Course Author Preparation

Course Author (faculty) Preparation 

Before designing an online course, we recommend that course authors, typically faculty, complete professional development that focuses on online teaching and design. Many colleges have created their own in-house professional development that is typically modeled after CVC@ONE’s Online Teaching & Design (OTD). It is recommended that this type of professional development covers: 

• Course design
• Interaction 
• Assessment
• Accessibility

More on Accessibility

All areas mentioned above are important; however, accessibility training deserves extra focus because of the nuances and details required to make content accessible. Within the accessibility portion of the training, integrating the use of any accessibility tools available to the college is key. This approach will ensure that faculty can identify and remediate accessibility issues before the course is reviewed by the POCR team. 

The accessibility training should include: 

• Heading styles
• Alt text
• Lists
• Descriptive links
• Table headers
• Color (both contrast and meaning)
• Captions/transcripts
  • Videos should include appropriate captioning including capitalization and punctuation 
• Accessibility Checkers:
  • Canvas Accessibility Checker
  • WAVE
• College Specific Accessibility Checkers
  • Pope Tech
  • UDOIT
  • Ally

Check this page out for more accessibility PD opportunities for review team and course authors