Implementation of Assistive Technology in Higher Education

>> Sheryl Burgstahler: It's important that people with disabilities are able to access programs and resources just simply as a matter of social justice. >> Cindy: Students with disabilities should be able to articulate what they need. I think that's very crucial. >> Patrick Pow: We want to really educate diverse learners. Diverse learners definitely including people with disabilities. >> Narrator: For students with disabilities, a successful academic experience requires teamwork. Team members are students, faculty, and the staff that supports students with disabilities. >> Bob Stacey: My name is Robert Stacey, I go by Bob Stacey. I'm the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and I'm a professor of medieval European history here at the University of Washington. A lot of disabilities, of course, are invisible. We think about disabilities and we think about someone who is perhaps in a wheelchair or who has vision impairment or whatever but oftentimes there are things like social anxieties that prevent them from participating comfortably in large groups. >> Dan Comden: My name's Dan Comden. I'm the Access Technology Manager in the Access Technology Center in the basement of Mary Gates Hall. We're part of UW-IT Information Technology in a unit called Accessible Technology Services. We do a number of different things in our department. One of the things that we do is provide access to academic technology for college students here at the University of Washington who have disabilities. The transition from the K-12 system into higher education can be a bit of a shock for some students. They come from a very supportive environment to an environment that is supportive but requires that the student really be their own best advocate. They have to seek out the services. The services are not just going to be delivered to them without them asking about it. >> Narrator: So how does the process start? In college, it begins with the student. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, students with disabilities have the right to reasonable accommodations. Students have to play an active role in claiming that right. Their first step is to contact the office that provides accommodations, which is sometimes called Disability Resources for Students or DRS. >> Jon McGough: My name's Jon McGough. In DRS, we work with students in every program across the university. That's undergraduate students, graduate students, students in professional programs like medicine or law. In working with our counseling staff, our counseling staff works to ensure that the students can access the classroom. That means that lectures are accessible to them. This could include sign language interpreters or closed-captioned videos. We work to ensure that their books are accessible to them. This could be textbooks in Braille or audio or many other digital formats. We work to ensure that clinical experiences and field trips are also accessible. >> Shelby: My name is Shelby and my disability is dyslexia dysgraphia. Dyslexia is basically where you can reverse words or leave words out. I always try and seek out where the disability department is. I feel like it’s the first thing I need to do because if I don’t have everything in order, then I’m just going to suffer all the way through college and I don’t want to do that. I try to set up my meeting with my counselor try to find out like if I get all of my testing accommodations and then I ask them if there are like anything else I need to know about if there’s something new. >> Narrator: Besides verifying that a student is eligible for accommodations, documentation helps the student services counselor determine what that student might need. Counselor Krista Greear talks with students about specific accommodations. >> Krista Greear: So I work with a couple different types of students. The first type of students with disabilities that I work with are those that have chronic health concerns. Perhaps they have arthritis where they can't manipulate a physical book. Or they can't carry the weight of their books on their back so they're really just looking for an electronic-only version. Perhaps the student might also have low vision where they need to have an electronic version that can be enlarged. The second type of students that I work with are by far the largest population and these are students with learning disabilities. >> Richard Ladner: I'm Richard Ladner, professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. If a student with a disability comes into your class, it's always a good idea to ask the student what their needs are. And try to make sure that you accommodate those needs and I've seen this done successfully a number of times by professors who have an interest in including all students in their class. I think all the materials in class should be accessible, the website, and so on. The assignments should be considerate of accessibility, the exams as well. >> Narrator: There’s a wide range of accommodations. >> Kayla: My name is Kayla and I have a form of muscular dystrophy. So essentially I just use a wheelchair because my muscles are weak and I also have panic attacks and anxiety as my invisible disability. Some accommodations that I had were the physical space where I needed a desk that I could pull up to that would raise, that was adjustable. I would need to be able to physically get into the room, the classroom, very important. And I got some writing accommodations that I had just in case I needed them. I also had certain accommodations about needing to take breaks and that's mostly due to my invisible disability. So if I am having a panic attack I can leave the room and the instructor would know why. >> Cindy: I'm Cindy and I’m a third year PhD student in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. I'm totally blind. DRS helped me to get accommodations in a few of my courses. They provided materials in Braille for me in a computer science course which was very helpful. They provided an assistant for me in a statistics course which was also very helpful because there were a lot of graphs and creating presentations using statistical software where I was best supported by having a student help me. >> Bob: Be clear about what you need. And make sure you communicate frequently with your instructor and if you're not getting the accommodation that you need let your instructor know. Our instructors are remarkable but very few are mind readers. >> Narrator: Students have the right to choose if, and when, to disclose their disabilities. >> Richard: It's up to the student, actually, the student whether they disclose or not their disability. If they do disclose it and they do indicate that they do have some accessibility issues, then a conversation would be in order and if the student does not initiate it then probably you should not initiate it. >> Cindy: So what I would advise is for professors to offer opportunities if they come across something that might be helpful for someone with a disability to offer it to the entire class like, “Oh if you have a disability here's something on campus that might be helpful,” you know, rather than kind of calling the student out. >> Narrator: If students do decide to disclose a disability, they should contact professors and disability services early, preferably before classes start. Sometimes, accommodations require advance notice. For example, books in alternate formats such as Braille may have to be ordered. >> Dan: It's important that they engage with their disability service office as early as possible so that they can – if they need accessible academic materials the DS office can start creating those as soon as they know what books are needed. It's really important that it be a proactive instead of a reactive process as much as possible. >> Narrator: Flexibility and communication are the tools needed for success. Cooperation between faculty, students, and service coordinators is the key to making it happen. >> Patrick: My name is Patrick Pow. I'm from University of Washington Tacoma. My responsibility is technology. I'm the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology. So it is really vitally important for us to provide equity and inclusion which includes people with any kind of needs – learning disabilities, physical disabilities. >> Sheryl: I’m Sheryl Burgstahler at the University of Washington. Here I direct Accessible Technology Services. My hope for students in our programs is that they'll develop some self-confidence, that they'll become self advocates, that they'll really know what they need, whether it's technology or some other accommodation. And they'll feel like they can be successful because they know, they've practiced some of the things they have to do to be successful in college and careers and they know that they can do it.

