Tag: Teaching & Learning Digest

Learning Labs

Introducing Learning Labs

Briana Fraser

Learning Labs are interactive, focused, and supported learning sessions where you can learn how to implement Langara’s teaching and learning technologies and tools. Capacity is limited to ensure all attendees have an opportunity to ask questions, try out tools, and receive support. Support in the room will reflect the technology, tool, and learning outcomes; however, you can expect to interact with EdTech Advisors, Specialists, and Technologists as well as TCDC Curriculum Consultants. The Labs are an opportunity to implement something new or improve what already exists with experts who can answer technical questions and provide advice.

Fall Learning Lab session topics include:

Brightspace HTML Templates

After participating in this lab, participants should be able to:

  • Use the Brightspace HTML editor.
  • Explain the benefits of using the Brightspace HTML templates.
  • Apply the templates to a new Brightspace HTML page.
  • Apply the latest version of the template to an existing Brightspace HTML page.
  • Mix and match HTML elements—such as image placement, accordions, callouts, tables, and tabs—from the various templates.

Adding closed captions to a video in Brightspace

After participating in this lab, participants should be able to:

  • Upload a video to MediaSpace.
  • Add closed captions to a video.
  • Use the MediaSpace captions editor.
  • Use the OneDrive captioning tool.
  • Embed a video in a Brightspace course file.

Creating an accessible Word document

After participating in this lab, participants should be able to:

  • Employ plain language.
  • Select styles that improve legibility of text.
  • Structure a document.
  • Create accessible hyperlinks and tables.
  • Add alternative text to visual content.
  • Use the built-in accessibility checker.

Improving the accessibility of existing PowerPoint slides

After participating in this lab, participants should be able to:

  • Avoid the most common PowerPoint accessibility mistakes.
  • Use the accessibility checker and make corrections.
  • Apply templates.
  • Apply structure.
  • Select accessible fonts and font styling.
  • Employ accessible use of colour.
  • Add alternative text to images.
  • Write meaningful hyperlink text.

Save time marking with Rubrics

After participating in this lab, participants should be able to: 

  • Define the purpose of the assignment or assessment 
  • Decide which type of rubric will be used with assignments
  • Create statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric 
  • Transfer analog rubrics into a digital version on Brightspace 
  • Associate their rubric with the assignment in Brightspace 

 

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 

Generative AI and STEM

susanbonham

Background

Artificial intelligence is not new. It has been part of our personal and work lives for a long time (autocorrect, facial recognition, satnav, etc.) and large language models like ChatGPT have been a big topic in education since version 3.5 was released in late November, 2022. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on enormous amounts of data in order to recognize the patterns of and connections between words, and then produce text based on the probabilities of which word is most likely to come next. One thing that LLMs don’t do, however, is computation; however, the most recent Open AI release, GPT-4, seems to have made strides in standardized tests in many STEM areas and GPT-4 now has a plug-in for Wolfram Alpha, which does do computation.

Chart from Open AI: exam result improvements from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4

Andrew Roberts (Math Dept) and Susan Bonham (EdTech) did some testing to see how ChatGPT (3.5), GPT-4, and GPT-4 with the Wolfram plugin would handle some questions from Langara’s math courses.

Test Details

Full test results are available. (accessible version of the problems and full details of the “chats” and subsequent discussion for each AI response are available at the link)

The following questions were tested:

 

Problem 1: (supplied by Langara mathematics instructor Vijay Singh)

 

Problem 2: (Precalculus)

 

Problem 3: (Calculus I)

 

Problem 4: (Calculus II)

 

Discussion

Responses from current versions of ChatGPT are not reliable enough to be accepted uncritically.

ChatGPT needs to be approached as a tool and careful proof-reading of responses is needed to check for errors in computation or reasoning. Errors may be blatant and readily apparent, or subtle and hard to spot without close reading and a solid understanding of the concepts.

Perhaps the biggest danger for a student learning a subject is in the “plausibility” of many responses even when they are incorrect. ChatGPT will present its responses with full confidence in their correctness, whether this is justified or not.

When errors or lack of clarity is noticed in a response, further prompting needs to be used to correct and refine the initial response. This requires a certain amount of base knowledge on the part of the user in order to guide ChatGPT to the correct solution.

