It’s my first Durham Users Conference – the 20th Durham Blackboard Users Conference (6th-8th January 2020, #durbbu, Access all Areas padlet).
Three days after the conference, I still laugh and feel the fun when thinking about the real-time subtitles* (technology+live stenographers) in the speaking from Dr Malcolm Murray, Bill Ballhaus and Kathy Vieira; I still feel the inspiration and think the faintly visible ideas about what we can do when recalling the playful learning from Dr Katie Piatt‘s talk; I still feel the joy and encouragement from the vivid conversations and sessions with people from different institutions. Indeed the members of the Durham Centre for Academic Development deserve a big thumbs up and huge thanks.
Now I got a bit time to check my notes and the resources I couldn’t read thoroughly at the time.
My first purpose for attending the conference was to expand my knowledge and find solutions to problems we are facing (e.g., e-assignments, assistive technologies, Accessibility training and support, issues when adopting Ally, benefits and risks in moving to SaaS and Ultra). I always wished we could have done something differently quickly.
The accessibility is an inevitable task on our road-map and the conference theme focused on accessibility, which helped me to gain the most of it. Firstly, the Blackboard Ally Data workshop delivered by Nicolaas Matthijs was very helpful. Through a hands-on exercise to understand our institutional reports data in a comparison view have made more sense than just reading through the isolated reports. I learnt that we have used the type of PDF files a lot in our system, which means the accessibility score in our reports would be very different (i.e., lower accessibility scores) from those institutions that have used more of WYSIWYG types or other types. It’s good to know that on the Blackboard SaaS, the Ally reports will be a part of the Blackboard data which is available automatically. I wondered if we don’t have Ally but are on Blackboard SaaS, can we use the Ally institutional reports directly? It’s also good to learn that the most common difficult accessibility problems to support are below, which help us to prepare and provide more support for these issues.
- contrast issues
- internal templates – this requires all teams to check and update their existing templates.
- headings problems – I experienced a problem myself recently
Secondly, I have realised the good work from the University of York in supporting Accessibility via Richard Walker‘s talk in the “Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations – November 2019 Update” webinar and Lilian Soon‘s presentation in the Ally User group 2019 November meeting. I also know Lilian’s excellent work together with Alistair Mcnaught and Ron Mitchell in the Future Teacher Talks. It’s nice to meet Lilian again in the conference and attend her workshop about using Kotter’s eight-step change process in improving accessibility support practice. I was dreaded when she showed a spreadsheet for checking their VLE accessibility without using Blackboard Ally based on their VLE Accessibility Review Guide**. It just looked like awfully a lot of manual work! We rely on Blackboard to provide an accessible platform and the Ally to help us identify accessibility problems. Of course things like the system outlook, the module template, the customised module menus and the embedded external content can be customised, accordingly such Accessibility Review Guide would be extremely useful. There were other useful resources from the University of York that I list here.
- Digital Accessibility Tutorial
- York TEL Handbook – Key Accessibility Guidelines
- Creating Accessible Documents workshops
Thirdly, many people/institutions have done a great amount of work and shared their experience with us. I missed some interesting sessions, such as the “Aligning Microsoft Teams and Blackboard” presented by Claire Gardener, the “Enabling virtual classroom technology for the whole institution” presented by Tom Foster, and the #BbMOCO pre-conference workshop. I managed to reach the useful resources as follows.
- Matthew Deeprose’s presentation about Blackboard Accessibility (115 pages!). There are many important highlights. The slides 16, 35, 46, 51, 66, 69, 79, 92 and 113 had called my attention particularly due to my support experience.
- Definitely useful for us to understand the most common accessibility problem – contrast issues. The Contrast Ratio checking table is helpful, I make a note for my team. Also, I installed the Microsoft’s Accessibility Insights tool***, and found it’s very handy to check accessibility on a web page. I tried it on our Blackboard system and noticed it can check the third-party tool like the Eesysoft Support Centre too. One thing to remember is to refresh the page, otherwise, the marked-out checking results on the Eesysoft Support Centre window will not disappear after closing the window.
- The Southampton’s branding provides a very clear guideline. I run a quick search from our University website and found the similar support information. Unfortunately, it’s not public-facing, so I am unable to share it.
