NLC’s environment and tools cater to diverse campus needs

Accessibility in the academic field is often addressed by meeting the physical needs of students, via ramps and elevators, campus resources, and instructor office hours. However, a closer look at the educational process reveals the most important commodity: access to learning, an area in which all our needs differ.

North Lake College is embracing Universal Design for Learning, a concept that focuses on both physical and more abstract issues of usability, in order to promote accessibility to learning for all students, despite varied abilities and limitations.

Conceived by a group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers, Universal Design is an inclusive approach to designing products, service and environments by taking into account the range of abilities, situations and ages of all users.

Use of the product or service should be easy to understand, regardless of one's level of experience, language skills, or concentration level. The designs should be intuitive, flexible, and equitable; for instance, by accommodating rightand left-handed people. As a familiar example, the ramp located on the second floor of the A-Building at North Lake leading towards the cafeteria, is designed for use by everyone, regardless of physical abilities. The underlying principle of Universal Design is to make a design usable by all while stigmatizing or segregating none.

The concept of Universal Design can naturally be extended to the process of learning. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) makes education more inclusive and effective for everyone.

For example, scientific equipment with large controls ensures more intuitive operation, and Web sites can be designed to be accessible to blind students who use text to speech software.

At North Lake, the Wildfire Institute media team aims to provide material on the Internet in a consistent, intuitive format. According to Wildfire's dean, George Marquez, a number of online courses offered through North Lake are already 90 percent accessible to everyone, and the team is presently focusing on the other 10 percent, as well as bringing the remainder of the courses up to standard.

“We are working on offering a text description of any graphics used on the North Lake Web site and Blackboard,” Marquez said, describing the move as beneficial to students who require text readers and those with bandwidth limitations.

Additionally, in order to make PowerPoint presentations accessible to students who are blind, the Wildfire Institute recently acquired software that converts PowerPoint to text, which can then be read by a Jaws® Screen Reader. As a further means of improving accessibility, new telecourse videos developed by the LeCroy Center present sound and captions in video instruction. These measures assist not only people who are hard of hearing but also people in a noisy, distracting environment.

In a more traditional classroom setting, UDL would alter the manner in which instructional materials are presented, namely in adopting an approach that allows people with great differences in how they see, hear, speak, move, read, and write to be equally successful as students. This diversity can be addressed by technology-enhanced Smart Classrooms.

To date, North Lake College has several smart classrooms equipped with video and audio systems, computers, and specialized lighting. Following the approval of a set of standards for smart classrooms last fall, all classrooms and laboratories in new buildings will be designed to accommodate various learning abilities, with existing classrooms slated for eventual revision.

Smart classroom standards allow for a consistent learning environment that benefits all students as well as preparing for the evolving implementations of technology as a teaching aid.

Universal Design applied to education stresses a multiple technique approach, which not only includes those with disabilities, but also caters for undetected variations in learning styles of the rest of the student population.

North Lake College is committed to providing the environment and the tools that cater to a diverse range of needs to ensure a greater degree of success for its students. Ultimately, Universal Design, an approach that promotes accessibility for as many people as possible, is good for us all.

– Nahid Pope is an academic adviser in Disability Services.