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We will be co-presenting on the community contributions to UCF's UDOIT, an open source, accessibility self-auditing tool for Canvas. Karen and Jacob will provide a brief history of the UDOIT tool, and Michelle will describe how she got involved and developed the UDOIT User Guide which is available through Canvas Commons.
History of UDOIT
At UCF, approximately 40% of all courses offered each semester have at least one student requiring an accommodation, and one of the tasks of the Center for Distributed Learning department at UCF is to evaluate the online courses for possible accessibility issues for students.
As many of you already know, manually evaluating course content is time-consuming, so we set out to either find or create a tool that would fulfill the following goals:
- Self-Service
- Easy to Use
- Provide Actionable Results
- Educational to Faculty
In the end, we decided to take an existing tool we developed internally (built using the Quail PHP library) and integrate it into Canvas using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard.
In 2013, we won a $10,000 “Canvas Grant” from Instructure to kickstart the project. While not a condition of the grant, we decided that whatever we created would be released under an open source license so that it could benefit the community.
In June of 2015, we released UDOIT under the GPL V3 open source license on GitHub.
In 2017, Michelle, from Clemson University, developed a guide for UDOIT which is available from Canvas Commons under the Creative Commons license Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike. Be sure to come to our presentation to learn more about how she got involved and how she developed this resource.
In May 2018, the latest version of UDOIT (2.3.2) was released.
Meet the Speakers
- tr_jbates from University of Central Florida:
- Jacob Bates has been a web developer for the past 14 years. He began as a part-timer at the University of Central Florida using Flash and PHP to make educational games and other interactive elements for online courses. After a stint in the private sector creating virtual training scenarios for the US Military, he returned to UCF to lead the Techrangers Team, a group of part-timers that create web applications, educational systems, and LMS integrations.
- @karen_tinsley-k from University of Central Florida:
- Karen is part of the Instructional Development, or "iDev," Team that creates tutorials and training to equip faculty, staff, and students to effectively use Webcourses@UCF and other online instructional assets. Karen coordinates Blind/Low Vision and Deaf/Hard of Hearing online content accessibility reviews. In 2014, her proposal for UDOIT (pronounced “You do it,” for the Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool), was awarded a Higher Education Canvas Grant for Applying Universal Design for Online Learning.
- @mtuten from Clemson University:
- Michelle Tuten is the Accessibility Coordinator for Clemson University’s online education department (Clemson Online). She spends much of her time evaluating the quality of online courses, developing training materials, and assisting faculty in developing online classrooms that present fewer barriers to learning. In early 2017, she developed a user guide for UDOIT, which is just one example of how members of the Canvas Community can and do contribute to the development of UDOIT.
Link to Event in Agenda
[UPDATE]
Thanks to all who were able to attend! For those who weren't able to attend, check out the following links:
