Case study
Focused on Accessibility, Chemeketa Community College Makes the Switch to YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform
Introduction
An Introduction to YuJa’s Accessibility Platform
Chemeketa Community College is part of the Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association (OCCDLA), which represents the state’s 17 publicly chartered community colleges and their locally elected board members. Every biennium, the consortium bands together to get licenses for ed-tech tools, apply for grant funding, and more.
As a Digital Accessibility Advocate and Instructional Designer at the institution and a member of the OCCDLA accessibility group, Heather Mariger is actively involved in helping pilot tools, secure licenses, and train others on accessibility best practices. “Some of the OCCDLA institutions are very small and many don’t have an accessibility advocate or a lot of resources,” she explained. “We’re much stronger as a group and we can all help one another.”
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About the College
About Chemeketa Community College
Established in 1970, Chemeketa Community College is a public two-year college located in Salem, Oregon, that serves more than 7,000 FTE students each year. The institution offers more than 120 different certificates and degrees including two-year university-level technical degrees, transfer degrees and intensive English.
The college is committed to transforming lives and communities through exceptional learning experiences. Institutional leaders and educators value access and diversity and promise to actively support student learning from precollege to transfer to the workplace through focusing on student, success, quality and sustainability in all practices.
“YuJa was one of the possible options and right away, the representatives were wonderful.”
Switching Accessibility Platforms
Making the Switch to the YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform
Chemeketa was using a different accessibility tool, but Mariger shared that her institution and others in the consortium had been experiencing issues with lack of innovation and its customer service. “We were so frustrated we decided to start looking for other options,” she noted.
Mariger has strong ties in the accessibility community and started reaching out to others for suggestions. “YuJa was one of the possible options and right away, the representatives were wonderful. YuJa let us test Panorama on several colleges’ test servers and worked with us to resolve issues – and that was before we even had a contract,” she stated, adding that Chemeketa and two other OCCDLA institutions were among the pilot testers for the YuJa Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform.
In addition to the innovation and support pieces, Mariger said the availability of a variety of features that span the accessibility spectrum; the ability to customize individual experiences in their Canvas courses; and user-friendliness for tech and non-tech-savvy users all helped cement the decision to implement YuJa Panorama at Chemeketa and the other institutions in the OCCDLA.
Mariger said integrating YuJa Panorama with Canvas was simple. Not only did YuJa have resources, but she put together additional resources and instructions before adding it to the production server for faculty and student use.
Instructors
Ease of Use Makes YuJa Panorama a Valuable Tool
Like most institutions, Chemeketa Community College has faculty with a range of technical skills. Some are comfortable with it, while others feel intimidated trying to correct accessibility issues. “With Panorama, our instructors can actually fix things within documents without having to download and re-upload it, which is really nice,” Mariger commented. “Panorama gives a lot of full instructions with videos, so instructors can see step-by-step what they need to do.”
Alternative formats were available in their previous platform, so having a variety of formats like Braille, Epub, OCR, math formats and others available wasn’t foreign, but YuJa Panorama offers “so many more options,” Mariger said, adding that instructors have called the Platform “life-changing.”
Streamlining and automating accessibility at the institution has been beneficial for instructors and students, and, as instructors focus on accessibility and begin correcting issues, they gain confidence and begin implementing accessibility in their course creation. “It’s not just students who have an accommodation who can benefit from making documents accessible. Making documents accessible helps all students.”
Student Benefits
Students Love Experimenting With What Works Best for Them
Mariger shared that students appreciate the ability to customize the look of their Canvas courses and that they can access alternative formats of their course materials. “Being able to have things in a format they like is really helpful,” Mariger said, noting that many students download audio files and listen to their courses.
Others, she said, find the math formulas beneficial as they work to learn and retain information. Students also download PDFs, which Mariger was surprised to learn because they’re notoriously not accessibility-friendly. “I try to advise faculty to avoid PDFs when possible because they can be a real problem for a lot of students,” she said. “But now students who want them can download them as a tagged PDF and get an accessible PDF as long as the original document has been made accessible beforehand.”
Support
Strong Support and Innovation Continues
When the OCCDLA selected YuJa Panorama, one of the deciding factors was the support and care they were given. Today, that remains true, Mariger concluded.
“The enthusiasm, the support, the fact that YuJa is always there if we have a problem, the innovation, customer support and friendliness – I can tell there’s passion for the work and that YuJa actually cares about accessibility. That makes a huge difference.”
Highlights
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Chemeketa Community College is part of the Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association, a consortium of 17 state institutions.
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The institution made the switch to YuJa Panorama from another platform because of YuJa’s rapid innovation and strong customer support.
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Faculty and students both enjoy the ability to customize their learning experience, with faculty calling it “life-changing.”
“There is so much innovation in YuJa Panorama. There’s always something new, and we love that.”
Heather Mariger
Digital Accessibility Advocate and Instructional Designer
Chemeketa Community College
