Standard 5

Accessibility for all learners

The online course is accessible and easy to use for all learners.

Checklist Items

5A - The course meets accessibility requirements.
5A.1 - All text-based course materials are accessible and readable by assistive technologies.

Plain, alphanumeric text is the most compatible, most accessible way to convey information to your students. If given plain text, students can change the font size or typeface to make the text more readable or have a computer read the text aloud. Giving students control over the text can help them to make it suit their needs and eliminate barriers to learning. You might be surprised to learn how much text in your course isn’t accessible or readable by assistive technologies, however. Watch out for wavy scans of photocopied book chapters, formula pages that you’ve handwritten instead of typed, and infographics and other images that include a picture of text instead of text itself. Have you ever struggled with a PDF that you could read but that became inaccurate, badly formatted, or nonexistent if you tried to copy and paste from it? You have experienced firsthand that it is easier to start with an accessible document than to try to make it accessible after the fact. Making sure that your text-based course materials are accessible also makes them searchable and benefits you and all of your students regardless of their unique situations.

Resources

  • iCollege Now – This page on accessibility and universal design also includes information about iCollege’s accessibility checker and the ReadSpeaker text-to-speech system that’s integrated into iCollege
  • GSU Help Desk – Ally in iCollege
  • GSU CETLOE – Guide to ReadSpeaker, including webReader and docReader
  • Adobe – Use Adobe Acrobat’s built-in accessibility checker to make more accessible PDFs.
  • Microsoft Office – Use the accessibility checker built into Word, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft software to produce more accessible documents. 
  • OSCQR #34 – “Text content is available in an easily accessed format, preferably HTML. All text content is readable by assistive technology, including a PDF or any text contained in an image.”
  • OSCQR #36 – “Text, graphics, and images are understandable when viewed without color. Text should be used as a primary method for delivering information.
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “The course design facilitates readability.”
  • Quality Matters 8.3 – “The course provides accessible text and images in files, documents, LMS pages, and web pages to meet the needs of diverse learners.”

Examples

This screenshot shows some of the ways students can customize text formatting in iCollege content pages. Students can select fonts such as Open Sans, Times New Roman, or Open Dyslexic to match their preferences and needs. This menu also allows them to adjust the volume and reading speed of the integrated text-to-speech system.

This screenshot shows student options for downloading an iCollege page or file in various file formats. These options include formats for ereader devices as well as electronic braille displays and audio players. Using accessible text in your course creates options for students who use assistive technologies as well as students who might have intermittent Internet access or simply benefit from accessing materials in another format.

5A.2 - An accessible, text-based alternative accompanies all non-text elements.

Multimedia engages multiple senses, but your students might experience the world differently than you or their classmates do. If you embed an image in an iCollege content page or in a document you distribute digitally to your students, be sure to include alternative text for the image. This alt text is a written description of the image that indicates the details you want your student to notice. Most students won’t ever be aware of alt text, but, for a student using screen reader software, alt text makes the difference between an inclusive, functional learning experience and one with a frustrating, gaping hole. Likewise, providing transcriptions and/or captions enables students the flexibility they might need to access the learning experience you’ve designed for them. Transcripts and captions are also easier to search than a spoken recording, so including a text-based alternative can help students who want to review what you said or didn’t understand what you said.

Resources

Examples

In this screenshot, I’ve inserted an image into an iCollege content page by using the Insert Image button. After selecting an image from my hard drive and uploading it to iCollege, I am prompted to provide alt text for the image. Although the prompt says the alt text “should convey the same information as the image,” note that iCollege limits alt text to 200 characters. Some screen reader software will only read about 150 characters aloud in alt text. For this reason, you should keep your alt text short and efficient. If there are complex details in an image that you want a student to understand, discuss those details in a paragraph accompanying the image in the body of your page. That way, all students, including students using screen reading software, will benefit from your commentary.

Some images do not contribute meaningfully to the content of your page. Aesthetic elements such as horizontal bars or abstract section markers might create a more pleasing and hospitable experience for some students, but students using screen readers can navigate the page by heading sections and do not benefit from repeated interruptions of the software noting a decorative element. In these cases, select “This image is decorative.” iCollege will then insert alt=”” into the image’s HTML code, which will tell the screen reading software that the image can be safely skipped. This empty alt text tells the software that there is intentionally no alt text and that the content creator did not simply neglect to add all text for something that could be important.

