Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 20

Get Rid of the Gray
nization and expanded detail of acronyms
and tables with our high military student
population (approximately 38% of our current
student population) in mind. According
to the American Council on Education
(2011), individuals who served in Iraq and
Afghanistan have up to a 40% chance of
acquiring a traumatic brain injury. We can
anticipate that there are more students with
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) than
have registered with our Office of Disability
Services. PTSD and TBI sufferers typically
experience difficulty with attention,
concentration, and information processing
(American Council on Education, 2011),
so page organization can be important in
their ability to absorb the content. Some
Section 508 and WCAG standards do not
apply to Excelsior’s online courses, so the
customized standards list was simpler than
the Section 508 or WCAG standards lists.
Upon establishing the standards list, Excelsior
modified institutional course development
practices to ensure that all newly
developed and revised courses aligned with
the standards list.
The Revision Process
This project is composed of continuously
moving parts; therefore there existed challenges
to arriving at a process that would
account for periods of review, editing, and
collection of materials – let alone sidestep
the continuous tasks of preparing our online
courses to run each term, implementing
emergency fixes unrelated to this project,
and normal course revision cycles. Excelsior
College has regimented course development,
course editing, and term preparation
procedures and deadlines, which
limit the amount of time a course may be
out of commission for completion of accessibility
edits. An additional challenge was
given of minimizing the time that we can
ask of the academic units, who are responsible
for managing the course content, as
much as possible. The process outlined in
Figure 1 was built toward the beginning of
the project, and have had success with the
tasks and order. Experimentation with the
time span for each task and the number of
courses in each task at one time has taken
place. During the first year of the project,
101 courses were put through the process,
with all of the courses moving through
each task at the same time. This was found
to be difficult to manage with only one
staff member acting as Project Manager
and long-term preparation periods when
courses could not be edited. The decision
was made to schedule courses in batches of
ten, with a new batch starting the process
every few weeks during the second year of
the project, which was found to be a much
more manageable solution.
As each course moves through the
process, it is analyzed by the contractor using
the accessibility standards list described
above and submitted to the Project Manager
in spreadsheet format. The spreadsheet
is divided into items that the contractor
can edit without any additional input, and
items that need either Project Manager or
academic unit input in order to be edited.
The Project Manager first provides input
that can be handed over without anyone
else’s involvement and then reaches out to
the academic unit responsible for the course
for input if needed. The Project Manager
creates a clear list of input needing the attention
of the academic unit and places a
deadline for the input to be returned. Examples
of input often needing the attention
of the academic unit include creating alternative
text for complex diagrams and tables
and obtaining text-based versions of PDFs
to replace scanned versions. After all input
has been gathered, the course returns to
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