great so we're just going to give a very short um presentation and a bit of an overview of some of the work we're doing uh in ucd to support uh our diverse students so so first of all we're going to talk about that diversity in ucd i'm going to give an overview very brief overviews to what we're doing in the university for all initiative and then julie who is our disability officer is going to talk to you about some of the supports that are available to students and what our ethos of support is for those student groups so for those of you who aren't familiar with ucd just to give you a bit of a bit of an overview really so we have uh over 30 000 students in total um our undergraduate population is just over 17 000 and within that undergraduate population we've got nearly a third of those students are international students and almost a third are what we would call diverse or from access and widening participation groups so that includes students with disabilities low-income students mature students students from ethnic minority backgrounds lone parents students who are refugees and asylum seekers so all of those groups are target groups as set out in the national access plan and ucd's target are key performance indicators that we would reach 33 percent so in order for us to do that with um i suppose we have a lot of different initiatives one of them would be all of our supplementary admissions route routes so we have the disability access route to education the higher education access route for students who are from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds we have mature entry pathways we have some university access programs we have open learning which opens up the existing modules in ucd which can then lead on to a pathway of full-time degree study and we also have lifelong learning and other part-time programs as well we also offer the largest scholarship program for access students in ireland so again making sure that while we support admission into the university we're also supporting students once they're actually in ucd so that just gives you an idea in terms of our bigger picture in terms of diversity so when we look in the area of disability support so here i'm showing you the picture from the past 10 years of students who've come forward to avail of disability support so we know this isn't a reflection of the diversity in the student population overall but it's just those students who are disclosing a disability and seeking support and who have a diagnosis and i think that's an important point to make as well so you can see that in 2010 11 there were 710 students in ucd seeking support and last year that was 1907 students so really um quite a lot of growth uh throughout those ten years and there's lots of different reasons for that one of them will be the increase in the disability access route to education for school leavers but also i think supports have become more widely recognized in the university students are getting supports earlier at second level and then seeking those supports when they come to university but this is just to give you a picture in terms of the supports that are provided in ucd and in terms of the growth in numbers i'm showing you two of the largest groups here and that's students with mental health conditions and students with specific learning difficulties primarily dyslexia but to look at the group of students with mental health difficulties many of whom have a co-diagnosis it's gone from 74 10 years ago to 505 last year and again these are the students coming forward seeking support so quite a significant growth in terms of other diverse groups i'm showing you here the numbers of students with add or adhd diagnosis autistic spectrum disorder students with developmental coordination disorder or dyspraxia and again quite a large growth over the past 10 years within those groups of students seeking support so in that context then so we know ucd is a diverse university we have a diverse student population so what do we do about that to make sure that the university is ready so the university for all initiative is really about changing the conversation from getting the student ready for university to getting the university ready for the students so quite often the conversation around access and widening participation is about admission routes and getting students in the door but we're very much focused now on making sure that the university is as inclusive as possible so we want all students to feel as though they belong here in ucd and you can see in some of the pictures here on this slide some of our access leaders some of whom avail of disability support through our service but we very much like to keep the student at the center of all of the work that we do we get feedback continuously from our students and they help us to make ucd a welcoming place for incoming students so we want to dispel this myth of a kind of traditional or average student and really embrace the diversity and give visibility to the diversity in the student population as well so our registrar famously says a student is a student in that we want our students to come in and really have a positive experience in ucd so if there's a science student who's availing of disability support they're primarily a science student and we support them in their own context rather than having them only supported within a disability service so we want to avoid as much as possible students having to wear labels if they don't want to and to make sure that we're mainstreaming supports and making the institution as equitable as inclusive and as flexible as possible we know there's no one-size-fits-all solution so one of the tools that we use to help us in the university for all initiative which is really about every single program in the university developing to be more inclusive is our toolkit for inclusive higher education institutions so what this does it helps us to start the conversation through a self-assessment exercise with program teams or college groups where they talk about well how inclusive is our teaching and learning how inclusive are our policies our strategies how inclusive is our built environment our technology infrastructure and our student supports and services so that everybody has this conversation about how inclusive are we at the moment and we can identify areas where there's good practice and identify areas really importantly where we need to do some work and develop some projects from there so we're starting that process now we've done these toolkit workshops with a number of program groups and we'll be continuing them in the next academic year as well covet as you can imagine interrupted our plans unfortunately so one of the big areas of progression within ucd is around universal design for learning and you might be already familiar with this image but the idea really is that we promote universal design for learning which at its core is about flexibility in teaching learning and assessment so that as many students as possible can be accommodated in that bottom level of the