Options for Physical Action
The UDL guideline “Provide Options for Physical Action” prompts us to provide accessible materials with which all learners can interact.
Provide Options for Physical Action
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I'm Claire. I work as an accessibility consultant. I work a lot with teachers and students around assessing learning activities, especially those tied to assessments. Sometimes these learning demonstrations are in the classroom and sometimes they are out in the field when students are in placement. During the pandemic, I've seen small tweaks made by teachers make a difference to students. For example, planning for differences in the time it takes for students to complete activities. One tip I offer is to let all students use voice to text to record their answers, where typing might not be possible or ideal. Providing electronic documents in accessible formats lets learners change the size of the text and utilize screen readers to be sure they can understand instructions. If I had one message to share with my colleagues, it would be: you don't have to be an expert. You can reach out to me or an assistive technologist to help and support you to make these tweaks. You can also reach out to your students; they usually know what they need. Even one change you make to provide options for physical action will benefit many students, not just those with accommodations, and help them understand how best they learn.
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Provide Options for Physical Action - Runtime 2:01 min
https://youtu.be/1jZehmpcnQU.
Feel free to write, draw, or audio record your thoughts on this prompt. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your ability to access and use technology-mediated communication? What have you noticed about how your learners express themselves using technology-mediated communication?
Technology and Action & Expression
Technology can both enable and hinder access to action and expression. We explored some of these barriers in terms of the digital divide in Module 3. Many of the technologies we enjoy today are a result of disability innovation. For example, text-to-speech has allowed individuals with learning disabilities to record their ideas effectively. This same disability innovation has allowed smartphone users to easily send messages to friends while carrying groceries, or writers to record ideas while riding transit, or everyone to avoid more screen time in an already screen-heavy day. However, technologies that increase accessibility and creativity for some may present barriers to others. For example, Adobe Spark allows learners to express their knowledge visually and creatively but does not, as of yet, allow the author to add alternative text (“alt text”) to images and photographs, making these inaccessible to screen readers. It’s important that we model the use of accessible technologies and encourage our learners to use technologies that are accessible to their peers. Luckily, there are various guidelines available to support this tool and technology selection process, including this rubric from the University of Western Ontario (UWO). In addition, your e-learning department can offer expertise in recommending technologies that serve your learners and learning goals, as well as audit any tool you are planning to use for AODA and Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG) 2.1 compliance.
Allowing students to choose the format and tool for their online assessment, when possible, helps to mitigate potential barriers – especially when the technical skills required are irrelevant constructs – while still attending to the course outcomes and assessment objectives. Online assessments may also require students (and educators) to develop new technical skills. Just like content-related knowledge and skills, these multimodal skills need to be learned and practiced before being assessed for grades. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to optimize our use of technology to engage learners. It does mean we should carefully choose which technologies we use so that they:
- are accessible to our diverse learners, both in function and cost;
- facilitate learning outcomes (both for the course and learners’ own goals);
- foster technical skills development relevant to the field of study; and
- offer support and practice opportunities for both teachers and students learning how to use the new technology.
Dubec’s original concept has been adapted here (Word Count: 567) by a group of faculty for all three domains of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
As we examined in Module 3, one way to critically choose a good option is to focus on a particularly difficult aspect of your course or the service you provide, and enhance options for learners to engage and express through technology in order to master a concept or solve a problem (Miller, n.d.).
Dr. Rhonda Dubec at Lakehead University constructed an informative graphic to help teachers decide what assessment options may fit with their cognitive learning outcomes in an online environment. In the original graphic, Dubec used multiple choice for summative assessments at every level of Bloom’s cognitive domain, but we have reduced its application. Multiple choice is not learner-centred. Nevertheless, it is still widely used due to a variety of factors such as: managing workload, large class sizes, and preparing learners for licensing exams. Historically used by the U.S. Army to quickly sort troops into intelligence categories, multiple choice has since been adopted as an assessment method throughout higher education across the globe (Ramirez, 2013). Multiple choice can become more learner-centred by:
- engaging learners to co-create the questions
- utilizing multiple choice as a formative assessment
- encouraging students to utilize resources (such as readings and case studies) to answer higher-level (apply) multiple choice questions