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Office of the Provost

January 2023 update for Future of Teaching & Learning Access Working Group

27 January 2023

The Access working group is pleased to present the following summary of work-to-date related to the Provost’s charge letter of 10 November 2022.

After reviewing the charge letter and developing shared definitions of important concepts related to access, the working group decided to focus on four interlocking aspects: 1) Accessibility supports and policies; 2) Barriers to increasing access; 3) Hybrid and online supports and policies; and 4) In-person space recommendations. The working group then split into subgroups around these four areas for deeper discussions. Please find, below, some initial conversation topics and potential recommendations from each subgroup. Our February meeting will be devoted to discussing potential recommendations as a full working group and brainstorming potential pilot projects.

Accessibility Supports and Policies

Jen Mankoff, Thomas Sefair-López, Lori Robins, Stephanie Kerschbaum

More than thirty years after the passing of the ADA, it is, unfortunately, the case that accessibility is not yet provided systematically, or universally, in university teaching, for students or for instructors. While universities have invested significant effort into accessibility, to the benefit of many generations of students, access is still handled on a case-by-case basis by the university, and not included as part of faculty training.

Accessibility creates a feeling in students and instructors that they are supported, especially for disabled students and instructors. When environments and spaces are accessible, people’s emphasis and energy go toward creation, learning, and engagement rather than toward dismantling inaccessible structures and practices. It is important to acknowledge that working toward and designing with accessibility requires instructors to make investments of time and labor, and thus accessibility needs to be supported through institutional resources and structures. A search of UW websites reveals numerous resources and materials available that teachers might engage; there is also a robust literature around educational accessibility, including Universal Design for Learning, but faculty are largely left to navigate this terrain alone in designing their courses and instructional environments.

Some initial ideas that have emerged:

  • Faculty orientation should include real training or at least a talk about working with DRS / enacting access in teaching/classes. (Perhaps this can overlap with CTL and Faculty Fellows)
  • Provide small grants in response to written proposals by faculty for making courses accessible, or to provide for extra RA support around accessibility when big changes are needed. The goal should be to slowly increase the number of frequently taught courses that are fully accessible over time, including transitioning course slides, textbooks, assignments and other materials into more accessible formats.
  • Ensure that students are provided advocates who can support them in navigating the access process.
  • Further invest in DRS
  • Create viable, supportive advocacy and grievance practices
  • Create a plan to address historical accessibility issues (e.g., existing inaccessible courses and buildings
  • Support for instructional staff and instructional designers
  • Increase the number of permanent faculty
  • Ensure that people with disabilities are represented among faculty and supported
  • Provide sufficient resources for TAs and temporary instructional staff to address accessibility without expecting them to work overtime to do this. One of the HUGE challenges is that creating access takes time/labor, often, and grad instructors frequently point to how overworked/undercompensated they are
  • Another challenge is that legal accommodations are structured as something that is provided by permission only, and attention to accessibility often follows accommodation, which does not fully address disability justice-related needs

Barriers to Increasing Access

A.J. Balatico, Erik Hofer, Michaelann Jundt, Matthew Saxton

This subcommittee is constructing a model of barriers to access in order to provide a framework for articulating the types of support structures that will require investment to reduce those barriers. Our current representation is a model with three categories of barriers and supports:

  1. Curricular: obstacles to access that arise from curricular or programmatic constraints in how academic programs are constructed, planned, and how students are admitted into them. Example issues might include: gateway courses, bottleneck courses, constraints on academic exploration, access to/demand for majors, or impact of enrollment
  2. Registration/Time Schedule issues related to how the time schedule is constructed for a given term and students’ ability to register against that time Examples include: availability of key courses, individual course capacity, time constraints, and prerequisite or gateway course time conflicts.
  3. Instructional Environment: challenges and support structures affecting access once a student is enrolled in a course. Examples include inclusive design, accommodations, student technology support/requirements, lecture capture, course modality, instructional technology literacy, and support for group work outside the classroom.

This is not intended to be a rigid model. Barriers in one category may affect barriers in other categories or barriers may be relevant to multiple categories. Access barriers in any category may also have quality implications that are better addressed by the other FoTL committee.

