TLP Blog

by Lori Beth Way

At CSU, Chico, Criminal Justice faculty and student majors are all members of the Vista CJ Community. The main purpose of the community is to foster communication between faculty and students. Specifically, there is a great deal of resource information that students can find on the community site. Majors can find there resources about careers, internships, graduate school, student groups, faculty office hours, and advising information. We also use the Vista Chat and Discussion tools so that majors can ask questions of the faculty and other students. Other tools that are well utilized are Announcements and the Calendar. Student response to the community has been very positive. They like having the resources organized and easily available whenever they wish to investigate them.

We have also started a Syllabi folder that is hidden from students because the function is to help the faculty make sure that we’re minimizing redundancy in courses. Hence, we’re also starting to use the Community Group in ways that not only helps students, but also helps coordinate faculty as well.

CSU, Chico has a goal of making all course syllabi “accessible” this fall, in accordance with the Chancellor’s Office Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI). What does this mean for faculty? If a syllabus is “accessible,” it is in an electronic format such as Word, a Web page, or Acrobat PDF that makes it usable, readable, and even searchable to all students.

TLP offers one-hour workshops called “Make Your Course Syllabus Accessible“. In this workshop, faculty will learn how to create a well-designed syllabus which is more usable and accessible for students with disabilities as well as students of every ability and learning style – and faculty will be able to do the same for all instructional materials they create with the same software.

For more information, see TLP’s Accessibility page which has links to tutorials and even a sample accessible syllabus which faculty may use as a template.

The California State University’s Institute for Teaching & Learning has released the Summer 2008 issue of Connections, the fourth issue of their newsletter. Read the newsletter here: http://www.calstate.edu/itl/newsletter/
In this issue: Sonoma State’s Universal Design for Learning efforts, information about the multi-campus Discipline Research Project, teaching tips based on the Primacy Effect, and more.