of the pyramid which you see there and it means students don't have to come an avail of specific support so a good example might be use of a smaller exam venue so that's probably our most commonly used support and julie's probably going to talk about it in a couple of minutes but what can we do to avoid students having to be segregated from the rest of the student population well we can eliminate timed exams where they don't actually um where they aren't necessary for us to measure the learning outcomes and uh professor colin scott spoke about the changes that happened post covet and one of the really positive changes that happened was we no longer had two and a half thousand students sitting in an event hall to do exams three times a day six days a week for two weeks which as you can imagine causes a lot of stress for a lot of students so if we can eliminate it now i'm hoping that we can see further elimination of those timed exams and again eliminating the need for students to have to go down the route of seeking a separate support so we promote universal design for learning we run the national forum digital badge in universal design for learning which i co-created with ahead and actually just at one o'clock today we had our last webinar for this national rollout so we have about 650 educators across irish higher and further education who are going to be awarded that badge at the end of this semester so we're really hoping there'll be quite a big impact in terms of the sector in ireland so i'm going to hand you over to julie now thanks lisa um i'm going to talk a little bit about how we support our our students within our unit um and i suppose the obvious thing is reasonable accommodations for students who disclose a disability but we're also very aware of the issues that some students have well all students have in fact with the transition and to third into third level education and for some students that transition is more challenging than for others so we've designed a range of supports to try and make that a little bit easier the first one is a tailored welcome program so we know we have all our entry pathways and we know a lot about these students or a lot of them um before they even make it to um ucd so we invite them to come onto the campus a little bit earlier earlier than everyone else so before the main um orientation which all students go to including this cohort and so they come when the campus is quiet and they're met by access leaders from their program and lisa showed you some of the photographs of our access leaders in her and her slides with photographs earlier and and they meet some other students from within their program they get information about what's going to happen what it's going to be like to be a student in ucg and they get a lot of information and about the supports that are available to them we also run then a series of academic skills workshops and we've access to online materials and these cover all the topics that we know that students and potentially struggle with the sorts of things that are unique to higher education such as maybe referencing your essays that might not be familiar to people who haven't studied um beyond maybe second level uh to date and this year we've moved all of our academic skills workshops onto our virtual learning environment so absolutely any student can benefit from these they don't need to be linked in with our department or to disclose anything students also have access to a dedicated disability advisor and that's so that they have somebody to come and discuss their issues with or any challenges that they experience within the environment so that we can assist them and as challenges arise we have um digital ambassadors that work in our center and they're available to students to help with all of the digital skills that students are required to have we have this assumption that the students are digital natives or many of them are and in fact a lot of them are very experienced in social media but much less so in things like email attachments and plagiarism software and other things that they have to use um in higher education we also offer students one-to-one learning support for those who struggle with the transition to um third level education and we've one-to-one occupational therapy support for students as well and that's particularly targeted at students with um autistic spectrum disorders so that they they can really identify some of the challenges that they have and work on a one-to-one basis with somebody to overcome those challenges so that they can operate within the university independently and going forward so every student who discloses a disability in ucd has a one-to-one needs assessment so they meet with either me or one of my colleagues and to talk about their own needs and preferences and how they'd like to be supported um in college this isn't isn't a once-off process they get to meet somebody and decide what they think they need and then they can come back and review this at any time so lisa's already mentioned some of the reasonable accommodations things like additional time in exams a smaller exam venue with a big push for assistive technology because we know that students can take that with that with them into employment and it's really important for us that students can become as independent as possible so that 10 years ago the slide that lisa showed you and many of those students would have had human support such as note checkers and things like that but we've really moved away from that now and we're focusing very heavily on assistive technology tools to help students to be as independent as possible we also provide with the students consent some information for their lecturers so the lecturers are aware of some of the challenges that they might have in the classroom environment and the provision of lecture slides and lecture recordings and as professor colin scott related to earlier some of the flexibility that has um taken place as a result of covet has been phenomenal for some of these students and we're really pushing hard to make sure that that flexibility is maintained going forward when we return to the campus so our strategy and approach then for supporting students we focus heavily on supporting the transition into third level level um that our students are independent and they've independent learning skills we really encourage the use of mainstream ucd supports and we work very closely with all of the supports that are available to students right across the campus and we support students in self-advocacy and we help them to do that and we communicate and disclose information to other members of staff when the students wish us to do so and finally as i mentioned already we're really trying to prepare our students for the workplace and make sure that they can compete on the job market with all the other students who who graduate with them thank you very much for having us both here today you can contact either lisa or myself by emailing us if you have any questions i'll be very happy and to speak with you