Algebraic computations cannot be trusted as ChatGPT does not “know” the rules of algebra but is simply appending steps based on a probabilistic machine-learning model that references the material on which it was trained. The quality of the answers will depend on the quality of the content on which ChatGPT was trained. There is no way for us to know exactly what training material ChatGPT is referencing when generating its responses. The average quality of solutions sourced online should give us pause.

Below is one especially concerning example of an error encountered during our testing sessions:

In the response to the optimization problem (Problem 3), GPT-3.5 attempts to differentiate the volume function:

However, the derivative is computed as:

We see that it has incorrectly differentiated the first term with respect to R while correctly differentiating the second term with respect to h.

It is the plausibility of the above solution (despite the bad error) that is dangerous for a student who may take the ChatGPT response at face value.

Access to the Wolfram plugin in GPT-4 should mean that algebraic computations that occur within requests sent to Wolfram can be trusted. But the issues of errors in reasoning and interpretation still exist between requests sent to Wolfram.

Concluding Thought

It will be important for us educate our students about the dangers involved in using this tool uncritically while acknowledging the potential benefits if used correctly.

Want to Learn More?

EdTech and TCDC run workshops on various AI topics. You can request a bespoke AI workshop tailored to your department or check out the EdTech and TCDC workshop offerings. For all other questions, please contact edtech@langara.ca

Brightspace Accessibility in Five, Bonus: Accessible Uploads

Luke McKnight

Brightspace plus accessibility logoBrightspace is an excellent tool to provide equitable, inclusive access to course content, documents, and media. 

As you create content, take advantage of Brightspace’s built-in tools and the Accessibility Checker to ensure what you share is accessible. Accessible content is inclusive, democratic, and maximizes learner independence. 

However, Brightspace is also a good tool to distribute other material such as lecture slides and documents. It is important that that material also be accessible. 

Creating accessible Word and PowerPoint documents is straightforward. Ensuring a PDF is accessible requires additional time and understanding of unique tools and code. 

The best practices (link text, colour contrast, headings, tables, and text equivalents) listed in this series apply to documents of all types. The process to ensure accessibility is slightly different depending on software.  

Microsoft Office Files

Word and PowerPoint have a built-in accessibility checker. To use this tool: 

  1. Navigate to Review 
  2. Select Check Accessibility 

Read more about making Office documents accessible.

PDF

To make accessible PDFs, it is best practice to make a Word or PowerPoint presentation accessible and then export to PDF. Adobe Acrobat Pro is required to ensure your PDFs are accessible. Try to avoid PDFs for content, except for forms and content to specifically be printed directly. For more information on making PDFs accessible, consult Langara’s Accessibility Handbook for Teaching and Learning. 

docReader

Brightspace now features the docReader tool. When a Word, PowerPoint, or PDF file is uploaded a Brightspace course, students will be able to have them read aloud using the Open with docReader button below the document viewer pane.

This tool does not absolve content creators of generating accessible content. This tool will not be able to read inaccessible documents.

Check out the other posts in the Brightspace Accessibility in Five series:

  1. Link Text
  2. Colour
  3. Headings
  4. Tables
  5. Text Equivalents

Brightspace Accessibility in Five, 5: Text Equivalents

Luke McKnight

Brightspace plus accessibility logo

Brightspace is an excellent tool to provide equitable, inclusive access to course content, documents, and media.

As you create content, take advantage of Brightspace’s built-in tools and the Accessibility Checker to ensure what you share is accessible. Accessible content is inclusive, democratic, and maximizes learner independence.

In the fifth of this five-part series, we will learn about text equivalents (alternative text and closed captions).

Alternative Text

Alternative text explains the content and context of an image to screen reader users. To write effective alternative text, consider how you would describe the graphic to a friend over the phone. Try to include all relevant information using proper grammar in less than 120 characters. Learn more in the Langara Accessibility Handbook alternative text chapter. 

Images may be marked as decorative if they are only included for visual effect or if the information in the image is also present in text adjacent to the graphic. 

When uploading a new image, Brightspace automatically prompts for alternative text. Enter a description in the Alternative Text field or check This image is decorative. Screenshot of Brightspace provide alternative text prompt

To add alternative text to existing images: 

  1. Select an existing image and choose Image options
  2. Check Image is decorative or enter a description in the Alternative description field.

