Review
- Interactive Design: 1.2 points—a bit higher than Poor
- Incorporation of Multimedia Learning Principals: 1.8 points—a bit lower than Acceptable
The marketing promotion of this webinar stated that it would explore the legal and practical issues surrounding digital accessibility and accessibility issues more generally in higher education. Instead, it provided little information beyond the basics. This webinar is best suited for individuals who are being exposed to the ideas of accessibility in higher education for the first time.
Overall, the “New Era of Digital Accessibility” Webinar is a poor synchronous training as it does not fully utilize the technology to create a synchronous interactive learning event. This webinar does a bit better as an asynchronous training, as its use of multimedia principles scores higher than its use of interactive design. Topically, this webinar is useful for information about how the U.S. Justice Department is viewing accessibility standards in lawsuits. It is also a useful resource for additional readings on the topic of universal design. A person newly thrust into the role of leading accessibility and instructional design on campus may find some of the Q&A valuable as well.
Evaluation
The webinar was assessed according to the principles of interactive design and for use of multi-media learning principles. This webinar scores poorly on nearly all metrics.
Interactive Design
- Division of Learning Content: acceptable
- Individual, small, and large group activities: poor
- Webinar leader as moderator: poor
- Interactive experience: poor
- Technology to facilitate participant interaction: poor
Multi-media Principles
- Use of dual channels: poor
- Contiguity: poor-to-acceptable
- Modality, redundancy, and coherence: poor-to-acceptable
- Personalization: good
- Segmenting and pre-training: acceptable
Category: Interactive Design (1.2 out of 3)
Division of learning content
Ideally, this principle involves deciding what work should be completed before the webinar, which exercises should be completed asynchronously, and which activities require synchronous learning.
Strengths
- The webinar provided two resources to be read asynchronously for further learning.
- Synchronous activities involved real-time response to participant questions.
Weaknesses
- This webinar did not have any pre-learning activities.
- It included a PowerPoint presentation that could have been read by learners before the webinar.
Evaluation: acceptable (2 points)
Individual, small, and large group activities
Weaknesses
- There were two individual activities: listen to the presenters, and ask questions. The webinar was set up so that individuals could only see their own questions and could not respond to other questions.
- There was no group formation, nor any ability to see any of the other participants. Although the presenters referred to having a large and diverse audience, each participant was completely isolated from the group.
Evaluation: poor (1 point)
Webinar leader as moderator
Weaknesses
- The two facilitators served as presenters, rather than moderators. They talked through their PowerPoint presentation, and then answered questions that only they could see.
Evaluation: poor (1 point)
Interactive experience
Weaknesses
- The interactive activities consisted of posing questions to the facilitators.
- It was impossible to see other participants’ questions or comments.
Strengths
- The facilitators encouraged participants to Tweet the webinar using the #IHEaccess hashtag. Tweets using this hashtag were streamed to participants during the presentation.
- The facilitators did make an effort to share some of the comments participants were making in response to hearing the questions and answers.
Evaluation: poor (1 point)
Technology to facilitate participant interaction
Weaknesses
- The technology enabled participants to type questions to the facilitators, and to hear the facilitators’ response to those questions the facilitators chose to answer.
- The technology did not allow participants to interact with each other or have a dialogue.
- The technology did not allow for group generation of ideas in response to current issues surrounding accessibility, a point that was acknowledged tacitly by the presenters when they encouraged the participants to email their ideas for a possible future webinar.
Strengths
- A Twitter plugin was provided to enable participants to easily live-tweet and see other participants’ tweets.
Evaluation: poor (1 point)
Category: Multimedia Learning Principals (1.8 out of 3)
Use of dual channels (visual and auditory)
There were minimal graphics, several of which were screen-shots of text. There was also minimal text. The visual channel was completely irrelevant to the presentation. It would have served equally well as a podcast based on how visuals were used. Visual information was inconsistent in its use to reinforce key concepts being presented orally. While many graphics were related to the instructional purpose, they were primarily decorative. The slide that mentioned traditional disabilities had a picture of an individual in a wheelchair and another picture of an individual using sign language. Another slide shows an image of a young man holding a sign that said, “Deaf President Now” to highlight activism related to disabilities. These graphics did not enhance the learning experience, save to highlight information presented verbally (either through text or narration). There were no organizational, relational, interpretive, or transformational graphics.
Evaluation: poor (1 point)
Contiguity
The contiguity principle was inconsistently used as text and graphics did not seem to be consistently chosen to reinforce learning objectives. Sometimes a graphic was displayed without any text. This training had all key components on one screen. Participants could move easily between the webinar widgets without losing focus on the presentation. All feedback was presented orally, although there was minimal interactivity. Linked information always appeared in a new screen that would appear on top of the primary screen, but did not interfere with the audio delivery. As the linked information was meant for asynchronous learning after the completion of the webinar, and the visual material was largely superfluous to the synchronous learning, this was acceptable.
Evaluation: poor-to-acceptable (1.5 points)
Modality, redundancy, and coherence
In general, the presenters used speech for words as opposed to presenting a great deal of text for the participants to read. At times, presenters read their slides. As there was minimal text on the slides, this was not specifically a violation of the redundancy principle. In some senses the presenters adhered to the coherency principal, as there were few extraneous words and graphics. However, as mentioned above, there did not seem to be good pedagogical reasoning for use of visuals in this presentation. I found it easier to concentrate on the webinar when I stopped looking at the slides and simply focused on what the presenters were saying.
Evaluation: poor-to-acceptable (1.5 points)
Personalization
The presenters used conversational speech throughout with minimal use of vocalized pauses and good intonation. One of the presenters was much louder than the other presenter, which may have been a technology issue, particularly since I had the sense that they were not in the same location. The only way this principal could have been improved is with video showing the presenters as they were talking. This may have served to enhance the visual channel, which was otherwise underutilized in the training.
Evaluation: good (3 points)
Segmenting and pre-training
The PowerPoint did a good job of segmenting the various topics the presenters covered. Each topic had its own slide. They did attempt to group the questions into appropriate segments during the Q&A. There was no pre-training. However, given the basic nature of this presentation, pre-training would not have been appropriate.
Evaluation: acceptable (2 points)
Ratings Key
- Poor = 1
- Acceptable = 2
- Good = 3