This screenshot shows the HTML code for an iCollege content page. The highlighted code is the alt text for an image. Screen reader software will say “An illustration of a captive experimental design to test cooperation in capuchin monkeys.” The student will then know that the image is simply an illustration of the experimental described in the previous paragraph and not additional content. Note also the identical title text immediately following the highlighted alt text. Title text is the text that appears when a student’s mouse hovers over an image. When you insert an image into an iCollege content page and provide alt text as prompted, iCollege automatically uses that same text as additional title text. Not all authoring software does this, however; alt text and title text are independent things and can be different from one another. A webpage or textbook might have title text but no alt text or alt text but no title text. Only alt text is required by screen reader software.

 

5A.3 - All videos in the course are accurately captioned.

Traditional captioning methods can be expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming, but machine-generated captioning uses voice recognition technology to transcribe your voice and synchronize the text on the screen with your speech. Unfortunately, automated captioning still has a lot of room for improvement, and background noise, a poor microphone, or even an accent or a difficult word can turn your lecture into gibberish. Taking a couple of minutes to review and correct the captions for your video will ensure your video is accessible to students. Furthermore, it might save you some embarrassment from representing your work with an inaccurately or inappropriately captioned video.

Resources

Examples

With video, the automated captioning made several mistakes. Transcribing “their old traits” as “ there all traits” would be confusing and unhelpful to students relying on the captions to follow along with a video. Even worse, however, the computer misidentified the Latin word Homo heidelbergensis as a slur and replaced part of the name with asterisks (not shown). Although the computer’s intentions were good, in this case its efforts were unnecessary and confusing. Fortunately, the caption could be corrected before the video was shown to students.

5B - Formatting and layout promote clarity and usability.

Navigating an online course can be difficult, but you can help your students by using a clear, consistent module design throughout the semester. Provide descriptive titles instead of generic titles like “HW1” or “Lecture 2,” and also use those descriptive titles in the gradebook. Organize resources by when they’re needed (such as in weekly modules or chapter units) instead of by resource type (all homework assignments, all lectures, all readings, etc.). Establishing routine structure in your online course helps your students to spend less time figuring out what they need to access and do in a given week and more time focused on learning.

Within individual HTML content pages, use heading levels to designate different sections of your text. Do not skip heading levels or use heading levels as a formatting shortcut. Screen reading software uses heading levels to navigate a page, and skipping heading levels or using heading levels erratically can make your content organization incomprehensible to students using screen reader software. If you like the text styling of Heading 3, please recreate that styling using the text editor tools, not the heading function. Likewise, watch out for distracting visual elements or hard-to-read text. Too much color coding in an assignment calendar, for example, can be distracting, low-contrast, or tedious to maintain while offering minimal benefit to students.

Resources

  • PennState Accessibility — Guide to using headings and subheadings
  • PennState Accessibility — Guide to legibility, including font formatting, color combinations, and contrast
  • GSU Help Desk – Ally in iCollege
  • OSCQR #16–28 — Standards for design and layout in online courses
  • Quality Matters 8.1 – “Course navigation facilitates ease of use.”
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “The course design facilitates readability.”

Examples

This example demonstrates heading levels in an iCollege content page. This page uses two heading levels: Level 1 (red text) for the page title and Level 2 (teal text) for next-level subsections within the page. In the screenshot, the cursor is in the Level 2 text “Warm-up Activity: Watch Music Video”, so the text formatting options at the top of the editor show “H2 – Heading 2.” After the music video section, there’s another Level 2 section containing a video lecture. These two sections are peers under the Level 1 (page-level) heading of “Political Anthropology: Culture and Power,” so they’re both Level 2, like equal-importance items in a bulleted list. If I wanted to create a subsection in either of these parts of the page, I could then use a Level 3 heading. The headings get smaller and less dramatic at each nested level, as they would in a text book. Organizing information in this way helps students to understand relationships between different parts of the presented content.

recommendations

R - 5.1

Text is available in an easily accessed format, preferably HTML.

