 If no further ado, I will hand over to you. We've got 20 minutes for your session. So please, please lead away. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. And we're so honored to spend this time with you and to have the opportunity to virtually present this. My name is Margaret Crone. I'm a second time presenter. And I'm from UMass Amherst. I'm a doctoral candidate. And I am here with my longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Chris Paul, from North Carolina Central University. Today, we're going to be talking about, and the title of our talk is Sustainability Through Accessibility, the Essential Role of Universal Design and Sustainable Open Education. And this presentation will address the theme of sustainable open education communities by investigating the opportunities of multidimensional sustainability through accessible educational resources. So today, in our reflective practice, we have four objectives. The first is to evaluate definitions and the linkages of sustainability and accessibility. Explore opportunities for sustainability through the promotion of accessibility and open educational communities and resources. Share some examples of research and teaching practices from early childhood education and also higher education in general. And engage with the audience about some opportunities for bridging sustainability and accessibility within their own educational domains. And now, I'm going to hand it over to Chris. Thanks, Maggie. So Maggie and I are part of a sustainability network based in higher education organizations here in North Carolina in the US called the Trillium Workshop. And the Trillium Workshop defines sustainability as a tripartite goal of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. And by this, we mean that the elements of sustainability are interrelated, not just ensuring environmental quality and global resource sustainability, but also ensuring social sustainability through improving equity by promoting economic sustainability, ensuring access to the resources we need, and all of which promote the more traditional definition of environmental sustainability of maintaining and promoting a better world. And so because of this, I think we think of, at our most recent workshop, focused on the relationships between sustainability and justice, that ensuring sustainability is a key way to approach justice. And if part of open educational resources is about ensuring care and justice, we need to think about how we can ensure sustainability into all of our OER work. So though we're not in person, and I'm sorry that we can't meet you together, we did want to start by asking three questions that you can share in the chat box or make notes to yourself, either way, of how you see justice and sustainability overlapping in your institution, whether or not you have a course or program in mind that you are either already adapting or thinking about involving sustainability, or when you think about your programs, you could have better sustainability. And I think all of us are finding new resilience and new needs in the COVID-19 crisis. So think about what challenges to sustainability have been revealed. I know at our institutions in North Carolina, in some ways, I think we're quite surprised at how rapid people have been able to move to accessible online and OER resources for our students and faculty. And so in some sense, perhaps, there was resilience there that we didn't know about as we all shifted online. So maybe just take a moment to jot those down. You can share them in the chat box if you're able to. So moving, one more moment. And these sides, of course, like all will be available and we'd love to hear from you and converse in these questions at a later point as well. Of course, a major representation of sustainability is captured in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And of these goals, Sustainable Development Goal number four calls for quality education, and specifically free, equitable, and quality education. And within that goal, there is a particular indicator, 4.8.1, that is assessing access to adapted infrastructure and materials for students with disabilities. And I think this is actually a key indicator, not just for access to those with disabilities, but a way to improve all abilities. And so what we'd like to talk about in our presentation is how addressing accessibility, as noted in this Sustainable Development Goal, is part of a way to move towards sustainability. And so to talk about that, Maggie will tell us about universal design for learning. Thank you, Chris. So universal design for learning is an accessibility framework that addresses accessibility by helping people with and without disabilities become people with abilities. And both in terms of access to content in terms of understanding it, and also talking about formatting as well. So there are three main principles that so we're going to refer to it as UDL, as noted in the title of the slide, to provide multiple means of action and expression, so the how of learning, engagement, the why, and representation, so the what of learning. And the connection we're trying to make with sustainability here in this presentation is that UDL increases sustainability by helping educators create and use accessible and sustainable materials and resources that enhance a learner's ability to engage and learn. And I'm just going to sort of go back a second in preparation for this presentation. My response to question two that he asked about what program would you adapt, I would adapt working with pre-service teachers and working in inclusive classrooms, and especially in terms of social, emotional