Speaker 1: We are live once again with some fantastic instructional design team members. We are so excited to learn about design with accessibility in mind. And we're going to talk a lot about design in Canvas courses and how accessibility works into all of that. I am thrilled to be joined by Nicole Hires, Dion Johnson, Kimberly Ellis. Thank you guys so much from the ID team. I always love having Dion on. I don't know if Kim's been on a live stream before with me. Nicole, it's just so exciting to see you guys fresh off of InstructureCon, where we had a ton of content. And I don't know about y'all, but I think I've slept for about four or five days since InstructureCon trying to catch up on all things that were happening during that time. But thank you guys so much for joining us. We'll do some brief introductions. Dion, if that's okay, I'll take over the introductory slides here and just introduce the team, those that are with us today. But Dion Johnson is a manager in our learning services department, obviously focused with the ID team, maybe the training team as well. Is that correct?

Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 1: No, just ID. Hey, we're moving and shaking here. We're also here with Kimberly, who is, that was a leap of faith. I knew you were going to be next, Kimberly, on the slide. Instructional designer, has been with Instructure for a few years. We're super excited to have her as well. And then, obviously, Nicole Hires, who has been with the company less than a year. Not a huge deal, but a huge instructional design fan. All of her credentials there, obviously, has been in education for seven plus years. We obviously love these folks. They have a lot of expertise. I'm going to kick it over to Dion. Let her kind of take the show from here. They've got a great presentation about accessibility and your Canvas course. So if you're hoping to learn more, this is the place to be. And accessibility is something we talk all the time about as a company, which I'm super thrilled for and just grateful that we have a company that cares and our instructional design team members are here to kind of take you into that world. So thank you guys so much for being here.

Speaker 2: Eddie, thank you so much. And I love your introductions and I am aligned with you. I'm so excited about accessibility. And this course is really a dream come true for me. It's probably been about three or four, maybe even five years that I became more aware of accessibility. And there were things that as I learned them, I thought, how can I help the masses? How can I help other people learn about natural language hyperlinks or how to effectively use headings or how to make sure that you have sufficient contrast? And at the time, I was dedicated to a client and I collaborated with another team member that was dedicated to another client. And we started putting together this course. And even in that moment, as I was putting together the course, I had this vision of a baby. I mean, something bigger and better and greater. And it really is a dream come true. And to connect with the instructional design team and have everybody share their passion and their knowledge and expertise and put together probably what I would pit as the best campus course that I've ever seen. I really feel that way about this course. And I'm so excited that people can purchase it and put it into their own instance so that faculty, staff, instructional designer, course designers, whatever the role is, that they'll have access to all of this content. And Kimberly, if you want to jump to the next slide, we'll just give people a quick little preview of what the homepage looks like. And I know Kimberly is going to dive deeper into what the content actually looks like. But if you'll hit next, we will share the slide deck out at the end of today's session so that you'll have all these links to the community blog post where we first introduced the idea of this course design with accessibility in mind. And it really was a labor of love by every single person on the instructional design team. And there's also a link to our one pager that talks about the course.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and Kimberly, if you want to pull up that one pager really quick, we can just give them a quick preview of what that'll look like. And so you'll get a real detailed overview of what to expect in this course, as well as some purchase options. And it's just a really exciting advertisement for our course that we are just so excited about.

Speaker 4: We'll put this slide deck in the chat, hopefully. Eddie, can you do that for us maybe? Or we'll chat about it before the session ends. And all of these links will take you to the links for the one pager. OK, let's see. My slides are overlapping. Sorry.

Speaker 3: It's all right. We've already had such great success since launching this course. So we have some feedback already that we can share with you. So one of our users said, course design with accessibility in mind is exactly the type of content I was hoping to learn more about. As a Canvas user, I wanted to know how to best implement UDL into course design and layout to create dynamic pages that are pleasing to the eye, as well as meet accessibility requirements for all learners. This course provides exactly that. Whether you're new to Canvas or a longtime user, everyone can take away something from this spectacular course. And I think that we all agree with that. We are so stoked about this and so excited for this to really go out to the public and for this to be more accessible to all of you. So we're really excited. And Kimberly is going to jump in a little bit deeper into what is offered in this course.

Speaker 4: For sure. Thanks, Nicole. It's awesome to see that feedback that we've gotten already. And I know this type of course would have been extremely helpful for me as a teacher. I also think that it's helpful for teachers to take a course in Canvas as a student because, you know, as teachers, we can see the student view in Canvas, but there's just something about that real experience as a student seeing it through the student lens. And it's a great way also for teachers to see a model course. They get inspiration of how they want to create their own Canvas courses. Right. So there are a lot of components that we're excited to share that this course includes. So I'll talk through some of those. The first thing is alignment. It was very important for our team not only to align the course with what we thought mattered most, but to practice what we preach. We wanted a rock solid course. We wanted to design it well. We wanted it to be accessible, mobile friendly. And the screenshot that you see here on the slide here, this is just a snippet of the objectives for one of the modules in the course. And notice, I don't know if you can see there, the objectives are all aligned with the course evaluation checklist and the universal design for learning guidelines, UDL guidelines. If you aren't familiar with the course evaluation checklist, you can check out the link in the slide deck. And that is like my number one resource for teachers. So check it out if you haven't already. It was a blog post that Dion posted a while back, and it is like our go to thing to share with customers. It's a free checklist, easy to use, and it will walk you through the steps of how to build a really quality class, course in Canvas, and all of the guides are there. So if you don't know how to do something, you click and it guides you along the way. So it is fabulous for sure.

