Rethinking course design

Kristin Bassett and Mary Bailey are clinical nursing faculty who share a deep commitment to their students and a detail-oriented approach to their work. When the opportunity to join the Digital Accessibility Liaisons Program arose, they both volunteered quickly and brought that same energy to the role.

Knowing that changes to Title II federal accessibility requirements were coming, they wanted to be prepared. They had also started to notice more students receiving accommodations through the Disability Access Center (Purdue Fort Wayne's version of Accessible Educational Services), and rather than simply reacting to those letters, they wanted to be proactive. As Bassett noted, students who need accommodations have likely always been there, but the conversation around it was missing and many students did not know what was available. They saw this as an opportunity to build courses where every student could access the material, whether they had formal accommodations or not. As Bassett put it, "if we can make meaningful changes that help students in different ways, we want to do that."

Bassett and Bailey made accessibility a priority on the faculty meeting agenda and sent monthly emails to keep it top of mind for their colleagues. In the beginning, they sent step-by-step emails to help overwhelmed faculty know where to start. They debated whether to tackle big things or small things first and decided starting small was the best approach. Once faculty began to see their Ally scores improve, showing that those small changes increased course accessibility in Canvas, it helped them realize the work was manageable. Bailey described their role as being a "funnel," condensing resources into a digestible format and pointing colleagues to the right support rather than trying to have all the answers.

As they worked on their own courses, both began to question their approaches to course design. Bailey initially considered stripping out all images from her presentations and keeping them plain, but she quickly realized she did not like teaching from those slides. That pushed her to find a middle ground and start asking herself "why" as she reviewed each element: Does this image serve a purpose? Is it really needed? Bassett noticed a similar shift, moving away from PowerPoint-heavy lectures and toward more hands-on, application-based learning, something she felt would genuinely benefit her students.

For Bailey, one student in particular became a driving force for this work. She was providing the required accommodations for a student who was doing well but found herself wondering if that student could do even better with more support. As Bailey noted, not every student who needs an accommodation will ask for one, and building accessible courses is really about making sure the support is already there. That point hit home when Bailey overheard students talking about watching recorded lectures with captions on to help with retention and exam prep. Nobody had asked them about it. It just came up in conversation.

Bassett summed it up well:

For more resources and self-paced courses, visit the Accessibility.IU website.