that learning is still benefitted from reading online textbooks.
“The most popular ones amongst students were the audio podcast and then the immersive reader…PDF too,” Rhumani Ghimire said, the team’s digital learning and access facilitator.
Khupe said an underused format is optical character recognition, or OCR, which gives students information in text based format.
“The challenge with that is that the photo scans that are being uploaded into the system, if they are of a poor quality, OCR won’t be able to depict those characters,” Khupe said.
Content such as this that the team is tasked with remediating is most often received through the disability resources office, but Khupe assures students that the alternative formats are for everyone.
“We see it being used throughout everyone because they just have the accessibility needs, and then also the content that is put in by faculty is not, like, the best accessibility standards,” Khupe said.
In addition to receiving course content that isn’t digital or accessible to begin with, another challenge of the team is general awareness of alternative formats.
Khupe said this realization sparked her team’s outreach campaign, which began this semester where members of the team stop by classes and give a short talk and poll on alternative formats.
Khupe has since reported an increase in downloaded alternative formats from 3,194 in September to 4,075 in October.
“Then students were like ‘Oh well, I didn’t know about this. This is so helpful. I have class content that I have to read so much but this makes my life so much easier now,’” Ghimire said.
According to Khupe, students interested in learning more about digital accessibility could come into the lab with a certain topic in mind, and the team would teach them about alternative formats which enables them to learn more.
“We envision the digital accessibility lab to be the home base for all things accessibility, but with a focus on actual practical learning,” Khupe said.
Through their efforts, online learning doesn’t mean losing core comprehension and study skills.
“We encourage people to play around with all formats so they can be familiarized with that and discover what really works best for them,” Khupe said. “We want to be able to help students study better.”
Leila Montoya can be reached at mont1761@stthomas.edu.
