For the past 16 years, the Catalyst Awards program has honored innovation and excellence in the Blackboard global community. In this series, a group of 2021 winners from across the globe shares their success stories and best practices.

This post was guest authored by Lesley Casarez, Director of Quality Enhancement Program, Program Coordinator of MS in Professional School Counseling, and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Angelo State University.

Dr. Casarez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Angelo State University, where she oversees the nationally-recognized master’s degree in Professional School Counseling and the Quality Enhancement Program. Prior to coming to ASU, she worked as a public school counselor and teacher.  Casarez completed her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at Texas Tech University and holds degrees from Sul Ross State University, Texas State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.  

Angelo State University is a 2021 “Inclusive Education” Catalyst Award winner. 

Angelo State University’s school counseling programs provide students with the option to earn their degree and state certification through an online graduate program, and have been doing so for over ten years. The number of students has grown significantly during that time, from about fifty students to over five hundred. 

Our journey to inclusive education began in 2014 when I was confronted with an accessibility issue. A hard-of-hearing student was having difficulty watching videos in her online class and described her experience: 

"At the beginning of my first course in the online graduate program, we were assigned videos to watch and use as resources for writing papers, doing assignments, etc. Since I am deaf and wear a cochlear implant, audio/video is very difficult for me to understand. I use a plug that I have for the computer and my cochlear device, however I still could not understand all of the videos. I always use closed captioning when watching television and also am able to read lips if the presenter is facing the camera. Since there were many videos and films to watch in the first course, I researched some of them on the internet and found a few transcripts. This was very helpful, but took up a lot of extra time. My family also watched the videos with me and tried to interpret what they were saying so that I could use it to do my assignments. However, I then began to worry that it could affect my grade and I would not be able to do the online program due to my deafness." 

This student created a need to pursue inclusive education through redesigning and redeploying the way we present information to students. Although this student has long since graduated, her struggle provided the university with a basis to provide current and future students with open access to education. This one student caused a domino effect that united the university to pull together the utilization of Blackboard course templates, closed captioning and Readspeaker, implementation of Blackboard Ally, and a focus on inclusive content. All of this has provided a success roadmap that is now being showcased across campus and at the national level to help others reap the benefits. It also launched a culture of inclusion that has begun to shape how administration, faculty, staff, and students view appropriate accessibility. The overall goal for inclusion began simply to make courses accessible, but has morphed into creating a culture of inclusion university-wide. The outcomes have been measurable at the course level through student feedback and the implementation of Blackboard Ally, and, as we progress university-wide, additional metrics have shown us gaps and areas where we have had success already. This has been a collaborative effort between the Office of Student Disabilities, E-Learning, and others. 

Reimagining Education

Through this process, faculty learned that frontloading a course with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) techniques allow for avoiding common mid-course issues that may arise. It is imperative that accessibility is incorporated proactively when building courses, rather than a response to specific student needs. Incorporating these techniques, in addition to those discussed below, enables all learners to receive maximum benefit from instructional materials provided within online courses.   

Expanding through University Change

Recently, the university has determined the implementation of Blackboard Ally will benefit faculty and students in multiple ways. Representatives from each college, Information Technology, eLearning, and Student Disability Services worked together to plan the campus-wide implementation of Blackboard Ally, as well as training for those who will be utilizing the services. This implementation has the support of university administrators, from the provost to the deans of the colleges. 

The project implementation team introduced the product across campus through multiple avenues. Additionally, the policy committee worked to ensure that a university policy will help standardize accessibility expectations across campus. This was such an unusual introduction that it was one of the first policies introduced to be housed in both academic affairs and student affairs. The committee also drafted an accessibility glossary, which has been publicly published on the university website. 

