What is your role at UBC, and how have you applied UDL to your work and approach?
Louise: I’m a lecturer in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and have been teaching at UBC since 2005. I specialize in teaching undergraduate geology and paleontology-related courses. One of the main pieces of my work is teaching hybrid courses, formerly called distance education. These courses are very intricate, and I’ve been co-designing them with various people since 2009. UDL principles are especially important in these contexts because there’s no instructor there to answer questions immediately as there would be during an in person course. For our Hybrid courses, students have to wait until one of the zoom help sessions or for replies on the Piazza Discussion Board. We try to get to these quickly but sometimes there is a delay of a few hours.
Sarah: I’m a Science Education Specialist in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, and I work in Skylight, which is the Faculty of Science’s centre for teaching and learning. My PhD and specialties are in volcanology, geochemistry, and petrology, but now I’m also working on pedagogy, helping faculty develop courses that are student-centered using evidence-based practices. I also chair the EDI committee in our department and sit on a few other EDI committees across UBC. I find equity to be an important part of having education be accessible. I incorporate UDL principles by working with lots of faculty on courses that they are developing.
Could you tell me more about the format of your course, EOSC 116, and your project to add alt text to figures? What motivated you to engage with the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your practice?
Louise: This course has a large enrolment of students from all faculties, and over the years we’ve had students who have faced difficulties in fully accessing the course materials. There’s one case that motivated me that comes to mind, where I had a student who was completely visually impaired take this class. Given that this course is about rocks and geological time, there’s a lot of having to visualize what was going on in the past and think about the dimensionalities of space and time, but for someone who is visually impaired and has never laid their eyes on a cliff of rocks before, that becomes a limiting factor. I had a lot of help from Marie Krbavac at CTLT, who grabbed onto this project with me. There was a long delay in getting the student somebody to help him, but three weeks into the course he was finally able to start, and we managed to get through the course with him, but his exam was delayed by seven weeks. That just made me really think about the accessibility of this course.
The course has somewhere around 860 figures because it’s entirely online, and adding alt text to all of them poses problems because of character limits, and you also can’t click on alt text, so if you’re differently abled but don’t use an immersive reader, you don’t benefit from that. So, after working with many tech people, we came up with a solution. Complex figures would have an alt-text component where it would literally tell you what you are looking at, so, for example, if you’re looking at a cross-section of different layers of rock, it’ll actually just say, “This figure is a cross-section of different layers of rock; the youngest layers are at the top, and the oldest layers are at the bottom.” And then we also created a separate dropdown extended caption that you can click on that is separate from the alt text completely. Some figures are quite intricate, and you might not know what you’re supposed to be focusing on, so the idea with the extended caption is that it directs you to the figure’s key information.
What challenges did you face with implementing UDL, and how did you overcome them?
Louise: Most of the challenges we encountered were tech difficulties, such as certain features working on a laptop but not on an iPad, or the immersive reader failing to function properly. Another issue was that we did a ton of our captioning work through Ally, an accessibility tool that UBC piloted but recently discontinued, which was frustrating.
Sarah: We also want to mention Erika Delorme, who’s a Learning Technology Rover at Skylight, and how much she helped with getting us through our challenges, getting everything to function as intended, and really working at this constantly. This wouldn’t have been possible without her.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you or your UBC colleagues encountered? How does UDL help address these barriers?
Louise: An issue I’ve noticed in geology is that a lot of our work uses hand samples and incorporates very hands-on labs, so it can be very difficult to offer the same quality of this kind of course virtually or online. Francis Jones, a fellow lecturer in Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, and I actually worked on a two-year pilot project called the Flexible Learning Initiative, where we recorded videos of samples and essentially built these virtual labs that produce similar results to in-person labs, which is a cool way we tackled that barrier.
Sarah: I’ve noticed that wheelchair users must sit at the front or back of a lecture hall, which may make them feel isolated or on display.
Another big barrier I’ve noticed is that many instructors are hesitant to record their lectures because they think that students won’t show up. When I was on medical leave, having access to Zoom and video recordings was crucial for me, and I know that there are students in similar situations who can’t get to class who would benefit from recorded lectures. Even if a student just wants to refresh something they learned or gets lost following along in class, having a lecture recording available can be so useful.
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found or created that were particularly effective in applying UDL?
Louise: I think there are some simple practices that can be used to increase accessibility; for example, I try not to use red and green in my diagrams, as they can be difficult to differentiate for people who are red-green colourblind, so instead I use purple and orange, which takes no more effort to do. Originally, my course was entirely made up of documents and no recorded lecturing, which I started to change, but hour-long lectures can be difficult for both me to make, as I may have to re-record a large portion of the lecture because of a single error, and difficult for students in terms of focus. I found it better to do sort of 5-minute sound bites, which can be more engaging, so I try to find the most difficult concepts in the course and record shorter videos on topics where students struggle. That way, students now have two ways of learning, both extensive written content and video content to reinforce key points. Another thing is the aforementioned extended captions, which will help highlight key information within complex figures. Lastly, I’ve been working on my syllabus for years, which is formatted clearly in ways that students can intelligibly understand and use, which is something I used to present to other faculty.
Sarah: Giving people time to think independently during group work is a teaching technique I like to employ, as it prevents some individuals from thinking quickly and dominating the conversation. We like to give science students two-stage exams where they can solve problems at their own pace without being influenced by others and then answer questions together. This way, they’re all able to contribute much more to the conversation. And if I’m going to call on a group for an answer, I’ll go up to the group beforehand and say something like, “That’s a really interesting answer; do you mind if I call on your group to respond to the class?” This way, especially in larger classes, students can let me know if they are comfortable with sharing in front of the whole class in advance and give them time to prepare their answer. I also ask students their names and, if they’re comfortable, their pronouns so I can call on them by name. This helps students in larger classes feel like they’re not just a number and creates a more welcoming environment. These things may sound more marginal or insignificant, but they help create a more holistic approach to learning in the classroom that can be lacking in science.
Is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you would like to mention?
Louise: I just want to reiterate that there were so many other people that haven’t been mentioned that helped with this project. I want to give a big thank you to Afsaneh Sharif, Erika Delorme, Jeff Miller, AC Dager, Jackie Stewart, and my two TAs, Teagan (Peri) Shepherd and Serena Formenti who helped me with this, and so many more people who assisted too.