HTML is a computer language designed for displaying documents in a web browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Your students access iCollege through web browsers, so offering course content in HTML reduces the number of technology layers between them and you. The basic content pages in iCollege are written in HTML, so you don’t need to know how to code to take advantage of iCollege’s accessibility features, such as adjustable fonts and a read-aloud function. If you do use other text formats, such as a Word document for homework or a PDF document for readings, make sure that the text is accessible. Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat both have built-in accessibility checkers to help you identify issues. It’s easier to design with accessibility in mind than to try to quickly make something accessible after a student encounters a problem. If at all possible, text should be encoded as text and not presented as images of text, which cannot be read by screen reader software. For example, equations and other non-prose text should be presented using the iCollege equation editor or LaTeX instead of a picture.

Resources

  • GSU Help Desk – Ally in iCollege
  • PennState Accessibility – Math and STEM Content
  • OSCQR #34 – “Text content is available in an easily accessed format, preferably HTML. All text content is readable by assistive technology, including a PDF or any text contained in an image.”
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “The course design facilitates readability.”
  • Quality Matters 8.3 – “The course provides accessible text and images in files, documents, LMS pages, and web pages to meet the needs of diverse learners.”
R - 5.2

Students are given ample notice of any timed work or assessments up front and have the information and contacts they need to request accommodations in advance.

Timed work and assessments can be additionally difficult for students with certain types of disabilities or requirements, such as using screen reader or magnification software. Letting students know in advance about timed work and assessments helps students to prepare for these situations and, if necessary, make appropriate arrangements with you and accessibility services. Being transparent about potentially problematic situations is a way you can proactively support accessibility in your classroom.

Resources

  • GSU Access & Accommodations Center
  • OSCQR #19 – “Instructions are provided and well written.”
  • Quality Matters 5.4 – “The requirements for learner interaction are clearly stated.”
  • Quality Matters 7.2 – “Course instructions articulate or link to the institution’s accessibility policies and services.”
  • Quality Matters 8.6 – “Vendor accessibility statements are provided for all technologies required in the course.”
R - 5.3

Content item titles are descriptive.

In the face-to-face classroom, you provide an organizing structure and lead the class through different sections of activities and content. You understand all the pieces of your course and how those pieces fit together. Clearly labeling content items in iCollege brings that same organization to your online course. Students can plan their studying better if they can easily see that something will be a video or a reading, for example. Provide descriptive titles instead of generic titles like “HW1” or “Lecture 2,” and also use those descriptive titles in the gradebook. Descriptive titles help students to navigate the many topics of your course and to think about which topics they do or don’t understand, and it makes the course easier for students to discuss with each other and with you.

Resources

  • Quality Matters 8.1 – “Course navigation facilitates ease of use.”
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “The course design facilitates readability.”

Examples

In this example, the different parts of an iCollege module have been given descriptive titles. Students know they’ll need about fifteen minutes to complete the first item on the list and that they’ll need earphones or a quiet environment because it is a video. A student who can’t watch a video at a given moment might instead skip ahead to a reading assignment or review an assignment prompt. Providing descriptive titles helps students to navigate and plan their studies in your course.

R - 5.4

Content item descriptions assist with navigation and help make the flow of the course transparent.

Where should students begin each module? Is there something they should read or do before completing an assessment? Students can work linearly through a module, but adding signposts to the content item descriptions will help them to plan their work and to make connections between different parts of the class. This text can be a short, simple way to help students to stay focused on learning your subject instead of getting lost in your course. 

Resources

  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
  • Quality Matters 8.1 – “Course navigation facilitates ease of use.”
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “The course design facilitates readability.”

Examples

In this example, the content items have descriptions that tell students what role this item plays in the whole module. Note that these descriptions don’t appear for submodule items if you’re viewing the module. If you view the submodule instead, however, then the descriptions become visible.

R - 5.5

Instructions and expectations for all learning activities and assessments are worded and formatted consistently.