Speaker 2: I just want to interrupt and say, the other thing I love about that checklist is you can make your own copy of it. So if you have institution specific objectives or you want to take some of those out or put some in, it's shared as a Google Doc so you can make your own copy and customize it, put your own branding on, etc.

Speaker 4: Awesome. The next thing that I think is really fun is that this course has a house building analogy. So these thing type courses are a great way to keep things interesting and to engage the learner. And we decided to build using a home, you know, building a home as our course theme. And we thought the process between building a home and building a Canvas course are so similar. So this is a perfect thing. And you can see this illustrated in the progression bars and also in the buttons, the page, the navigational buttons on the home page. So I'll just kind of talk through these buttons for a moment. The first button that you see is the course introduction. You see the welcome mat. And this is, you know, your learners are ready to enter the course. This is where they're going to get the course overview, the requirements, anything to get the learner ready to dive into the content. Then module one, we see plan. And this is where you're planning, you're dreaming, you're brainstorming about the content. You're creating a course outline, which is similar to a house blueprint. The second button or the third button you see here is module two, construct. So this is where the hard work is. Right. It's like you're building all of your content out. It's similar to the construction phase where you would put up the walls of your house. And then module three is design. This is where we discuss the aesthetics, the graphical components, which is similar to picking out your paint colors for your house and your tile and your carpet or whatever, like all of the fun, fancy things, right, to jazz up your course. And then module four is hosting. So your course is built, you're opening the door of your house or your class, you're inviting your students in. And this is where we kind of use the analogy of a housewarming party. This is where we touch on universal design for learning and humanizing the course and really making the learners feel at home inside of that course. Just like if you were to go into someone's house, you don't want to sit there stark and feel like you're not, you know, you don't belong there. You want to be able to go get a drink and mingle with the others in the house. And we talk about all of those things. And then we wrap up the course just leaving learners on their path to success, equipped to design Canvas classes with accessibility in mind. And so throughout the course, we have really good examples that show good and poor examples just to help learners recognize what good design is and what is accessible and what is not. We have resources throughout the course with supplemental materials, video demonstrations, pro tips, and all of the images and videos are available on our website. So all of the images and videos are completely accessible. We have all text and captioning on everything. This course is designed to run completely on its own as a self-paced course. So we have these knowledge checks like self-paced quizzes that are built into each module, but there are optional assignments and discussions that can be included in the course if you'd rather have it facilitated. We have customization options, which is one of my favorite things about the course. Dionne is going to talk about some of the purchase options in a minute, but I think it's super cool that this course can come branded like it is, branded with Instructure logo on it, or it can be completely customized for your institution. So the colors and the logo, you'll see here Bowling Green, Orange and Brown, and Kern County Navy Blue, and New Mexico's beautiful teal, and it just looks beautiful. The course can live right inside of your instance. So there's no need for your users to have to log into a different instance of Canvas to experience this course. And for those of you who have had to log into different instances of Canvas for professional learning, you know how huge this is to have it live right there on your teacher's dashboard without an extra login. This is one of my favorite parts. And the branding is not just changed here on the homepage like these screenshots show. It would be changed throughout the entire course. So in all of the discussions, assignments, pages, you're going to see those same colors that are branded for your institution. There are also some other customization options if you would like. So if you'd like to include badging, we can incorporate badging into it. The course utilizes videos, but if your institution has studio and you'd like to track your insights or you'd like to add in commenting and quizzing on top of your videos, those are additional options. Another option is that we can facilitate the course for you. Our instructional designers can facilitate it. We know administrators and educators are already so busy. You have enough on your plate. So if you would like our team to facilitate, we can do the personalized feedback, announcements, notifications, and even synchronous events if you want us to sync up and coach or support your teachers along the way throughout the course. So I'm going to hand it over to Dionne, and she can elaborate more on those purchase options that are available.

Speaker 2: Awesome. Thanks so much, Kimberly. Yeah, so we have the courses available, the course itself, which means it would be, again, as you mentioned, installed in the client's instance of Canvas. It doesn't include any updates or facilitation. It includes, like you mentioned, the self-graded quiz and can be run as is. It's perfect for those that prefer self-paced learning and does not, like I said, include any of those annual updates or facilitation by an instructional designer. The second option is you can get the course with annual updates. We know that Canvas has a new and improved version of Canvas about once a month. So updated screenshots are going to be included in there, as well as we're implementing the Addy model, and I'll talk about that a little bit more on the next slide, where we're getting feedback from people, what worked, what didn't work. And so as we get those improvements, we're going to be adding those to the course as well. And then if there's any updated accessibility information, we'll add that to the course. So that's what the updates include. The third is that you can add on instructional design hours for those facilitation or customization options that you just mentioned on the previous slide. So if you're interested in purchasing the course, the course with annual updates, or you want some instructional design hours, you just need to reach out to your CSM or your CSM team. And we also have the link to design services that talks about not only this course, but some of our other service offerings. So for those of you that aren't instructional designers, you may not be familiar with the Addy model, but that stands for analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate. And that's the process that we're going through with this course. So this is, we're actually already working on our third iteration, where we've got some additional videos that we're incorporating into the course, as well as those assignments and discussions. So to get that feedback, you can see there's a little screenshot of the feedback and some of the questions that we'll be gathering so that we can have new and improved versions all the time.