Closed Captions

Captions provide a text equivalent of all audio elements in a video, presented visually in time with the video. Closed captions can be toggled on or off by the viewer. Open captions are ‘burned’ into the video and cannot be turned off.

Traditionally, we think of captions as an accommodation for viewers who cannot hear the audio in a video due to hearing loss. Statistics suggest 4-5% of the general population suffer some form of hearing loss. That number increases to around 20% for people over aged 60. However, 80% of 18 to 25-year-olds regularly use captions when watching video.

Captions are not just an accessibility essential, but also an excellent universal design for learning tool.

All new uploads to Kaltura (either in Brightspace My Media or Mediaspace) will have machine-generated captions automatically ordered. Videos added to OneDrive/SharePoint can have machine-generated captions ordered manually. Machine-generated captions are not accurate enough and must be edited. To learn more about captioning, read the Captions and Transcripts chapter of the Langara Accessibility Handbook.

Accessibility Checker

Brightspace includes a built-in accessibility checker. The checker appears on the second row of the editor toolbar.

  1. Select More Actions to reveal the second row of the toolbar
  2. Select Accessibility Checker

The accessibility checker will highlight many accessibility issues and offer solutions to correct them. However, the checker tool will not check videos for captions. This must be verified manually.

Check out the other posts in the Brightspace Accessibility in Five series:

  1. Link Text
  2. Colour
  3. Headings
  4. Tables
  5. Text Equivalents
  6. Bonus: Accessible Uploads

AccessAbility Week at Langara

Luke McKnight

AccessAbility Week, starting on Sunday, May 28, is an excellent opportunity to:

  • Acknowledge and celebrate individuals with disabilities.
  • Advance and emphasize the ongoing efforts to reduce barriers.
  • Reflect upon and acknowledge the progress made in fostering inclusivity and accessibility.

The goal of accessibility is to ensure that everyone can participate fully in their communities. Accessibility is not an accommodation. Accessibility is not about making space for any one person; it’s about building environments that are more inclusive and easier to access for anyone.

While accessibility is crucial for people with disabilities, efforts to reduce barriers benefit everyone. Barriers hinder people from being included, accessing information, and participating fully. Some examples of barriers are:

  • Doors without automatic openers.
  • Poorly lit rooms.
  • Inaccessible digital documents.
  • Websites that are hard to use.
  • Attitudes towards disabilities and accessibility.

Reducing barriers increases diversity, inclusion, and independence for everyone.

In EdTech, we are committed to developing resources that enhance accessibility across Langara’s digital environments. This includes promoting Brightspace best practices, improving captions in Kaltura MediaSpace, and creating resources to develop accessible content in Langara’s core technologies.

Explore our digital accessibility resources and email assistivetech@langara.ca to learn more.

In addition to AccessAbility Week, Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) occurs on May 18. Numerous GAAD events are scheduled, offering excellent opportunities to learn more about accessibility.

As an introduction to digital accessibility, consider this brief presentation:

Please contact assistivetech@langara.ca for more information.

Brightspace Accessibility in Five, 4: Tables

Luke McKnight

Brightspace plus accessibility logo

Brightspace is an excellent tool to provide equitable, inclusive access to course content, documents, and media.

As you create content, take advantage of Brightspace’s built-in tools and the Accessibility Checker to ensure what you share is accessible. Accessible content is inclusive, democratic, and maximizes learner independence.

In the fourth of this five-part series, we will learn about tables.

Tables

Tables should only be used to present data, not for layout or formatting. Include a header row and/or column and avoid blank, split, and merged cells.

Use the Table tool to insert and modify tables:

Use Table Properties for advanced settings such as style, padding, and formatting.

To set header rows:

  1. Select a cell in the row to be made a header
  2. Open the Table menu and choose Cell Properties
  3. Change Row type to Header and click Save

Do not add images of tables. If you must, ensure the image has alternative text that accurately conveys the table data.

Accessibility Checker

Brightspace includes a built-in accessibility checker. The checker appears on the second row of the editor toolbar.

  1. Select More Actions to reveal the second row of the toolbar
  2. Select Accessibility Checker

The accessibility checker will highlight many accessibility issues and offer solutions to correct them. For tables, the accessibility checker will flag tables without header rows or columns. The checker will also note tables without a caption and suggest users add a summary to long or complex tables.