Do you have regularly occurring assessments, such as quizzes or homework activities, that use essentially the same format from unit to unit? Write the instructions once and reuse it! Recycle and adapt a set of clear, well-written instructions whenever you repeat that assignment type or if there are similarities between assignments or activities. Using boilerplate language saves you time and effort while ensuring that your students receive the best version of your instructions every time. This regularity helps your students to focus on completing their best work rather than interpreting changing instructions.

Resources

  • OSCQR #19 – “Instructions are provided and well written.”
  • Quality Matters 3.3 – “Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of learners’ work, and their connection to the course grading policy is clearly defined.”
  • Quality Matters 5.4 – “The requirements for learner interaction are clearly stated.”

Examples

Although some instructions will probably be unique to the assignment, others can be reused throughout the course. Reusing instruction language where possible saves you time and helps your students to focus on doing the learning activity instead of parsing slightly different instructions each time. By using a final paragraph like the one shown in the example above, this sociology instructor can provide extraordinary support for students in this activity, and these instructions can be easily pasted into and set up in any discussion the instructor uses in any class that shares a similar design.

R - 5.6

All learning activities and assessments include the purpose of the activity, connection to course goals and SLOs, specific tasks students need to complete, important dates, time-to-complete estimates, and evaluation criteria, as well as any required tools or skills and related support resources.

This list might seem long, but each of these items will improve the transparency and effectiveness of your activities and assessments. You understand why you assign the things you do, but making those connections clear to your students will make their learning experiences more meaningful. Your language models to students not only connections between different content areas but connections between their studies 

Resources

  • OSCQR #6 – “Course provides access to learner success resources (technical help, orientation, tutoring).”
  • OSCQR #11 – “Requisite skills for using technology tools (websites, software, and hardware) are clearly stated and supported with resources.”
  • OSCQR #12 – “Technical skills required for participation in course learning activities scaffold in a timely manner (orientation, practice, and application – where appropriate).”
  • OSCQR #19 – “Instructions are provided and well written.”
  • Quality Matters 2.3 – “Learning objectives or competencies are stated clearly, are written from the learner’s perspective, and are prominently located in the course.”
  • Quality Matters 2.4 – “The relationship between learning objectives or competencies and learning activities is clearly stated.”
  • Quality Matters 3.3 – “Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of learners’ work, and their connection to the course grading policy is clearly defined.”
  • Quality Matters 4.1 – “The instructional materials contribute to the achievement of the stated learning objectives or competencies.”
  • Quality Matters 4.2 – “The relationship between the use of instructional materials in the course and completing learning activities is clearly explained.”
  • Quality Matters 5.1 – “The learning activities promote the achievement of the stated learning objectives or competencies.”
  • Quality Matters 5.4 – “The requirements for learner interaction are clearly stated.”
  • Quality Matters 6.1 – “The tools used in the course support the learning objectives or competencies.”
R - 5.7

Module description fields present the module’s purpose (including course goals and SLO), outline tasks students will be performing, share due dates and evaluation criteria, offer strategies for completion, and list required tools and skills as well as related support resources.

Module description fields are the first thing your students see when they access a module, and they’re one good place to centralize important information about the module. You can also use to-do/checklist pages, module introduction pages, and iCollege tools such as the course calendar and Intelligent Agents to help students stay organized in your course. You probably shared course goal and student learning outcomes at the beginning of the course, but take the opportunity to draw more direct connections to the current module and the activities students will be completing in this module. Important information is worth repeating, so keep it close by to when and where students will need it.

