EDUCAUSE | Learning Objects

Tune in March 25 for a Free Web Seminar on Teaching with Digital Collections in Undergraduate Curriculum

pkurkowski — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:35:38 -0500

Many academic digital collection projects are focused on special collections and college archives. Such projects seek to bring collections "out of the basement" and enable greater access to valuable and specialized research materials. However, undergraduate students and faculty often have very different needs and expectations of these digital materials than experienced researchers or the general public.

What does it take to implement a digital asset management system that not only improves access to collections but also allows faculty to integrate digital materials into their teaching? In this free March 25 EDUCAUSE Live! web seminar, Teaching with Digital Collections in the Undergraduate Curriculum, presenters Marianne Colgrove, Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of Web Support Services, Reed College, and Dena Hutto, Director of Reference and Instruction, Reed College Library, will share their experiences in implementing a CONTENTdm-based digital image collection for the classics and humanities.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related EDUCAUSE resources on DAMS, Digital Collections, Learning Objects, and Teaching.

EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: Content Catastrophe

Carie417 — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:51:05 -0500

In this 45-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Deborah Everhart and Martin Irvine in a session entitled Content Catastrophe: The Gap Between Textbooks and Global Real-Time Knowledge Acquisition. They use case studies to demonstrate how faculty at Georgetown University have created an environment where course material can be dynamically controlled by instructors and students.

My Accessibility Saga XII

hes8 — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:27:01 -0600

It isn't always a struggle, sometimes the work gets done without undue effort! I'm continuing to improve the accessibility of my web learning objects, and just finished one that a colleague uses in his molecular genetics course.

It's a straightforward exploration of bond energies affecting equilibrium concentrations. It's mostly ascii text, with two drop down menus and one text box where the result appears. There is a display table, which makes complete sense when "linearized" (read left to right by rows).

The small amount of effort it took went to doing such things as adding a noscript section and changing away from the now-improper use of header tags.

Nothing exciting - hardly worth writing about, except for the hope that somebody will see that retrofitting accessibility isn't always a bother.

My Accessibility Saga continues further

hes8 — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 20:52:13 -0600

Web Accessibility at was discussed at Educause 06 (in a discussion session facilitated by Terry Thompson.) We had participants from both industry and higher ed in the discussion, and this helped reinforce one of the ideas which has been becoming apparent to me as I've been converting my learning objects to, ummm, "enhance" their accessibility. (For more on this see my earlier blog posts with similar titles.)

I've also presented on this topic in two venues, along with my colleague Lisa Fiedor, who works with faculty and instructional designers to help them overcome accessibility problems in online material. The preparation, presentations, and Q&A have also fed into this idea.

"It's awareness, more than effort." is the straight-forward idea. It's not hard to build in accessibility, if one is aware of it all the time, but awareness can lapse if not cultivated.

That's why I think it is important to keep up a "buzz" about it - and to share the methods that ease implementation. (It was delightful at our presentations to have people in the audience say that they had learned useful simple techniques.)Back to the Educause session - we saw that there also is an awareness dimension at work in bring education and industry priorities into alignment. Educause, the premier locale for education/industry discussions, can play a very beneficial role. I encourage all of us to continue to make the conference and Connect the discussion forum for advancing accessibility!

My Accessibility Saga - continues

hes8 — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:53:28 -0500

Two more learning objects done! Or should I be more careful and say that I've completed my first efforts on making them accessible. I've used the same techniques that I used in my first adventure. (To read the earlier progress in My Accessibility Saga, go to my blog here and scroll down to the bottom, and then work your way up! There's got to be a better way - but I haven't found it yet. :-)

I worked on my learning object which deals with sampling from a Uniform Distribution. Making this accessible is almost cheating, since the learning object is extremely similar to my first effort in dealing with sampling from the Normal Distribution. However, I'm not at all ashamed in using skills I've just developed and in reusing code.

This reworked learning objects is at http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/samphist.html

Next, I thought it would be terrific to be able to say Section 508 compliant: yes for a learning object of mine which is listed at merlot.org This one is called "The Mitochondrial Eve - Who will she be?" and is another exploration of a random phenomenon - this one in evolutionary genetics.

After thinking a while, I concluded that the important simulation outcome information is already presented in text boxes, and the nice colored graphics mostly give a visual display of the information in the text boxes. This may be helpful to the sighted reader but is primarily repetitive.

I decided that what was needed was a D-linked page which described the overall process and explained the way in which the text box numbers should be interpreted.

This took some writing, and then I went back to the learning object and "tidied" it up - e.g. got rid of the misleading header tags, and reviewed what I had done.

