"I Can't Make It Any Easier" Targeting Special Accessibility for Vulnerable Populations

I designed this session after hearing a coworker vent that she had made it as simple as possible for students to do their work, but they were still complaining that it was too hard. It made me really think about how our students were interfacing with our LMS. While my school is using Canvas, the presentation was intentionally system agnostic.

As a note, though Accessibility is in the name of the session, we were focusing on literally ACCESSING the resources within the LMS. WCAG 2.0 web accessibility is incredibly important, but was not the focus of this presentation.

Before I created this training, I conducted an informal survey of In Service Teachers about LMS design. I received 135 responses from across North Carolina, mostly from public schools. My home county made up about 68% of the respondents, so I freely admit that there are flaws in the data set, which is why I never pursued formally publishing it. But it was enough to make some suppositions for the sake of a professional development.

What I found was shocking. By and large, teachers believed that their LMS Courses were well designed and accessible for students. They were slightly less confident of the accessibility for families. But there was a resounding consensus that most users were not making use of the resources teachers were putting on the LMS.

We discussed lots of ways to streamline student access to their LMS, including hub and spoke web design as a way to reduce cognitive load created by the number of clicks to access course materials. The biggest takeaways were to simplify our pages, reduce clicks, and be aware of loading times for students at home.

Our Padlet was a wonderful way to collect participants' ideas and responses and captured the highlights of the in person conversations.