Resources

  • OSCQR #6 – “Course provides access to learner success resources (technical help, orientation, tutoring).”
  • OSCQR #11 – “Requisite skills for using technology tools (websites, software, and hardware) are clearly stated and supported with resources.”
  • OSCQR #12 – “Technical skills required for participation in course learning activities scaffold in a timely manner (orientation, practice, and application – where appropriate).”
  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
  • OSCQR #19 – “Instructions are provided and well written.
  • Quality Matters 2.3 – “Learning objectives or competencies are stated clearly, are written from the learner’s perspective, and are prominently located in the course.
  • Quality Matters 2.4 – “The relationship between learning objectives or competencies and learning activities is clearly stated.
  • Quality Matters 3.3 – “Specific and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of learners’ work, and their connection to the course grading policy is clearly defined.
  • Quality Matters 4.1 – “The instructional materials contribute to the achievement of the stated learning objectives or competencies.
  • Quality Matters 4.2 – “The relationship between the use of instructional materials in the course and completing learning activities is clearly explained.
  • Quality Matters 5.1 – “The learning activities promote the achievement of the stated learning objectives or competencies.
  • Quality Matters 5.4 – “The requirements for learner interaction are clearly stated.
  • Quality Matters 6.1 – “The tools used in the course support the learning objectives or competencies.
  • Quality Matters 7.1 – “The course instructions articulate or link to a clear description of the technical support offered and how to obtain it.
  • Quality Matters 7.2 – “Course instructions articulate or link to the institution’s accessibility policies and services.”
  • Quality Matters 7.3 – “Course instructions articulate or link to the institution’s academic support services and resources that can help learners to succeed in the course.”
  • Quality Matters 7.4 – “Course instructions articulate or link to the institution’s student services and resources that can help learners succeed.”
R - 5.8

Use of tables is minimized.

Tables can be one of the most convenient ways to lay out information on a page, but they can also be one of the least accessible parts of your documents. You can use tables, but make sure they’re being used for an appropriate purpose, such as looking up specific information instead of reading all the presented information. Don’t use tables to control the layout of a web page if you can avoid it, and make sure that your table has an appropriately labeled header row that will repeat across pages of a document if needed.

Resources

  • PennState Accessibility — Guide to Tables
  • Microsoft Word – How to make properly formatted, more accessible tables in Word
  • Microsoft Office – Use the accessibility checker built into Word, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft software to produce more accessible documents. 
  • Adobe – Use Adobe Acrobat’s built-in accessibility checker to make more accessible PDFs.
  • OSCQR #24–26 – Standards for using tables in online courses
  • Quality Matters 8.3 – “The course provides accessible text and images in files, documents, LMS pages, and web pages to meet the needs of diverse learners.”

Examples

In this screenshot, I’ve selected the “Repeat as header row at the top of each page” option for the first row of this table. This configuration ensures that readers will still be able to easily use the table even if the table itself becomes divided across multiple pages.

This screenshot shows a table that should be a numbered list in HTML instead of a table. Note the lack of a header row, which can make navigation difficult for screen reading software. Unfortunately, technical problems with the CSS caused formatting in the numbered list to go haywire when the Latin names were italicized. As a compromise, a table was used to simulate the desired formatting, but in most cases this kind of pseudo-table should be avoided if possible.

R - 5.9

All text is free of spelling and grammatical errors.

In an online course, your text is you or at least a major part of the self you present to your students. Proofing your text against spelling and grammatical errors reflects positively on your professionalism and the care with which you are teaching the course. Even more importantly, error-free text is more accessible text. A typo might make the difference between screen reader software recognizing a difficult word and the software mispronouncing the word beyond recognition. 

Resources

  • OSCQR #20 – “Course is free of grammatical and spelling errors.”
  • Quality Matters 8.2 – “Course design facilitates readability.”

Examples

In this example, the word processing software has underlined three spelling errors in red. The software’s Read Aloud feature pronounces the first misspelled word “several” unintelligibly.

R - 5.10

Audio elements are clear and easy to understand, at a consistent level, free of pops and clicks, and synced with video, where applicable.

Students will watch a blurry or drab video, but they won’t listen to one whose audio is grating or difficult to understand. If you’re curating existing multimedia, make sure that the audio won’t be an obstacle to student understanding. It’s better to not use any multimedia than to use multimedia that will actively impede learning. Unnecessary echoes, pops, or other noise problems can negatively impact students in many different situations, and noise can also reduce the effectiveness of Kaltura’s automatic captioning software. If you’re making a video yourself, be sure to follow CETLOE’s tips in the “How to Shoot Video in Your Home or Office” resource to improve the quality of your recorded audio. Borrowing or getting a better microphone can be an easy, inexpensive way to upgrade your connection to your students.