- I’m looking forward to seeing the enhanced ATbar being available in the Blackboard Community as I used it on my blog and CMALT site. I’m interested in how well it has supported users in Blackboard when thinking about the Blackboard’s own inconvenient settings – the ‘Change Text Size’ and the ‘High Contrast Setting’ via the Global menu.
- Meanwhile, I have to recommend the Digital Accessibility: Enabling Participation in the Information Society MOOC delivered by the University of Southampton again. I took it in 2017, which was a useful starting point of understanding accessibility issues.
- Tim Smale’s blog post about the conference. This is very helpful as he noted some of my missed sessions, especially the Turnitin workshop. I don’t know how he had time to jot down the sessions. He must have noted things in his blog during the session.
- Amy Eyre (University of York) has well organised the #BbMOCO workshop as always and all presentation recordings are available. I am pleased to be able to view the recordings afterwards, particularly to learn the University of Derby Digital Practice Handbook and Laura Hollinshead‘s presentation of “Inclusive use of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra“, a comparison between using the Blackboard Group and the Collaborate Ultra room for summative assessment from Helga Gunndarsdottir‘s presentation, and Julian Brown‘s and Rachel Bassett-Dubsky‘s use cases from the University of Northampton.
My second purpose for attending the conference was to present our work with Eesysoft and share our experience with others. The key benefits for us to use the tool include:
- to allow us to deliver contextual support in Blackboard easily (aiming for supporting learning design models and approaches into activities),
- to understand how the system have been used (aiming for strategical evaluation, monitoring, cost-efficiency analysis), and
- having the capability of intervention (either from the perspective of supporting teaching and learning enhancement or from the perspective of improving a service).
My third purpose for being the conference was to learn new things beyond my field and networking. I noticed that many attendees are working on CPD design and staff engagement (or having most relevant responsibilities for them). A successful sustainable service/support requires the organisational structure, the adopted service approaches, principles and leadership connected well. I feel it’s a bit magic that some universities could roll out Ally in a few weeks without delivering staff accessibility training at first and didn’t get many complaints as we thought it would be, and some universities treated Blackboard help materials support as a separate part from the IT service. One important impression I had was from what Dr Katie Piatt said, “… Probably I was senior enough to say …” when someone questioned her how they dealt with different voices about playful activities in VLE. Leadership is such a crucial element in innovation and changing management. Another good example of Ally support is from the University of Reading ****. It shows a support model of leading teams and their responsibilities clearly. Some people may see Ally is just a checking tool. I seem to take it as more than just another tool in Blackboard but a handy accessibility enhancement solution.
To be realistic and to not be overly eager to many fantastic ideas and possibilities, I reviewed my notes from the last year’s Blackboard TLC conference and again use the MoSCoW method to create a plan.
| Must have | ➽ Review and improve Blackboard Collaborate Ultra support materials relating to accessibility and inclusivity. ➽ Checking Ally(accessibility) support materials in Eesysoft and make the new structure available. ➽ Improve the Blackboard Ally support materials for our IT staff, especially the information for supporting assistive tools, contrast ratio, mobile accessibility, and equations. ➽ Blackboard Ally availability goes ahead |
|---|---|
| Should have | ➽ Comparison of Blackboard managed-hosting and SaaS, learn what SaaS does and doesn’t. Do we have resources ready? ➽ Map out the Accessibility Support Staff Engagement teams, what we have and what we need to develop. |
| Could have | ➽ Move to SaaS – to meet and discuss with the universities that have been on SaaS |
| Won’t have (this time) | ➽ Very accurate live captions – Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Skype, Panopto |
NB:
- * Providing accurate captions will be the upcoming task.
- ** The guide can be very useful for us when we are doing our VLE review.
- *** I will improve the accessibility of my blog using the existing good tools.
- **** Thanks for Anne-Sophie De Baets having taken the photo of ‘Ally – Staff Engagement from the University of Reading’. I couldn’t attend that session. I hope you don’t mind I keep it.
Finally, I must admit that the Durham University has put their heart and soul into the event. I had entirely enjoyed the time there, never thought we would be in a show of murder mystery when having a good meal in the Durham Castle.
Web n' Circle 