Hybrid and Online Supports and Policies

Bryan Blakeley, Andrea Carroll, Lisa Hoffman, Kevin Mihata, Marisa Nickle

Our conversations have focused on how hybrid and online courses should be treated from an administrative standpoint, as well as how faculty members access and receive assistance when they need it. A short list of draft recommendations follows.

  • Revise standards for online and hybrid course approval, including determining the rationale (if any) for treating online / hybrid courses differently
  • Improve communication of online / hybrid standards and course mode definitions
  • Clearly communicate what is and is not covered in UW policies about online / hybrid courses and what is determined at school / department level
  • Inventory training opportunities for faculty members and departmental support staff and communicate them more effectively
  • Create just-in-time training opportunities for faculty members (if none currently exist)
  • Create / refine roles for “faculty consultants” who can help faculty members with a wide range of experiences (i.e., “faculty concierge”)
  • Provide support for departments and curriculum committees on determining mix of modalities in different academic programs
  • Explore the need for additional instructional design consultation and support

In-Person Space Recommendations

Jon Bakker, John Danneker, Stephen Groening, Casey Self

Our work to date has included meetings with the registrar’s office, time schedule office, event services, and academic analytics. We have developed a set of guiding questions and some initial observations and recommendations.

Guiding Questions

  • How are rooms with different capabilities assigned? Is there a priority system?
  • If we increase flexibility in course mode, does that translate to flexibility in room assignment?
  • How are “bottleneck” or conflicting required courses handled at the time schedule level? Can remote instruction alleviate bottlenecks?
  • Are there any processes/infrastructure systems in place from course room assignments that could allow students/faculty to see unused spaces as a bookable asset more broadly?
    • Faculty teaching booths
    • Student attendance booths
  • Does the time schedule require one course per time slot in a classroom? Would there be a way to coordinate on a more granular level (e.g., course A meets in person MF one week while course B is virtual, and then the next week course A is virtual while course B meets in person during those same times in that same room)?
  • If we increase access to spaces (after hours weekends) are there safety or accessibility concerns?
  • Thinking about field trip courses: What is the most efficient way to get that information to students early? Are there ways to mitigate overlap with other courses?

Preliminary Observations and Recommendations

  1. Most equity/access issues are economic
  2. Utilize data from Dawgpath to identify current bottleneck courses
    1. Offer priority support and training to any faculty interested in adding online sections or online versions of a course
    2. Collect data on learning outcomes
  3. Time schedule flexibility depends on correct scheduling information inputs
    1. Train departmental time schedule reps to give accurate hybrid schedules
    2. Train faculty on what “hybrid” means and how to specify criteria for the classroom you want
  4. Create a central syllabus repository for students to have access to information about course requirements, including field trips and hybrid/online specifics
  5. Given that the Registrar does not manage field trip scheduling and conflict it will likely need to be handled at the departmental level, so a set of “best practices” should be developed for scheduling and requiring attendance for field trips/courses to minimize student schedule disruption
  6. Create a group to identify alternative procedures for time scheduling, based on benchmarking and local knowledge, and consider substantial upgrades to that process
    1. Current system cannot easily support specific needs for remote/hybrid instruction requests
      1. “Priority assignments” is variable, depends on pre-existing MOUs, and does not generally result in clear matching
      2. Too many resource requests (movable tables AND panopto) will result in class NOT being assigned a room, and having to be added manually by staff
      3. Diffused “ownership” of space (general, departmental, event spaces) leads to complex scheduling challenges
      4. The less faculty input, the more efficient the scheduling
  1. Expand pilot for a central room reservation system for small spaces and conference rooms, currently managed at the departmental level
  2. Identify under-utilized campus space to pilot student space reservations for online course work
    1. What underlying infrastructure could be used (e.g., 25 live, UW scout)
    2. What has already been tried?
    3. How do we establish equity between students from different departments and ensure all students can access all spaces?
    4. Who owns this space system and who pays for managing it?
  3. Pilot program to offer funds to departments to create faculty space for hybrid or online teaching (space access to be managed at the departmental level)
  4. Make summer quarter a real quarter
    1. Or bring A/B mentality to regular quarter
    2. Pay equity over summer quarter to offer actual classes
  5. Explore the possibility of outdoor classrooms, increased usage of UW-affiliated areas such as the Washington Park Arboretum, Union Bay Natural Area, and remote sites (e.g., Friday Harbor Labs, Pack Forest)