Resources

  • CETLOE How to Shoot Video in Your Home or Office” – This infographic includes specific advice on capturing high-quality audio.
  • OSCQR #15 – “Any technology tools meet accessibility standards.”
  • Quality Matters 8.5 – “Course multimedia facilitate ease of use.”
R - 5.11

Visual elements — text, graphics, animations, video, AR/VR/XR, etc. — are rendered clearly, easy to understand, and are accessible or have an accessible alternative where accessibility would not be possible.

Including text-based alternatives to non-text elements is an essential step towards making your course as accessible as it can be, but you can go further by making sure that all parts of your course are as accessible as possible. Students might use a combination of modalities to access the resource instead of choosing either multimedia or text, and using clear, well-designed multimedia helps to make that piece more accessible to people with a wide range of abilities.

Resources

  • OSCQR #15 – “Any technology tools meet accessibility standards.”
R - 5.12

The course is delivered via the iCollege digital learning environment.

Every course taught at Georgia State University is different, but iCollege, our learning management system (LMS), is one of the few tools by nearly every student in nearly every course. Using iCollege as the online home for your course encourages an economy of scale that benefits you and your students. Reducing cognitive overhead helps everyone stay focused on learning instead of struggling to keep track of many different websites, each with their own passwords and ways of doing things. Many textbook publishers and learning tools can be integrated into iCollege, and you can still link to resources from the GSU library and other sites. Using a well-maintained iCollege site provides students with a well-supported, accessible hub for learning instead of burdening them with additional obstacles.

Resources

  • OSCQR #6 – “Course provides access to learner success resources (technical help, orientation, tutoring).”
  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”

Examples

This example shows a simple Overview page for a course in iCollege. Students will might be familiar with iCollege from another course, but you can still help students by highlighting the different resources our university offers to help them use the iCollege system.

R - 5.13

Course Content Modules organize learning experiences for students.

Content modules tell a story about your course, and that story helps students to follow along. It might seem logical to group your course materials by type, with a folder for homework assignments, a folder for videos, a folder for discussions, etc., but that organization misses an opportunity to tell a more focused story about your students and the work they’re doing from week to week. Keeping together the pieces of your course that students will need in a given module creates spatial and temporal contiguity in your course design. Using weekly or unit-based content modules will help your students to better understand the course as an exploration of connected subjects rather than a series of numbered assessments.

Resources

  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.14

Course Content Modules share a common structure and sequence of activities.

To succeed, students must navigate their competing responsibilities across multiple courses. Each course has different requirements, rhythms, and ways of interacting with students. You can help your students to focus on learning in your course by reducing how much they have to focus on the tools you use to reach them. Your course will vary from week to week, but you can still create consistency in how you tell students what they need to read, watch, or do to complete that week’s module. How will you introduce the module’s objectives and to-do list? How will you get the students warmed up, experiencing content, and demonstrating their learning? How will you wrap up the module and get students ready to make connections to the next topic? Maintaining a similar flow from week to week supports your role as the facilitator of your course even if you’re not standing at the front of a physical classroom.

Resources

  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.15

iCollege’s Daylight theme, EduBlogs webpages, or PressBooks is used as a style template.

These tools give you great control over the formatting of your text-based content, but those wide-open options can be overwhelming and treacherous. These updated style templates give your content a clean, professional look, and they’ve already been vetted for accessibility and readability. You can still customize your course as you like, but we highly recommend that you use these style templates as a starting point. You’ll save yourself time and effort while presenting an aesthetically pleasing learning experience to your students. 

Resources

  • iCollegeNow — Scroll down for instructions on setting up the Daylight template.
  • U of Waterloo UXDL Honeycomb — “How do we create DESIRABLE online learning experiences?”
  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.16

iCollege’s default navigation and layout are used, promoting consistency across courses and facilitating support.

You might have received conflicting information in the past about customizing the iCollege Navbar. You can remove or rearrange parts of the navigation part to direct your student’s attention and remove distractions, but this customization comes at another cost. The more students encounter the default navigation layout in their courses, the more confusing and distracting it becomes when one course customizes the layout. Using the default navigation settings also helps students who seek documentation or live help for using iCollege. Customizing the navbar for your class offers some benefits, but these benefits aren’t worth your effort to set up, your students’ efforts to adjust to, and the technology staff’s efforts to support a custom layout.