learning and supporting children with disabilities. And I feel like this is sustainable and by teaching them about universal design and accessibility in general, early in their careers and nurturing them with knowledge and support will help them build reflective practices and sustainable practices in their classrooms. Since teachers teach what they know, if they have more knowledge, support, and access to accessible information, it will enhance their ability to teach with effective practices and keep an evolving practice. Right now, we live in a digital age. We are this conference overall theme is CARE, which we argue can be translated as connecting sustainability and accessibility by increasing all learners access to educational resources, no matter what form they're in, so visual, auditory, physical, and so forth. There are various challenges as Chris was discussing, and we are all experiencing with this COVID-19 epidemic that when we go digital, individuals with disabilities may face in accessing classroom materials. So it's important for us as educators to recognize and learn about how to address the foremost common ways in which a disability may inhibit a person's access to the material. So as instructors, we should be aware of the visual, auditory, ambly... Excuse me, I'm sorry. Cognitive and speech. So we argued that UDL should be prioritized in the creation of OER with knowledge such as how digital access and those abilities affected to demonstrate that accessibility is a form of care and sustainability. So I'm going to hand it to Chris now. Oh, I'm sorry. So what we're doing here is we are just sort of trying to flip the framework here that how can, rather than thinking about what's the relationship between universal design and sustainability, how can OER design ensure sustainability by using universal design? Thanks, Maggie. So I think what we know is that traditional educational approaches are not sustainable. And the disruption of the COVID pandemic has definitely revealed many of these challenges. In my own world, students don't have adequate access to the internet. They may or may not have had their own resources that faculty have assigned that are not OER. They may not have their own devices, even at the graduate level. And so access to education is costly and not sustainable in the traditional forms. And this practice creates injustice. And so the question is what can we do to transform education for sustainability? And I think what Maggie was saying is that we want to not just think of UDL as one example of something that should be expected of OER resources for improving accessibility, but creating resources that are inter-adaptable and able to be used in any context with machine reading, with adaptation of visual and textual material, so that it is accessible across settings and resource levels and can be scaled. And I think the key, though, is that this requires a lot of coordination among educators to create accessible levels. I see Deb Baff mention that in Wales, there's quite the challenge of having to create bilingual content for OER production because of that additional time. And this really is a good example of how we need to have incentives to increase accessible OER materials, whether that's in language, in machine readability, in content. And we need to support our educators in creating sustainable and accessible OER because it's not just when we find ourselves in a global crisis, but for each individual student when they are in a setting where they can't access the materials, they have no way to advance and no platform to build upon to grow. And so building these design tools of accessibility generally is key to making our material sustainable because it increases the ability to be adaptable both to the individual and to institutions. So OER communities, such as this one, can help promote sustainability and accessibility using good design broadly and UDL in the curriculum and in the classroom, both virtually and in person is really critical. We should also think about what the rules are around accessibility in OER materials and whether or not standards and rules around OER need to be increasingly focused on accessibility. And of course we need to provide the resources, the OER resources themselves to help people develop improved accessibility in their content. So Maggie is going to give us an example from early childhood education and how she's integrating accessibility and improving sustainability. So I'm going to come from this from two angles in terms of accessibility and sustainability. First is from what's being done in the research, what's being reported. And so early childhood teachers report that they have positive experiences when they are given accessible and sustainable sources and that it helps them reflect and continually improve on their current teaching practices. And most of this research is coming from Australia, but people are beginning to take a critical and historical approach in researching and reviewing sustainability and the materials that are given to early childhood educators, which I think is progress, but more work needs to be done, especially in regards to universal design, not just in the classroom that teachers are doing with their students, but giving them in the curriculum that they're being taught with. And as an educator, myself and as an instructional designer, I have learned a lot about there are many ways to make a class sustainable through accessibility using universal design so you can organize your course so that you, anyone, regardless of their ability or disability, can navigate it. You can use transcription and closed caption. You can