Watch for more posts in the Brightspace Accessibility in Five series coming soon, including:

  1. Link Text
  2. Colour
  3. Headings
  4. Tables
  5. Text Equivalents
  6. Bonus: Accessible Uploads

ETUG Spring Workshop 2023

Briana Fraser

The Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG) is a community of BC post-secondary educators focused on the ways in which learning and teaching can be enhanced through technology. ETUG’s mission is to support and nurture a vibrant, innovative, evolving, and supportive community that thrives with the collegial sharing of ideas, resources, and ongoing professional development through face-to-face workshops and online activities.

Spring Workshop

This two-day online and in-person workshop will showcase how instructors, education developers, and education technologists are approaching design. For example, we’ll explore how digital literacy, inclusive technology, and AI could be “baked” into courses and how instructors are supported in making design decisions around technology. We’ll also consider the ongoing communication and capacity-building at institutions around digital literacy, accessibility, and AI, such as how teaching and learning centres and libraries get the word out to instructors and students about new approaches and resources.

Join ETUG online in Zoom or in-person at Kwantlen Polytechnic University Lansdowne Road Campus in Richmond, B.C. for this 2-day hybrid event, sponsored by BCcampus.

  • Day 1: June 1, 2023: 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM Pacific Time
  • Day 2: June 2, 2023: 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time

Workshop Rates: 2-day Registration Only

  • Early Bird In-Person: $175 CAD + 5% GST (ends April 29 at 11:59 PM)
  • Regular Rate In-Person: $200 CAD + 5% GST
  • Online: $150 CAD + 5% GST
  • Students: Free

Childcare

Attending an event sometimes means choosing professional development at the expense of spending time with family, but for large, multi-day events hosted by BCcampus, participants do not have to choose one over the other. Please let us know when you register if you will require childcare. You can read more about our childcare program and provider here Childcare Program Information

In order to secure nannies in time, our childcare registration cut-off date is May 15, 2023. 

Registration

Register online to attend the ETUG Spring Workshop

 

Brightspace Accessibility in Five, 3: Headings

Luke McKnight

Brightspace plus accessibility logo
Brightspace is an excellent tool to provide equitable, inclusive access to course content, documents, and media.

As you create content, take advantage of Brightspace’s built-in tools and the Accessibility Checker to ensure what you share is accessible. Accessible content is inclusive, democratic, and maximizes learner independence.

In the third of this five-part series, we will learn about headings.

Headings

Headings are an important part of documents and web pages. Headings create organizational flow, build connections between key concepts, and break up large blocks of text to increase readability. Screen reader users rely on headings to navigate the web and longer documents. For anything beyond a few paragraphs, headings are essential for screen reader users.

Use headings in a sequential, nested hierarchy. For example, use a Heading 1 for the title or topic. Use Heading 2 for major divisions of content and ideas. Use Heading 3 for subtopics of the major divisions. Brightspace supports 4 heading levels.

You can have multiple headings of the same level, but do not skip a heading level. A Heading 2 can follow a heading 1 or a heading 2. A heading 3 can follow a heading 2 or heading 3 and so on.

Headings benefit all readers. Headings:

• Include all, regardless of access means.
• Provide context and explains relationships between ideas.
• Emphasizes key concepts.
• Provides ‘bookmarks’ for natural breaks.
• Allows for easy review and location of content.

Creating Headings in Brightspace

Select the Format tool in the top left of the editor toolbar and choose the appropriate heading level.

For more information about headings and document structure, consult the Langara Accessibility Handbook.

Accessibility Checker

Brightspace includes a built-in accessibility checker. The checker appears on the second row of the editor toolbar.

  1. Select More Actions to reveal the second row of the toolbar
  2. Select Accessibility Checker

The accessibility checker will highlight many accessibility issues and offer solutions to correct them. For headings, the Brightspace accessibility checker will flag text that could be a heading due to formatting (bolded larger font on a line by itself for example) but is not properly coded as a heading. The accessibility checker also flags headings that are out of sequential order (for example a heading level 3 with no preceding heading level 2).

Watch for more posts in the Brightspace Accessibility in Five series coming soon, including:

  1. Link Text
  2. Colour
  3. Headings
  4. Tables
  5. Text Equivalents
  6. Bonus: Accessible Uploads