Resources

  • OSCQR #13 – “Frequently used technology tools are easily accessed. Any tools not being utilized are removed from the course menu.”
  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.17

Multimedia are all made available and usable within the iCollege digital learning environment.

Centralizing your course in iCollege gives your students’ the benefits of iCollege’s accessibility features as well as its support resources and staff. Before including a link that will send students away from iCollege, consider whether you can integrate the external resource into the iCollege environment. If a document is hosted on another website, consider whether you might download it and host it yourself in iCollege (with proper attribution) to ensure that your course design remains stable long term. YouTube videos can be embedded in iCollege content pages or even imported into Kaltura, which gives you access to Kaltura’s accessibility features as well as video quizzing options and student engagement statistics. Some resources can’t be integrated into iCollege, but keeping the learning experience as centralized as possible will help you, your students, and technology support staff.

Resources

  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.18

Where external learning technologies (such as textbook platforms) are used, iCollege remains the course’s organizing hub, coordinating learning activities and course communications.

For some courses, the bulk of your content and even your assessments might be incorporated into a system outside of iCollege, such as a textbook or courseware from a higher ed publisher. In these cases, be particularly alert to ways that you can use iCollege to create a supportive learning community for you students. You and your course are more than an access point to a textbook, and you have more to offer your students than a link to the textbook website and a copy of the syllabus. You can use iCollege to support greater interaction with your students and between your students, and you can offer additional context, personalized support, and emotional and intellectual interest to the course. Publisher courseware offers wide-ranging and increasingly sophisticated features, but no courseware by itself is an adequate substitute for the comprehensive learning experience you can create for your students.

Resources

  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
R - 5.19

Publisher content is integrated into iCollege and is placed in the correct sequence in the iCollege Content Tool. If “deep linking” to specific publisher content is not possible, instructions for how to access the specific content are provided in iCollege, within the regular flow of the iCollege content.

Deep linking means providing links that take students directly to the intended content. For example, if you’re using an ebook accessed online through the USG’s Galileo system, you can send students directly to the chapter or page you want them to read instead of sending them to the book’s entry in a database. Many textbook publishers have iCollege integrations that allow students to access specific parts of the textbook through iCollege. Keeping navigation as simple and direct as possible keeps students focused on learning rather than focused on navigating multiple websites. Making it easy to quickly access relevant content reduces barriers for students who might have difficulty navigating a site.  If deep linking is not possible, keep in mind that the added complexity might discourage students from accessing the textbook more than absolutely necessary, and students will need additional support to keep the technology from being an obstacle to learning.

Resources

  • GSU ServiceNow – Add External Learning Tools to Your iCollege Course
  • GSU CETLOE – Films on Demand
  • GSU CETLOE – EBSCO Curriculum Builder
  • GSU CETLOE – Learning Technology Evaluation Toolkit
  • GSU CETLOE – Sponsoring a new iCollege or Canvas tool integration
  • OSCQR #16  – “A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).”
  • OSCQR #19 – “Instructions are provided and well written.”
R - 5.20

Selection of learning technologies balances the affordances of the tool with training, support, and cognitive load demands.

Learning technology is a means to an end, and tools shouldn’t compete with assessments and content for student attention. If you’re excited about a tool that requires some training for students to engage deeply with it, great! Design your course to incorporate the tool regularly into your students’ experience, and be sure to give them opportunities and support for practicing the tool. If a neat but inessential technology is tripping up students, consider creating a similar activity with simpler, more accessible, or better supported technology. Your pedagogy is bigger than the technology you use, but your pedagogy and your technology need to cooperate to create the learning experience you imagine for your students.

Resources

  • OSCQR #11 – “Requisite skills for using technology tools (websites, software, and hardware) are clearly stated and supported with resources.”
  • OSCQR #12 – “Technical skills required for participation in course learning activities scaffold in a timely manner (orientation, practice, and application – where appropriate).”
  • OSCQR #15 – “Any technology tools meet accessibility standards.”