Tag: standards

Accessibility Teaching Practices at Langara College

Accessible Teaching Practices

Luke McKnight

Accessible BC Act – Start acting now. 

On June 21st, 2021, the Accessible British Columbia Act came into effect. The intention of the act is to create accessibility standards that will reduce accessibility barriers and promote inclusion throughout the province.  The act is being implemented in a phased rollout, with education one of the first sectors expected to comply. This mean that course content, such as presentation material, communications, documents, and videos will need to be made accessible to students with disabilities. 

EdTech is publishing resources, offering workshops, and providing other learning opportunities for instructors and other employees to develop the skills needed to improve the accessibility of course materials. 

Improving accessibility in the classroom. 

When aiming to improve accessibility in the classroom, instructors need to consider learning spaces, course design, assessment, content, and delivery. Read Bridging the Gap to get a sense of the ways in which critical barriers to learning may be addressed. 

Langara’s Assistive Technologist is here to help. 

Langara instructors (and students) are uniquely supported in improving access with an Assistive Technologist. If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Luke McKnight, consider joining one of EdTech’s upcoming accessibility focused learning opportunities. Luke will be on hand to offer expert advice and support in improving accessibility. 

Participate in EdTech’s upcoming accessibility-focused learning opportunities. 

Start developing your accessibility skills and knowledge by joining us for: 

Learning Lab: Brightspace HTML Templates 

September 15th, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM in C202 

How to Create Accessible PowerPoint Slide Presentations 

September 27th, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM online 

Learning Lab: Adding Closed Captions to a Video in Brightspace 

October 13, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM in C202 

Learning Lab: Create an Accessible Word Document 

November 3rd, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM in C202 

Learning Lab: Improve the Accessibility of Existing PowerPoint Slides 

December 8th, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM in C202 

AI Detection Tool Testing — Initial Results

Briana Fraser

We’ve limited our testing to Turnitin’s AI detection tool. Why? Turnitin has undergone privacy and risk reviews and is a college-approved technology. Other detection tools haven’t been reviewed and may not meet recommended data privacy standards.

What We’ve Learned So Far

  • Unedited AI-generated content often receives a 100% AI-generated score, although more complex writing by ChatGPT4 can score far less than 100%.
  • Adding typos and grammar mistakes or prompting the AI generator to include errors throughout a document can change the AI-generated score from 100% to 0%. 
  • Adding I-statements throughout a document has a dramatic impact in lowering the AI score. 
  • Interrupting the flow of text by replacing one word every couple of sentences with a less likely word, increases the perplexity of the wording and lowers the AI-generated percentage.  AI text generators act like text predictors, creating text by adding the most likely next work. If the detector is perplexed by a word because the word is not the most likely choice, then it’s determined to be human written.
  • Unlike human-generated writing, AI sentences tend to be uniform. Changing the length of sentences throughout a document, making some sentences shorter and others longer and more complex, alters the burstiness and lowers the generated-by-AI score. 
  • By replacing one or two words per paragraph and modifying the length of sentences here and there throughout a chunk of text — i.e. by doing minor tweaks of both perplexity and burstiness — the AI-generated score changes from 100% to 0%. 

To learn more about how AI detection tools work, read AI Classifiers — What’s the problem with detection tools?

Zoom – Live Transcripts

Ari Crossby

Zoom’s Live Transcript

""

Langara recently enabled a new Zoom feature – Live Transcript. Live Transcript provides machine-generated live speech-to-text transcription of a Zoom meeting. This feature is enabled by the host after a meeting is started. Participants only see the Live Transcript option if the host enables it.

Turning on Live Transcript during a meeting

  1. Begin your meeting 
  2. At the bottom of the screen, select Live Transcript. If you don’t see it, you might need to maximize the window. 
  3. Click Enable Auto-Transcription. The button will turn blue, indicating that live transcription is on. 

""
Once enabled, the Live Transcript button includes a tiny arrow on the top right corner. Clicking on it gives participants the option to view the transcript.  
""
The transcript is updated live as participants speak. At the end of the meeting the host and participants will be prompted to save the entire transcript. 

Limitations

  • The captions and transcript are machine-generated and do not meet accommodation standards for students requiring captions. 
  • The meeting host must start Live Transcription before participants can view the transcript. Any conversation that occurs prior to enabling the feature will not be transcribed.  
  • Live Transcripts are not available in Breakout Rooms. 
  • Live Transcripts only supports English.