Online courses and accessibility

[AmLitHist]

Serious question here, to Hegemony's point:

Everything I upload in my F2F and online classes is posted after I've locked those files as "read-only."  Doesn't that cover the issue of students changing the content of the Word and PPt files?

The accessibility tools built into Word are actually pretty darned good these days, at least for the content I generate (English/humanities docs, syllabi, assignments, etc.). I don't know how well they work for other disciplines' materials.  Alt tagging and table formatting are also simple to do, as others here have said.  And Blackboard also has some decent tools to check/remedy problems related to accessibility issues.

My sabbatical in 2015 involved generating a pretty comprehensive set of documents for faculty use in assuring accessible course materials.  Our library's archivist said they sat more or less unused, until prep for our most recent HLC visit started. Since then, they've enjoyed a lot of use.

[Katrina Gulliver]

Adams State University went on probation with the HLC for their accelerated online programs not having enough content, right after a successful HLC review, in part because of media reports about large numbers of students from other institutions enrolling in these shortened courses because they were easy.

Does anyone know what's going on with Adams State now? I recall there was some drama about a Masters with an external partner that had to be shut down, and the coach cheating fiasco from a few years back.

[Hegemony]

To answer AmLitHist's question, I myself am baffled about how students manage to change the files. But several of my colleagues report it has happened to them. I'm sorry I can't explain further.