Preparing for Ultra: Evaluating Learn Course Accessibility and Mapping
Accessibility
Each year since its inception, the Learn Foundations internship programme has included, in addition to the more high-profile course migration process, two further pieces of work on course mapping and on course accessibility across the University. These are not supplementary processes, but central aspects of our work to better understand and support the Learn VLE.
This past year, during the Summer 2022 Learn Foundations internship programme, our project was no different. On the contrary, because of the rollout of the new Learn Ultra VLE, it was more important than ever to evaluate the state of course accessibility so we could take the opportunity to ensure more accessible course design right from the beginning.
The course accessibility evaluation process is done manually by our incredible team of interns, who meticulously evaluate individual documents, URLs and course links, audio and video content, and inline course page text against a set of criteria chosen in accordance with institutional and national accessibility policy and legislation.
Overall, 597 randomly selected courses from Academic Year 21/22 across 19 Schools and Deaneries were reviewed against a pre-defined accessibility matrix. Over 7600 items (documents, audios, images, URLs) were reviewed. The random selection of materials allows us to evaluate more authentically the accessibility of any given course, while also optimising the data collection workflow. In future, the use of the Ally tool will help us run these accessibility checks more holistically.
Some significant gaps in access persist across Schools, in particular around subtitling and image descriptions, but some of these do warrant very straightforward solutions, like adding duration of audio/video. We have produced some University-wide insights averaging out the compliance per type of item:
An average of all metrics across all Schools and Deaneries at the University of Edinburgh found the reviewed courses to be 78% complaint:
- Documents: 75% compliance
- URLs: 93% compliance
- Audio/Video: 65% Compliance
- Page Text (course pages): 79% compliance
As a caveat, some of these statistics average out measurements and metrics across an incredibly wide range. For example, in the Document category, there was an average of 99.8% compliance for folder naming, but only a 1.2% compliance average with regards to Alternate Format Statements.
Course Mapping
The other core summer programme project directive beyond migration and accessibility is course mapping. Similarly to the accessibility checks, the summer 2022 programme had a slightly different purpose because of the ongoing transition to Learn Ultra. Since the new VLE does not allow for nesting folders beyond two levels of depth, any existing courses with a deeper structure would have to be rearranged in time for the Academic Year 2023-24. As such, we geared our course mapping work specifically towards this issue, and we measured the depth of all active courses in each School and Deanery (unless they opted out, which less than a handful did).
We mapped everything comprehensively so that Schools and Deaneries could effectively target their complex courses (defined as any course with more than 33% of material held beyond the second level of folder depth). This at-scale mapping also allows us to prepare to resource the transition over this coming summer 2023. Shallower courses, so to speak, are more accessible and therefore the mapping project also complements the accessibility work. In other words, all of our work contributes to the same goal: improving and better facilitating course engagement for all users.
There is software available to central learning technology staff which allows the mapping of several courses at once, but there is also a manual mapping option which simply requires the copying and pasting of the course map into an Excel spreadsheet. This latter process is much more time-consuming, but is possible for anyone curious about the depth of a single or small number of courses without needing access to the software.
Once our intern team collected all of our mapping data, we moved into the analysis stage.
Overall, our intern team mapped 3,274 courses from Academic Year 2021-22 across 21 Schools and Deaneries, in order to understand better the design of each course, paying particular attention to key pinch points such as folder structure.
- Over 500,000 individual items were mapped.
- Approximately 25% of courses were deemed “complex” (as stated, courses with more than 33% of content held 3 folders deep or more.)
As we began to report the insights back to the Schools and Deaneries, many noted their courses had overall much less depth than they worried would be the case. A few schools have more than 90% of their courses already limited to folder depth of two or shallower, which places them very well for the upcoming transitions! This also allows us to focus our support where it’s most needed as we move forward, ensuring everyone has the resourcing they need to best approach the rollout of our new VLE.
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