Pushing Back on a College Myth

A story I have heard a lot is that college is a cold, strict place. For students, they hear “There is no late work accepted.” “You won’t get the benefit of the doubt.” “You better figure things out because you’re on your own.”  “You won’t be able to do x, y, or z in college.” The message? College is a scary place.

As if our first-gen students or anyone else coming to college does not already have a challenging time overcoming imposter syndrome or learning the ropes or having enough gas to get to campus or making sure they get to eat before class! This really is a myth that needs to stop. 

This myth doesn't just affect first-gen students, though they may feel its weight more than others. It affects returning students who left college once and are terrified of repeating the experience--we have many in our online classes. It affects students who grew up hearing adults talk about professors as unreachable figures. When students walk through our doors already bracing for rejection, they're less likely to ask for help, less likely to persist through a hard week, more likely to disappear quietly instead of asking for help. The myth costs us students before we even get a chance to show them who we actually are.

I talked with a student in office hours the other day who reiterated a version of this myth to me. She was truly worried about how she would be perceived for asking questions. I did my best to convince her that educators here at GCC would appreciate her asking questions; that is, after all, how students learn. People at GCC do care. They hold office hours hoping students will show up. They send emails checking in on students who've gone quiet. They build in flexibility for when a student is juggling two jobs and a sick parent at home.

How do we change the story? We can be intentional about telling a different story--starting on day one. The way we introduce ourselves, the tone of our syllabus, whether we smile when a student asks a question that's "already in the syllabus.” All of it sends a message. Counter stories don't spread on their own. We have to repeat them wherever we are able.

The Meeting of Accessibility and Generative Artificial Intelligence

Recently, I realized that I had been ignoring AI in favor of accessibility. I mean, a person only has so much brainspace, right? Then I started hearing a little buzzing about how others were starting to use AI to assist with their accessibility efforts, and I realized the two could be combined to save some time and make more challenging improvements related to accessibility. 

So here are a few ways I've been using my personal, paid Claude account to help me with the accessibility related to my courses:

• HTML remediation for WCAG compliance. That's a mouthful to say that I pasted the HTML code from my Canvas pages into Claude with a prompt that asked it to correct the HTML code so that it was fully accessible. What Claude did was then to remove empty paragraphs, add screen reader text for links, fix heading structure and navigation elements, convert all caps text to proper case, and remove unnecessary inline styles and broken links. If I prompted carefully at the start of the chat, telling it I was going to give it page after page, it gave me HTML code back and wrote "Ready for the next page." It was easy to get into a groove of copy/paste/copy/paste. 
• Transcript cleanup and video accessibility. Getting the video captions right with YouTube has never been so easy. Once the auto captions are complete, it's easy to copy the text of those, paste them into Claude, and ask that they be corrected for upper/lower case letters, punctuation, and spelling. Then it's simple to take the corrected version and paste it back in. There's no worry about VTT or SRT files. 
• PDF to accessible format conversion. I do have a short story in one class. It's older and in the public domain, but I only have a scanned copy for students. I asked Claude to read the pdf and give it back to me in plain text. I then copied that into a Google Doc, used Grackle, and then created a link using "share" and "publish to the web." I then linked to that from my Canvas course. Students now have an accessible version of that story they can read. It also is a whole lot cleaner than that scanned version!
• Writing a Pressbook. I had Claude create the first part of a Pressbook I'm working on. I asked for some styling and a particular font. I then asked it to create pages with that same styling for each section of content I give it. What I'm ending up with are parts of the book that all have the same styling regardless of where the content comes from. The book will look consistent. 

Right now, I'm really looking for ways that I can use AI as a tool to speed up what I have to do and to help me make all my course content fully accessible. AI doesn't always get it right, and I sometimes have to ask for a redo. The iteration is still faster than what I could do on my own, and Claude makes corrections to the HTML code, which I cannot do on my own without a lot of extra work. I am curious how others might be doing similar tasks. Let me know!