There’s been a greater focus on digital accessibility over the last year, which is great, but often the advice wasn't taking into account the specific difficulties of maths and stats. It feels like this is quite a niche subject, but actually, I think it would be hard to find a university subject that doesn't use at least a few equations from time to time, like finding averages. This post isn't going to be about why it's important, because if you're here you probably already know that - and it's definitely not going to tell you all the answers. It's been a really interesting journey though, so that's what I thought I'd share.
How do you write guidance beyond what you know
I'm still getting my head around the scale of the university and working out how it all fits together. so the first task was trying to find the right people to talk to. A background in psychology, maths and teaching is fairly useful and you'd think it would make me fairly well placed, but at the start I was pretty out of my depth. To write decent guidance, I needed to know more about the specifics of how different courses teach maths and stats and the support needed by our students. With a bit of a scattergun approach, I tried to pull together people from academic departments, MASH, and those who support disabled students. This made for a brilliant working group, which I'm very grateful for. I'm not a regular LaTeX user, which was one of the main areas of concern, so having people testing things out was invaluable. I was also given copies of course notes and other things to play around with to make sure that it was as realistic as possible.
Agreeing on things
Early on someone said something along the lines of, ‘great, now you've got them together you just need to get them to agree what's best and it will all be sorted’. I'm not sure what the punchline of the joke about a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer walking into a bar would be but the answer almost certainly isn't agreement. The fundamentals of mathematics might not change, but the way things are used and presented definitely does.
My definition of what should be included in the guidance was that it should only be things that we are confident will have a positive impact for students. Adding to staff workload, even if it is only small changes, needs to be justified by ensuring that it is actually helpful. I know from initial testing with checkers like Ally that it's easy to either accidentally, or by gaming the system, get a great score while also being functionally useless to those it is supposed to help.
Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater
One of the trickiest problems is hand written notes. They don't translate well electronically, and while we're looking at ways to help with this it's also important to recognise how useful they can be. Seeing mathematics written out by an expert models the good practice that our students need to get used to. This is particularly useful for students with specific learning difficulties. One thing does not have to be perfect for everyone, if there is another way they can access that same content. For example, where there has been a tutorial online and a tutor posts up a video, the slides, and the notes, this gives students the opportunity to access the content in the way that works best for them.
The guidance and the next steps
In the end we've put some guidance together that hopefully will help, but behind the scenes quite a lot of work is still happening - testing things out and seeing how we can make it better. Imperfect is better than nothing though, and it's really good to have people interested in and helping with this.
Have a read, and, if you're interested, I'm looking at ways to turn the working group into something broader for people interested in digital maths to get together.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/apse/digital/digital-accessibility/accessible-maths
No comments:
Post a Comment