teach your students about OER and have them build OER resources as assignments. And I've done this through a grant through Massachusetts and it was really powerful, both in the reflection of what the students learned and what I learned. You can use accessible formatting and you can make alternative assignments. And I think the biggest point as an educator and I think in response to the question we had about COVID-19 is when we're in a hurry, we often use technology, but it is important to match the use of technology with the learning goals and objectives of your course and keep that in mind when thinking about accessibility because then it's sustainable. So just to give a quick example of from my personal... Five more minutes. Okay, from my personal work is I created an alternative assignment for early childhood educators teaching them about play. And we used videos and voice thread and gave consistent directions. And so there's a link on this page to learn more about it. And this is an open source example. So I'm gonna hand it off to Chris now. Yeah, I'm just... We're batting on this one. Unfortunately, you can't see the picture of our conference because Maggie had put these blue halos around us. So you'll just have to imagine what we look like. But the example... So Maggie talked about early childhood education and I run a graduate program in North Carolina in the U.S. And as part of this trillion workshop that we were working across all levels of education or based in higher education to think about integrating sustainability across our program. And so it's both faculty and staff and it's improving sustainability through the sharing of data and resources across institutions of learning. We used an accessibility design workshop each year with online resources. And if you follow the link in the presentation you can also learn more about the most recent workshop where we are addressing justice and environmental sustainability. So I think Maggie will wrap it up with a few more questions for you and we appreciate the chats. So what we wanted to end this presentation with is as educators, what are some of the opportunities that we can use to bridge sustainability and accessibility? So thinking about this in terms of barriers that you face in increasing accessibility in both your communities and the resources of OER and also what are some of the possible sustainable solutions to overcome these barriers? Really these questions in terms of a virtual conversation are to get the conversation started. And I can say, obviously we have formatting to overcome with our Blackboard Collaborate. I was going to say that, so that may be one is technical barriers. But many of you in the chat have mentioned the resources necessary which often means that the dedicated times that our institutions are often constantly changing and growing and rarely do we set aside the time for faculty and staff to say what do we need to do to make sure that these resources are accessible. And that has to be there and that's true for language translation, for machine readability. And so that, I think we really appreciate you being here in this presentation today with us and certainly ask you to take back to your groups thinking of making sure that you put on the agenda to think about design features and accessibility. And sort of last but not least, and I'm so sorry for the technical difficulties, I will work with Alt to make sure that we have a downloadable format that is not wonky. Yes, there is a rubric for checking accessibility. Kathy can answer that question after this. We could not be here. So innovators, it's really important that we as innovators connect and so we have connected with a bunch of communities and we just wanted to acknowledge them, the Massachusetts and North Carolina resources that we have used. And our references slide here is just to give you an idea of which resources we use and now I think we have time for questions. Thank you, Maggie and Chris. So I think we've got time for one question. If anyone wants to raise their hand, we can give the microphone to you. But I think we can also work with you, Maggie and Chris and just providing the link. I think a lot of people are really interested in what you were talking about and all the links you were sharing as well. So we can work on that, but do we have any questions? You can also, sorry. I did want to just call attention to Mira on the chat pointed out a really wonderful term. I don't know if that's hers or it's been used elsewhere but accessibility debt is really an excellent way to think about it that we rush into creating materials so often and don't address accessibility till afterwards. And so I think that's an important way to think about our obligation to reduce that debt among the work that we do and among that of our colleagues. Yeah, and I just wanted to say, I shared the Google link which may have been part of the problem of going from two different platforms of running it from Google to PowerPoint. So there is a link in the chat right now currently if people would like access to it, so. Well, thank you, Maggie and Chris. So I'm sure people have any follow-up questions they can reach out to you and also you can follow the chat as well. Can we just show our appreciation? I copied Maggie's link as well and I'll add that to their session page with permission so you can grab it there as well. And I'm just gonna swap out the slides and we can invite Dominic to the stage. Hello, testing. Hi, Dominic. So I'm just getting your slides ready now. There you go. Hopefully my network is going to permit this. So, okay. So Dominic is going to be talking about changing educational policy.