As you prepare your Autumn courses, don’t forget that the CoE Technology Center can help you make your course materials more accessible for all students! If you will be uploading readings, sharing PowerPoint slides, or including videos in your materials, our group can remediate documents and caption Panopto videos so they are accessible to students who rely on alternatives to audio or visual content. For example, remediated PDFs are accessible to students who use assistive technologies like screen readers, and they’re also beneficial because any student can use Canvas to download an audio version! Note that some PDFs have accessible, full-text HTML versions via our library; however, scanned chapters, or PDFs of articles without an available full-text version online, need to be remediated in order to be screen-readable. If you are interested in this service, please email edhelp@uw.edu with your request! Due to the time-consuming nature of remediation and captioning, the turnaround time is usually several weeks, but we are happy to get started early on Autumn quarter course materials.
News
Engaging Practices to Take into Autumn Quarter and Beyond
If you’re thinking about the practices from this past year of online learning that you’d like to take with you into your in-person and hybrid classrooms, a new article from Educause offers some great ideas. Improved Student Engagement in Higher Education’s New Normal outlines five teaching enhancements that can increase and sustain student engagement across multiple modes of instruction.
UW Expanding use of 2FA
We have been using Two Factor Authentication (2FA) to enhance the security of our web apps (like Workday) for several years. This technology adds a layer of security by asking you to confirm your login attempt by authorizing access in a secondary device (usually you phone). This year, UW IT is expanding its use by making it the default login mechanism for all staff using any UW web app using SSO (Single Sign On). Most of our staff should already have this properly setup, but if you need to check some instructions, please visit the 2FA opt-in page. To learn more about this technology, please visit this 2FA website.
Eduroam: prepare to re-onboard your devices
Eduroam is the secure and preferred encrypted WiFi service at UW (Read the longer. UW-IT has been working to improve our network’s security during this summer and some of these improvements will require for us to re-onboard our devices once we return to campus.
For detailed instructions in how to proceed, please visit the Eduroam Onboarding Guides page at IT-Connect. The instructions on this page will help existing and/or new users of this encrypted WiFi network.
Privacy by Design
The UW Privacy Office keeps developing guidelines, policies and orientation materials to help us understand how to align our projects with current privacy practice. One of these is the idea of “Privacy by Design”, which underscores the importance of minimizing the risk of exposing data throughout the information lifecycle. As part of this effort, the Privacy Office recently published a short video to highlight humanitarian, ethical, and legal obligations when it comes to individuals’ privacy.
Please visit the UW Privacy office website To learn more bout these principles.
Poll Everywhere website updates
Poll Everywhere is web based software to conduct synchronous and asynchronous polls. It can also be integrated in PowerPoint presentations, where polls can be complete using any kind of mobile device. Last month, there were some changes to the web interface to make it more user friendly and to help poll authors to organize their polls. Existing users should have received an email from UW-IT with details about these changes.
If you want to learn more about this free tool, please visit the IT-Connect/Poll Everywhere website or contact us if you need any help with your project.
Thinking About Hybrid Learning Environments
As Spring quarter comes to a close, we in the Tech Center office are thinking ahead to Autumn quarter and the kinds of learning environments—in-person, online, or hybrid—that we all will encounter and create this fall. As you know, the university is planning a full return to in-person learning, and it will be so exciting to work and learn together on campus again! We also know that our continued flexibility in meeting students needs could necessitate a hybrid or blended approach to learning. With this in mind, we have developed a new page in our CoE Tech Center website that focuses on hybrid learning, and the many student participation modes that are possible in in hybrid learning environments. Our goal with this page is to outline a few of these possibilities, highlight the benefits and challenges of different approaches, and offer examples of instructional methods adapted to these environments. This resource is far from exhaustive, and is meant to be a starting point now, and later, a resource to refer to when you know more about what your Autumn quarter students and their needs and preferences
eSignature Policy for the UW College of Education
As any educational organization, we are in constant need to collect and archive signed documents. With the increased availability of eSignature technology at our University, the College of Education recognizes the need for some guidelines to help faculty and staff to navigate this process.
These recommendations apply to faculty and staff in the College of Education and reflect the administration’s expectations for document safety and privacy vigilance, as well as alignment with the University’s best practices in digital file storage.
You can access this policy at the Technology Center website
Hybrid Models Article: Flattening the Multimodal Learning Curve
This recently published report (March 2021) summarizes the opinions of educators and technologists in multiple countries, reflecting on available data about the massive transition towards diverse remote and hybrid educational models during this pandemic. The authors highlight the impact of flexible and interactive methodologies and the growing pressure of educational institutions to demonstrate greater value and to innovate.
Accessible Technology Webinar Series
Accessible Technologies will be hosting webinars on popular IT Accessibility topics on the last Thursday of each month, 3:00 pm– 4:00 pm.
Webinars are free but require registration. Watch for registration links as we get closer to webinar dates.
Future Webinar Schedule:
- June 24: Alternatives to PDF
- July 29: Teaching an Accessible Online Course
- August 19: Accessible Web Content Creation
- September 30: Video Accessibility
- October 28: Testing with Screen Readers
- November 4: Document Accessibility
- December 2: Accessibility in Procurement: Reading a VPAT