Speaker 4: So what else is happening in the Addy world? Another promotion that we have going right now is we have a buy two, get one free on all of our ready-made templates. So ready-made templates, if you've never used them, they're a great way to have this fill in the blank Canvas course for your teachers. They allow your educators to focus on putting in the content and less time on the technical aspects of designing an online class. So take advantage of this promo, and it will end the last day of November. And we'll end with this client testimonial.

Speaker 2: And I love this. We have a lot of testimonials that are out there, but I'll just read this particular one. The support we've received from the Instructure design team has been nothing short of amazing. From brainstorming to publication, they are there every step of the way to offer guidance and expertise to make beautiful, accessible courses. I highly recommend working with the Instructure design team on your next project. Love it, guys.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much. We've had a few people pop in. I know that I was talking to the Techtoses on Twitter, at Techtosa. They're our good friends that we've had on a number of live streams. We actually had them talk about accessibility, huge accessibility fans. They were so excited about this. Didn't really interact in the chat, but I just wanted to make sure they got a big shout out. And Hilde, one of our very good Canvas friends that we're always communicating with, was on here just a little bit late, super excited for the topic. So timely, right? Accessibility is something that obviously we have to think more and more about in this digital crazy world. So we definitely appreciate you guys taking your time. Did you have anything else? Obviously, we put the chat, the slide deck in the chat. Was there anything else that we wanted to throw out there? Any kind of links or anything that we could share? The deals. I didn't know we were going to get any deals, but we're going to get some deals. The deals. I didn't know we were going to get any deals on this thing. I felt a little bit like price is right. You're like two for the price of one. I did not expect that. So that's well needed in education as well, too. So do you guys have anything else you'd like to share?

Speaker 2: I just think about this course from the faculty or being the student and receiving courses that are designed with accessibility in mind, not only to provide those accommodations, but also like mobile. How many of your students are accessing content on a mobile device? And hundreds of hours have gone into developing this course. And I if I was on the user end, I for sure want to purchase something like this. It was just out of the box, ready to go and then leverage it with those annual updates or facilitation hours, if that is in your budget.

Speaker 1: So absolutely.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And just to add on to that, I, you know, from the perspective of someone freshly out of the classroom, I really didn't realize how important accessibility was. And so to have had a course like this to kind of set the tone of what my courses should look like for my students really would have been very powerful. So I'm really excited to see what this course does, the impact it's going to leave and how we can continue developing it to make it even more powerful for our teachers and therefore learners in the future. So I'm really excited.

Speaker 1: Kim, any final thoughts? I know when I put together, so we used to do a lot of we did some website work for a district that I was working for before I moved on to another district. But we were working on just revamping their website. And there was this big thing about accessibility and websites and schools and making sure that everything was clean and everything looked the way it should. And I was shocked by how bad, you know, and I think a lot of teachers, when they see kind of what Nicole said, when they see their course compared to maybe this course that's been developed, you know, under those rules, how different they might be.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I think of it as from a perspective, being a former administrator in an e-learning department, thinking about you have all of those checklists that you have to meet for accreditation standards. Or for grant requirements and things like that. This is a great way to check that box and say, yes, all of our teachers know about accessibility because this course lives on their dashboard or we require this of our teachers. Right. Great way to make sure that you are putting the information in their hands that is needed for all of those different checkpoints. And so thank you, Hilde, for your comment, I'm glad that you're joining us today.

Speaker 1: Yeah, Dionne, do you have a basic price structure that we can discuss or what's the best way for folks to kind of find out how to get this? Should they reach out to a CSM? Should they email the ID department? What's kind of the, what's the gatekeeper on this? So that some folks that are asking, we had a few folks in the chat ask, you know, how much does it cost?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so the CSM or the CSM team are your, that's your gateway for everything for learning services. But out of the, I know that it's $6,000, so I might as well just answer that question right here, and with the annual updates, it's an additional $1,000 per year. Got it. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: We appreciate you guys. No time is valuable and we had a hard stop right at one o'clock. You guys have just been phenomenal. Obviously, great information. If you have questions, feel free to reach out to Canvas Feedback, Canvas Help. Obviously, we've had some questions in the chat. Hopefully, we've answered them for you today. Guys, thank you so much again for joining. Thanks, Eddie. Thank you. Appreciate it. Until next time, keep learning, everybody out there in Canvas land and in Structure land. We really appreciate you. Thanks for watching.