Then I went to Merlot and changed the Section 508 statement to yes! Wow, that felt good!

If you're interested in this learning object - you can find it at Merlot, or you can go directly to http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/gn/ex/mit-eve.html
to see it.

This one has more discipline material in it than do the sampling objects I've mentioned earlier. They were more skeletal, and written to invite the adopting teacher to add course material when using the simulation.

At this rate, I won't have them all done by Educause 2006. But I'd be glad to discuss them and demo them if you catch me there. I hope to have all of them done by Educause 2007!!! :-) Hmm, I think my university would prefer an earlier completion date.

My co-presentation on this topic at the Instructional Design group is at the end of this week, and I'm looking forward to that - both the co-presentation with a wonderful colleague of mine (Hi Lisa! :-) and to hearing reactions from a group of Instructional Designers.

My Accessibility Saga - continues

hes8 — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:43:52 -0500

After finishing the revision of a learning object which did a simulation and presented it in an inaccessible manner (see my earlier eight installments on this topic,) I took it easy for over a week. Then I started thinking about two follow-on topics:

A) What about the other learning objects I've done? How many of them require the same attention?

B) Is there a deeper principle involved than "revise it to improve accessibility"?

My answers to myself:

A) Stop taking the easy way out - it takes less effort to ask questions like this than to go through the learning objects, one by one, and fix everything found to be wrong!

B) Yes. Don't go at things bass ackwards! While revision is necessary for old material, what is really important is incorporating accessibility into Instructional Design. If we consider that Instructional Design is meant to reach all students, then all we need to do is good instructional design and we can stop being concerned about "accessibility". :-)

So, for now, I'm working on another simulation or random events (a very similar one - which demonstrates the Uniform Distribution vs. the Normal Distribution simulation.) I'm also going to co-present on these ideas in one of our university's Fall Semester Instructional Design Interest Group meetings. I'm wondering about the reactions, but am very optimistic.

[don't worry - I'll post about the reactions :-]

My Accessibility Saga VIII

hes8 — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:31:14 -0500

["Odyssey" is how I described it, one dictionary definition is, "a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune" but I used it to foreshadow a successful conclusion - at least for the time being.]

That's all I can think of or remember. Thanks to all who helped me along this path, and who make me think and work more than I really want! :-) I also have to mention my friend and colleague Sarah Stein who always is helpful when I'm trying to convey information - although all the faults and errors in this story remain mine.

I started my Odyssey with a learning object which excluded visually impaired students. At the end of my Odyssey, I still have basically the same learning object which accomplishes the same learning goals, but which is much more accessible. Check it out. It wasn't difficult to produce. It took some effort, but most of the effort was in learning what was needed and thinking about choices of methods of doing it. I hope that my effort can make it easier for you to increase the accessibility of yourteaching material.

Please go through my examples, and let me know if you have suggestions, better ideas, or criticisms. I have many more learning objects to improve (e.g. a simulation of a"One Compartment Equilibrium" and am looking forward to using my newly polished skills. Perhaps you have good ideas which can make it easier for me and for all the rest of us interested in providing accessibility to all students.

Sina handed me another insight. He applied the "less is more" idea to the sonification of the two dimensional text area. I've explained why I think that mentally summing the counts of 50 tones is an overload. Sina asked why it has to be 50? Why not 3? I.e. the left and right tails and the central mode? Then hearing these tones one could get a good idea of how the order of observations skipped around, and the relative frequency of occurence. That might work! It's less detail than isprovided visually, but certainly much better than nothing. I wondered if 5 tones/sections would work better? That would be the flattish areas of the tails on either side, the curved areas on both sides, and then the middle mode. Sina thought that it might work, but that any finer division wouldn't.

It would be great to do some trials and see how this type of sonification would work. In order to do that, it would be great to figure out how to do it in (client-side) JavaScript. If that doesn'twork, then it certainly can be done in the server. So there's more investigation and work to be done.

[and that's why I consider this odyssey a success, but not an ending. I hope to continue this discussion, and would appreciate your joining with your comments and suggestions]

My Accessibility Saga VII

hes8 — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:34:37 -0500

["semantic structure" - what a mouthful! perhaps I have some more to learn]

Am I backsliding when I use strong or bold tags? Perhaps a bit, as I'm mixing content and presentation. But these are minor, and I don't think they have a perceptible effect on accessibility - so for now, I'll just go with them. Also, I'm not sure that the strong tag is strongly discouraged. (Putting the style information in the head section of the page allows the use of the styles in the body. However the best way would be to use an external CSS / style sheet. This allows the same ease of use, but also allows the user to substitute their own style sheet, which can be important for users of assistive technology. Because I'm retrofitting pages which use very little style markup, I'm not going to do that for now. If this is just yielding to my temptation to take the easy way out - I'll have to take refuge in Larry Wall's statement that one of the great virtues of a programmer is Laziness. :-)

Just a few more left -

This learning object won't work at all without JavaScript. Providing a <noscript> section with a notice to this effect is an easy way to avoid misunderstandings.

Since the second textarea can be programmed to be empty until the simulation stops, that's a good way of allowing a non-sighted user to detect that event. An extra line of JavaScript implements this, also note it in the D-link page.

The title attribute can be used in textarea tags, but then it appears when the cursor is placed in the textarea box - that's bad. It confuses sighted users, and doesn't seem to add anything for accessibility - remove them.

The D-link page has a "Return" link at the bottom - put in HTML so that it returns to the location of the D-link. Many browsers do this automatically - don't take a chance.

Oh - one last general item - try to stick closely to the standards. Non-standard HTML is pretty much ignored by browsers which don't understand it - but when dealing with unknown, maybe minimal, browsers and screen readers, it's better to be conservative in this respect.

[Is this a hint that my odyssy is nearing its successful conclusion? Certainly there is more to learn - stay tuned.]

My Accessibility Saga VI

hes8 — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:05:27 -0500

[the path is smooth, and I'm moving along at a good clip]

More back and forth about more details that can be changed. What does the "Panic Stop" button do. It stops the simulation - isn't that clear? Why is it needed? Well - back in 1999, it seemed like a good idea. :-) Removing it provides some extra clean-up, one less distraction.

There are two major sections of the page - demarked by the header at the top - giving the name of the learning object, and then, below the textarea, is the header "Thought Questions". Nothing else of importance, just a few items below, giving contact and copyright information, etc.

Nothing else of importance - so why are there two more major sections of the page? Oh yeah, I used two <h5> headers to get small bold type in the few items at the end. Why did I do that?

Flash back to the 1990's - I'll quote from an HTML Reference, copyright 1996, "Different level headers produce different sizes and styles for text." They sure do that, and I suspect that I'm not the only one who has used them for those purposes over the years. This is a bad thing for non-visual perusal of the page when markup is being used to understand the organization of the page. The W3C has some pointed discussion of this, as Jude reminded me! (She's better than Jiminy Cricket at being a conscience. :-)

The fix is easy when I realize it should be done - markup tags for font intensity and size (since I'd rather not use a style sheet for this minor use), and I'm done with this problem.

I really need to break the habit of using header tags for visual presentation! They should be used only for semantic structure.

I hereby resolve to stop using header tags except to provide meaningful structure to web pages! (Will this public declaration stick with me? Jiminy, you are granted full license to bug me if I ever backslide.) (Entomological note to Clyde: Yes, I understand that
crickets aren't bugs!)

[semantic structure is important, but unfortunately easy to overlook - there will be a few more "simple" items like that, along with some more simple items, as the odyssey continues]

My Accessibility Saga V

hes8 — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 19:55:04 -0500

[Always hopeful, I thought it was about done.]

But more testing raised more questions. Even if the *process* of developing the histogram is closedto the screen reader, the end result might be more open. Sina suggestedthat hearing the heights of the columns read left to right might result in more understanding than just a description that emphasized the jagged nature.

Always looking for the easy way out, I counted the 50 final column heights from a simulation run and typed them into the D-link page as an example of the the overall shape and its jagged nature. Well, maybe more than one example was needed, so I put three examples on the page.

Sina wouldn't let me get away with the easy way out! Yes, the examples did help - but the sighted user could run as many examples as desired. Why not provide the same capability to the screen reader user? Blast it - this took some programming. Put another textarea on the page, wait for the simulation to stop, then count the column heights programmatically and enter them into the heights textarea.** [see comment for footnote]

A straight forward programming task, even for someone a bit rusty in JavaScript - note to self: it helps to remember to put in the ending textarea tag. :-) Sina liked it, and suggested leaving in the three examples on the D-link page and having this, too. But a minor detail, separating the numbers with commas, instead of just blanks, made it read out better. (This is an example of the little things that can be doneto improve accessibility - not hard to do, but one has to know about them and be aware of the need to do them. (You'll see the version with these improvements in another installment or two.) By "little things" I mean that they aren't required by law, but they do help. Since my solepurpose in making the page was to help learning, this is a major motivation to me.)

[Things are going well, very well - but I'm not "just about done". However this is getting more and more interesting because I'm really into true Instructional Design! I'm making my learning object into one which can be used by more potential learners. I'm learning how to do it better, and I'm getting up to speed. No more frustration!]