Open Education 2015

This special session takes an in-depth look at the accessibility efforts of BCcampus, CAST, and the FLOE Project as they relate to open educational resources.

1. User Testing Open Textbooks with Students with Print Disabilities

BCcampus will briefly describe the process of user testing open textbooks with post-secondary students who have print disabilities. The focus will be on the lessons learned in this process and how this data fed into the creation of a toolkit on accessibility for open textbook authors. Presenters will share failures and reflect on how to improve this process in the future. The presentation will showcase the BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit and share best practices with the audience on how to make all open educational resources accessible, therefore making the materials truly open to all.

2. CAST projects

Project Open (https://open4us.org) is an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help TAACCCT grantees meet OER, accessibility, and quality requirements for grant deliverables in the U.S. Department of Labor's two billion dollar Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) program. We will describe the process of working with community and technical colleges to develop Open Educational Resources that follow universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines and web accessibility standards. We will focus on what we have learned about how to support UDL implementation and web accessibility best practices from our engagement with colleges through the largest OER initiative to date (the Department of Labor's TAACCCT program). We will showcase udloncampus.cast.org a set of web resources we have developed to help postsecondary stakeholders integrate Universal Design for Learning into the development of course materials, teaching methods and assessments and discuss how OER creators can move from addressing web accessibility to designing for all students through UDL.

The Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) Center (http://aem.cast.org/) has a mandate to provide technical assistance resources designed to increase the availability and use of curriculum resources and delivery systems designed accessible from the outset, including elementary, secondary, postsecondary and workforce-related OER. We will review best practices in OER creation with an emphasis on EPUB3; the emerging importance of equipping OERs with the capacity for data interoperability related to student usage, and we will emphasize the important role of accessibility as foundational component in the creation of UDL-aligned OER.

3. FLOE project

The FLOE Project (http://floeproject.org) leverages the diverse pool of Open Education Resources (OER) and the opportunity to create variants to optimize learning for the full diversity of learners. FLOE supports learners in discovering and refining their understanding of how they learn best, specifying this, and then the FLOE services can be used to match those needs for a given learning goal.