Faculty Development

Another project entailed a training course for faculty to help them understand how to implement accessibility within their courses using the tool Blackboard Ally. The Director of Student Disability Services worked with the E-Learning team to develop a training course, met with the pilot participants, and followed up to see how they implemented the learned information. Twenty out of the twenty-four participants in the study were actively involved in a self-paced online training, which included how to create accessible content using Blackboard Ally, the automated accessibility checker housed within Blackboard, along with information on various laws and legislation guiding ADA compliance. The training culminated with an awareness quiz to help faculty identify areas of accessibility they needed additional guidance with. Furthermore, a discussion board was set up to allow participants to engage with their peers, provide thoughts and feedback to one another, and receive additional guidance from the trainers. An additional piece of this study included engaging four faculty members in a structured focus group to better gauge their understanding of the course content. The project culminated with 15 faculty members utilizing Blackboard Ally as a tool in their course to improve accessibility of the course content.   

As all courses were forced online during the pandemic in 2020, these practices have been helpful in educating faculty and staff with how to implement quality accessibility practices within courses. Some of the pilot participants elected to continue using Blackboard Ally to review course content for their future courses. As a result of the pilot, the participants encouraged their peers, university-wide, to use the tool and champion the efforts of the project implementation team. 

Additionally, a text-to-speech tool, ReadSpeaker, was piloted during a mini-session in the spring of 2021. This tool was offered to all students taking courses during this mini-session, not just those requiring accommodations. The tool was intended to offer an immediate impact on all student success by allowing the delivery of course content in a variety of ways. 

Additionally, compliance training has been approved for campus use to help educate the larger campus community about the importance of accessibility. Training sessions are ongoing as accessibility and tools continue implementation. 

Student Level

All of the avenues to implement accessibility mentioned above started with baby steps to help one student. Those baby steps benefited the student and helped to ensure an inclusive experience in the graduate educational program: 

"Having closed caption and transcripts for all videos is perfect! I was pleasantly surprised to see them even on professor introduction videos. It has really helped relieve anxiety and frustrations. Since audio/video are my only difficulties in the online learning environment, the CC and transcripts are the only areas that I saw a need for improvement. Ensuring that all videos are formatted this way makes it much easier."   

University Level

At the university level, the Blackboard Ally project implementation team has been able to showcase various accessibility programs, especially as courses have been pushed online due to the pandemic. As previously mentioned, the training course for faculty helped participants learn how to implement accessibility within their courses. The optional training sessions resulted in 33 faculty agreeing to participate. At the conclusion of the semester, 20 faculty reported the training was useful, and found value in using the tools provided. Several of the participants requested to continue using Blackboard Ally in future courses and submitted requests to have the tool made available in their courses for the following term. The focus group participants used terms such as “loved, liked, very helpful, and valuable” to describe their experiences from the training. At the conclusion of the study, faculty unexpectedly reported enjoying seeing the gauges turn from red to green, indicating they had successfully improved their course content. 

An institutional level report was collected prior to and after the training being offered to faculty. At the conclusion of the study, there was a marked improvement reflecting a 3.59% increase in the accessibility of online course content for the study participants’ courses and a 4.83% overall increase in accessibility institution-wide during the same term. An overall institutional increase of 1.24% was achieved by 20 faculty members who participated in the study. As of this fall, Blackboard Ally has been turned on for courses campus-wide. 

The pilot of a text-to-speech tool, ReadSpeaker, received mixed feedback from students and faculty. There were 609 students enrolled in the pilot with 64 students registered for accommodations with the Office of Student Disability Services. During the three-week session, 18,748 clicks were recorded with 1,930,281 characters read. One of the benefits to this tool is the availability to all students, not only to students with registered accommodations. 

At each of these levels (student and university), there have been processes that could easily be replicated at other universities. It is important to note that this has been something that was not accomplished overnight, but, rather, with persistence and advocacy on the part of individuals across campus coming together over the course of several years. 

Learn more about Angelo State University’s Catalyst Award for Inclusive Education here.

For more on our Catalyst Awards Program visit our Catalyst Awards Page.