The question
Making content accessible is always important to teachers, but for Sandra Connelly, an assistant professor of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), accessibility can take on different meanings. For one student, it meant literally being able to access the material. With videos being hosted on YouTube, he was unable to view them being based in China. This presented an interesting problem: while she'd been steadily moving her class material online, how would students, who have restrictions on materials, regardless of their location, be able to access everything?
At a glance
Cliente: The Rochester Institute of Technology
Industria: Education
The Story
- An existing solution to a new problem
- A video for every need
- There when you need it
Defining accessibility
An existing solution to a new problem
Her solution was to create short (five- to seven-minute) lecture videos, each hyper-focused on a single topic – 200 of them in fact.
The videos are multi-frame split between her presentation slides and an American Sign Language interpreter, while she delivers the mini lectures (all closed-captioned). After each video, students are given critical thinking questions to reinforce the material they just heard and encourage them to apply their learnings to problems outside biology (such as, “why might genetic testing alter the health insurance industry?”).
Students were able to turn off both the ASL interpreter and closed captions, however, Connelly quickly realized that the interpreter not only helped benefit the deaf and hard-of-hearing students, but also the rest of the class.
Working with an ASL interpreter forces Connelly to slow down in her speech and ensure each of her lessons are well-organized so they can be more easily translated. What’s more, students started watching the videos looking for visual cues in the sign language, which helped reinforce topics of conversation or lessons.
The videos also allow students to go back and re-watch the material at any time, which not only creates a more available learning environment, it’s been a huge time saver for Connelly. “It gives students access to a ‘virtual me.’”
Now, when her students want to ask her a question, she’s able to simply point them to the resources online to have it answered (and since each video is so short, they aren’t forced to sit through an entire hour-long lecture just to get their particular query). And for those who continue to struggle, using background data, she’s able to verify that they did indeed watch the material and participate in quizzes and discussions.
“Now, I don’t have to spend time walking 400 students through the material individually,” she says.

A video for every need
Publishers’ material and quizzes are also housed on the platform, with grading automatically linked to the gradebook (a huge time-saver, Connelly says) and this year she ran all of her exams through Brightspace, creating the true one-stop spot for learning that her students were asking for.
"Brightspace is available when it says it’s going to be. If students are going to work on something at 3 a.m., there’s no reason it’s not going to be available to them."
Sandra Connelly, assistant professor of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology
There when you need it
“Brightspace is available when it says it’s going to be,” she says. “If students are going to work on something at 3 a.m., there’s no reason it’s not going to be available to them.”
Is it working? Her class is spending 60% more time with the material than they did in previous years, and most impressively there was a 10% increase in average class grades over previous years (not to mention that her classes have almost doubled in size as word spread). Connelly says, “You bet it is working.”

This case was a Brightspace Excellence Accessibility Award Winner for 2016.

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