Limed: Teaching with a Twist
Season 2, Episode 3

Rafael da Silva teaches e-Learning design and development courses at Boise State University. As an instructional designer, Rafael is passionate about ensuring his course materials are accessible for his students. In this episode, Ann Gagné, Senior Educational Developer from Brock University, Clare Mullaney, Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University, and Vanessa Truelove, Masters of Higher Education graduate student at Elon University share some useable tips to make your classes more accessible and other ideas to help you self-assess accessibility features of your teaching. While Rafael’s context is a distinctly online and asynchronous setting, our panel’s advice extends across teaching settings and encourages teachers to make small changes and work toward continual growth.

View a transcript of this episode.

This episode was hosted by Dhvani Toprani and edited by Jeremiah Timberlake and Matt Wittstein. Limed: Teaching with a Twist is produced by Matt Wittstein in collaboration with Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning.

About the Guest

Rafael da Silva is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning at Boise State University. At BSU, he teaches e-Learning design and development courses and coordinates the Interactive Learning Design lab, in which students further their knowledge of e-Learning practice, collaborate with clients on development projects, and conduct research focused on learning design. Rafael has used his expertise and passion for instructional design to create engaging governmental training materials as well as creative English as a Second Language tools and approaches, such as interactive training modules and educational games. His research has been featured in TechTrends and the International Journal of Designs for Learning. You can learn more about Rafael’s work and experience on his LinkedIn profile.

About the Panel

Ann Gagné is Senior Educational Developer, Accessibility & Inclusion at the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation at Brock University. She is also an adjunct instructor at George Brown College. For more than a decade she has worked in instructional design, curriculum, and educational development that fosters inclusive teaching and learning. Her area of research is accessible pedagogical strategies and she works to raise awareness about accessibility in educational spaces. In early 2023 she started Accessagogy, a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy, available through her website.  She has published on many topics related to accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Clare Mullaney is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature, disability studies, and book history. Her current book project, A Word Made Flesh: Disability Writing and Editorship in U.S. Literary Culture, explores how editors recover writing about disability without erasing marks of author’s impairments or their access needs from the page. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Pedagogy, Public Books, and The Atlantic.

Vanessa Truelove is a graduate student in the Masters of Higher Education program at Elon University. While studying at Elon University, Vanessa has focused on student inclusion through all aspects of the student experience. As the Graduate Apprentice in the Gender and LGBTQIA Center on campus, they have had the opportunity to create programming, educational opportunities, and supervise students in a way that is inclusive of all the identities their students possess. Vanessa has a passion for social justice and will do what they can to level the educational playground for those populations that have been traditionally underserved in the Higher Education Landscape. They enjoy engaging in conversations around how best to help students and are excited to be able to again engage with this work in a full-time capacity after graduation. Vanessa will graduate in May of 2024 and has hopes of being employed in the Northeast United States soon after graduation.

Resources Related to this Episode

Some of the technology mentioned on the episode:

• ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, that enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. (Wikipedia) ChatGPT is available at https://chat.openai.com
• Descript is an editing software that allows users to automatically transcribe recordings then edit the transcription like a document. Descript offers a number of AI supported tools to make audio and video editing more simply. Descript is available at https://www.descript.com.
• WellSaid Labs is an AI powered text-to-speech tool that provides realistic AI voice overs for corporate trainings and eLearning and other engaging experiences. WellSaid Labs is available at https://www.wellsaidlabs.com.

Additional resources from the episode and/or related to accessibility in teaching and learning:

• Accessible syllabus. Accessed November 13, 2023. https://www.accessiblesyllabus.com/.  
• “Before You Do Anything, Start Here: Best Practices for Accessibility in Online Education.” Home. Accessed November 13, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/march-2020/before-you-do-anything-start-here-best-practices-for-accessibility-in-online-education.  
• WAI W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. “WCAG 2 Overview.” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Accessed November 13, 2023. https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag.