TLP Blog

An “accessible syllabus” is highly usable by all students including those with disabilities, more easily updated by the faculty member, and is created using best practices and organization with software faculty already commonly use, such as MS Word. Dozens of faculty have attended TLP’s workshop to make their syllabi accessible, and three of those faculty members were kind enough to share their experiences working with their own syllabus, adopting a syllabus template for a new course, and getting feedback from students on their new syllabus. Presenting on February 26, 2009 at our TILT Symposium about accessible syllabi were Laurel Hill-Ward (Special Education), Kathryn Schifferle (Marketing) and Julie Schneider (Nutrition and Food Science) .

Watch the archive online through Wimba here.

See our new web page answering your frequently asked questions: http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/accessibility/faq.shtml

Provost Flake announced in December that the short-term goal for our campus is to have all course syllabi accessible to all students. TLP regularly offers a one-hour workshop on how to do this called “Make Your Syllabus Accessible with Microsoft Word”. This past summer, TLP hosted a two-day institute for 60 faculty who learned how to create an accessible syllabus, Universal Design for Learning, and how to use Vista to enhance accessibility for all users. This fall semester, another 14 faculty members took the one-hour syllabus workshop, and during the winter intersession another 26 attended. It’s best to learn in a group! Group workshops for your departments are available, by appointment. Faculty Symposiums for TILT and CELT were offered in the fall, with faculty demonstrating how they are applying these new strategies to their courses.

Confused about how to begin working with ATI? Start by making your syllabus accessible: training, tutorials and a checklist are online at http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/accessibility/syllabus.

For more information about how TLP is supporting the Accessible Technology Initiative for Chico State faculty, see our Accessibility Page: http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/accessibility.

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.