H810: Accessibility Ahead

H810: Accessible Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students is in its first presentation at the Open University. While I have a strong background and interest in accessibility issues for the Web, I do not have much expertise in applying this to e-learning particularly. As a result, I have been working through the course materials on a week-by-week basis myself, linking my own knowledge to pedagogy and research and ensuring that I am familiar with what my students are expected to know. Given that the course is rated at 15 hours a week, this has not been a trivial exercise, although some of the hours have been set aside for students to reflect and contribute to blog or forum entries. Those activities I have omitted, but I have worked through all of the resources (and beyond) and tried out many of the practical activities included in the course. When it came time to grade student essays at the end of Week 6, I discovered that all of that reading had a cognitive price to pay in terms of remembering what had come from where and the specifics.

I wrote the following short message back on November 4th in one of my H810 threads discussing possible alternatives for content delivery in the H810 course:

I’m going to write a more detailed blog post about this (when I have some time!), but one thing I noticed especially about this course is that it’s merciless if you have any kind of memory problem. I’m not sure if you’ve seen my previous blog posting about my own memory problems, but I found my memory particularly problematic while commenting on your TMAs. I’d remember that I’d read/seen something somewhere that I wanted to share with you, but I couldn’t remember where exactly. Normally this doesn’t cause me too much trouble because I either helped write the course or the majority of the course is available as downloadable PDFs, that I can then easily search in tools that I have locally. Where you’re being sent off here, there, and everywhere, and the descriptions of where you’ve been going are fairly general, then it’s very difficult to search. Although I knew I relied on electronic records and notes a lot, it didn’t really hit home how much I really do need to rely on that to supplement my tenuous memory.

H810 is one of the Open University’s predominantly “contentless courses.” That is, the majority of the course is actually drawn from third-party resources and the Open University predominantly acts as a kind of editor in choosing out the appropriate resources and providing a framework of activities and commentary in which to situate those resources. I’ve helped write one of these contentless courses myself, but the degree to which it is contentless depends on the subject matter and availability of high-quality, stable, authoritative resources in the area. The stability and authoritative aspects are particularly important. Just because it is on the Web does not automatically guarantee that what the resource says is true. Just because it is on the Web now does not guarantee it will be still on the Web in six months. We have already seen the “BBC Ouch!” student diaries we used as case studies in the course disappear suddenly, a few weeks after we used them.

H810 relies extensively on external resources. In Week 4, where we first met the “BBC Ouch!” student diaries, students are asked to read accounts from the following:

1. 4 one-month long web diaries of students with disabilities starting university at “BBC Ouch!“
2. 12 student profiles drawn out of forty available ones at the SKILL Student Experiences site.
3. 3 video case studies of students from Skills for Access.
4. 7 case studies plus any that interest out of twenty-five case studies at DART.
5. 30 case studies from LExDIS project, which were unavailable at time of writing and time of use.
6. A lengthy (20,000+ words) essay on the history of Worcester College for the Blind from http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/visugate/public_exprmedu.hcsp.
7. Review a collection of typewriter adaptations from http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/1284.htm.

That makes 26 case studies by my account that were actually available and I know I personally reviewed a great many more. Without having taken notes on all the case studies I reviewed, could I remember which case study, or from where, something had been mentioned? No. You might think that’s only natural, but even in units where there weren’t such a vast number of case studies, the number of web sites visited or pages read in the e-book become very difficult to keep track of when you decide later, “Oh, I remember reading something about this” and then your memory fails you and you cannot remember where.

As I commented in my short forum posting, this previously had not been that big of an issue for me as most courses are delivered electronically and I can just search the materials for what little I do remember. That strategy failed me here, because all of the content is actually external to what the course directly provides. It was quite frustrating trying to recall where I had seen something. At the same time, it was enlightening to realize how much reliance I have placed on search as a scaffold for my own inability to retrieve or commit things to memory. Again, in retrospect, it seems obvious. That is why I keep such detailed research journal notes and maintain a bibliography database with extended information in a very disciplined fashion. I am providing myself with the data I will need later to remember something.

How can I do that on a “contentless course” without making and keeping notes on everything by hand? Keeping notes would likely work, but it is too much work given how many resources are being used in this particular course. One possible solution is that, similar to a list of references, an annotated resource list is provided by the course team. The problem with that is that it would likely summarize the SKILL Student Experiences site as “Profiles of students with various disabilities or impairments in a higher education setting”, which does not help you remember which students or interesting profiles were there.

Another possibility is the Firefox ScrapBook extension. I originally started using it to keep local copies of some course content pages because the Open University’s VLE has been acting up at inconvenient moments. This very cool Firefox extension allows you to make a complete, painless local copy of an individual web page (or a set of pages), as well as allows you to use customizable highlighting pens on the content, remove some content, or even add annotations as text or links to other material. In addition, you can organize your saved content into folders, like bookmarks, and, most importantly for my purposes, do a full-text search. If I was using Firefox full time instead of its Gecko-powered, Mac-enhanced Camino brother, I might be tempted.

I think a better solution is for me to use something I’m already using: DevonThink Pro for the Macintosh. I’ve been using DevonThink Pro as a research notebook, miscellaneous journal, and grade notebook. It handles many kinds of media with ease: images, PDFs, RTF, text, etc, allowing you to easily search and classify those documents, whether they’ve been imported completely into its database or just imported by reference. It also can handle bookmarks or web archives. A web archive, just like in ScrapBook, is a complete record of a single web page or even an entire web site. While it is some work to add an entire web site or specific pages to DevonThink, the task is made easier through the use of a bookmarklet I can install in my browser (see picture above). If I want an entire web site, it’s easier to use the built-in download tool in DevonThink itself, which will download anything linked to a given start page. The end result is the same: a local and completely searchable copy. It has the additional bonus that DevonThink’s classification engine will also thoughtfully suggest related content it already knows about (see last picture)

I have only touched on the capabilities of ScrapBook and DevonThink, but I think they both have strong possibilities for supporting other people with memory committal or retrieval problems, even though that is not their primary function. ScrapBook is available free, whereas DevonThink Pro is a commercial software product sold for $79.95 US. It is available at 25% discount for educational users or non-profits. There is also a “personal” edition available, which has fewer features, but is half the cost.

I now have a job ahead of me going back through the first ten weeks of the course and archive the resources I previously read or reviewed into a new H810 DevonThink notebook.

More information:

• Devon Technologies. 2008. “DevonThink”. Retrieved on November 17, 2008 from http://universalusability.com/index.html.
• ScrapBook Firefox Extension. 2008. Available online from http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/.