This 6-week challenge will help faculty focus on specific tasks to work on for your fall courses as we prepare for the possibility of different teaching modalities.  Each challenge is based on the TLTC’s simplified OSCQR (OPEN SUNY Course Quality Rubric) checklist. We hope that as you build your course, the checklist is helpful as some of the points are simple and mechanical and some are deeper and get to how a course can be designed and how students are evaluated. 

Focus: 

Simplified OSCQR 2.1: If course readings are in the red on Ally, faculty have reached out to the library to see if more accessible copies can be located. 

Challenge: 

Select a course you will be teaching in the fall and go through all of the files that are loaded into the Blackboard shell for that course.  Locate all course readings that were scanned from other locations (scans of book chapters, or articles, or other locations).  If there are articles, course readings and other published materials in the red, contact library electronic reserves (e-reserves@oneonta.edu) to determine if there is a more current source that can be provided in a more accessible version. Just as our understanding of accessibility has grown in the past few years, so has the library’s and the vendors and journals. Sometimes it is better to get a new, fresh copy that is accessible from the start than try to remediate an older PDF. 

For other course materials that need to be made accessible see the “How To Materials” section below.

Supporting Materials: 

• OSCQR Video Explanation for Accessibility Standards (1:46) (https://youtu.be/uPIdyuxAisY) 
• Faculty Perspective on Blackboard Ally (6:04) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqV2YSBOZ0E&feature=emb_title) 
• Student Perspective on Blackboard Ally (6:37) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5bInyKh_Y4&feature=emb_title) 

How To Materials: 

• Accessing Content Collection to see Ally score for all materials (4:21) (https://youtu.be/b3ljX7LZAfE) 
• Materials for how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro to remediate a PDF 
• Checklist for the Creation of Accessible Word Documents  

Join Us: 

• TLTC Summer Webinar series session: Creating Accessible Videos: How to create and share videos for Blackboard – Tuesday, June 30, 1-2pm, TLTC Summer Webinar Series Microsoft Teams area 
• Teaching Breakfast – All About Accessible Materials – Join us on Thursday, July 2, any time from 8:30-10:00am to talk about the creation of accessible materials for your course.  We will be meeting in the Teaching Breakfast Microsoft Team area 

Show us your great ideas! 

We will be using this space on the TLTC’s blog for you to share the work that you have done for this challenge if you are willing.  Leave a comment at the bottom of this post describing the work that you have done so that others can get ideas on techniques for making their course materials accessible.