Welcome to Episode 25 of the ThinkUDL podcast! Today Lillian talks with Jeremy Olguin, the Accessible Technology Manager at the Office of Accessible Technology and Services at California State University, Chico. Jeremy and Lillian met at the August 2019 5th Annual CAST Symposium “Becoming Expert Learners” on the campus of Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk about the long 18-month rollout of Ally at Chico State and the mindset shift from Accessibility to Inclusivity on his campus.
Resources
Twitter: @Jeremy_D_Olguin and @ChicoState
How Technology Helped Chico State Automate its way to Accessibility
Universal Design for Learning Project Breaks Down Barriers at CSU-Chico
Making Progress on Course Content Accessibility
Transforming Accessibility into Inclusivity
Blackboard Ally for LMS– General information on Blackboard Ally
CAST webpage
CAST’s Twitterhandle: @CAST_UDL
CAST on YouTube | CAST on LinkedIn
Sign up for CAST’s UDL Professional Learning Newsletter
Transcript
[Lillian] Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast. Where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind.
[Music]
I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding, and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters.
[Music]
Welcome to episode 25 of the Think UDL podcast. Today I talk with Jeremy Olguin, who is the accessible technology manager at the Office of Accessible Technology and Services at California State University-Chico. Jeremy and I got the chance to sit down in August of 2019 at the fifth annual CAST symposium: Becoming Expert Learners on the campus of Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts to talk about the long eighteen month roll-out of Ally at Chico State, and to talk about the mindset shift from accessibility to inclusivity on this campus. And if you want to know more about all these ideas we talk about on the episode, take a look on this episode’s resources section at ThinkUDL.org. But, we got so carried away in our conversation that I told him I would ask him a question and then forgot to ask the question, so I’ve got him again to answer the question I ask all of my guests, and that is: what makes you a different kind of learner? So, Jeremy, what, finally, I want to ask you this question: what makes you a different kind of learner?
[00:01:51]
[Jeremy] Thanks, Lillian, so, that was one of those questions that, when we first learn, or when I first heard it, I was like, wow this is the first time anyone’s asked me that. And I said I think I’m different than most of my colleagues and I feel that way because I’m rooted in student services. I’ve never once worked on the academic side of the house in any higher education capacity. So, I’ve had to be a social learner my whole career. You know, I’ve had to learn by interacting and listening and just walking around and making friends with–even though people like to joke, like most of your life is working with faculty and working, you know, in those departments, but you’re rooted in social serv–student services, and I think that that’s why I’m different is I didn’t have the ability to you know go in there and research and interpersonally connect and you know have that kind of capacity, like I didn’t have that. So, I just had to learn by social learning, just listen, and its been an adventure every day to learn in that way, but you know, its kind of a fun thing to have.
[00:03:00]
[Lillian] Yeah, and you’re learning that’s how you can get this information, and chances are, that’s how a lot of people are getting this information, isn’t it?
[Jeremy] Yeah, its just really interesting and it’s a way, I mean, rooted in student services allows me to have that student experience as well. So, I can work with a faculty member in the morning and have a group of students in the afternoon and kind of put some of those things that I learned from that faculty member into the student in a different capacity, and I think that’s been really cool.
[00:03:28]
[Lillian] Yeah, that seems like its really important to have all of those different perspectives that are like in your head at the same time.
[Jeremy] Yeah, I think so too.
[Lillian] Knowing how a student is going to react, or knowing how various different students are going to approach this, you’ve got all of that in your design thinking ahead of time. Which, you know, makes this UDL, right, you’re planning for that variability because you’ve had so many experiences with all these different people, so
[00:03:58]
[Jeremy] Yeah, yeah, I make the joke all the time, and a lot of my colleagues say, well you’ve never worked on the academic side of the house, and I never have, which is why I’m different.
[00:04:09]
[Lillian] Yep. Well, and it serves you well when you need it, you definitely need it. A lot of times it is–if on the academic side of the house–its like a different language, or, like, wait a second, you’re dealing with actual students, right, you know, its not just the theory and the applications, its real people so we have to remember that.
[00:04:28]
[Jeremy] Yeah, and it kind of gets us out of that siloed thinking as well. Like, you can’t cross from student services over into the academic side and help out faculty, like, no, we don’t work in siloes and we’ve got to stop thinking that we work in siloes in higher education. Like, yes, I’m in student services, but I help university advancement, I help academic affairs, I help Chico State enterprises, you know, it’s getting out of that mindset and really building and fostering partnerships in a higher ed institution is what really helps us move forward.
[00:04:56]
[Lillian] Oh, yes, we are all in this together, that’s what I really loved about talking to you about how you did this roll-out, you are making it all-inclusive, everybody working together
[Jeremy] We’re trying to, its hard, I mean, higher education and campuses in general are just really difficult to sometimes do that, I mean, things get in the way, other projects, other narratives going on, its just really–its difficult at times, but, if we don’t continue to try to foster those partnerships, then we’re not going to move forward.
[00:05:26]
[Lillian] Right. Well I’m glad you are.
[Jeremy] I appreciate it.
[00:05:29]
[Lillian] That’s great and I’m glad to get this story out to our listeners too. So, and there’s one thing I’d like for you to tell me about too is this Universal Access Toolkit that you hope to be rolling out this April of 2020, can you tell us more about that?
[00:05:45]
[Jeremy] Yeah, kind of a brainchild of one of those partnerships and that’s–I’m working with all of our School of Education. There’s some wonderful Universal Design experts in that shop and what do is kind of bring in the technology, but I don’t necessarily have the very strong research background into the true UDL application, you know, and I thought, hey, let’s put together an app and see if we can kind of blend those two because CAST does an amazing job, you know, on their research side, but that addition of the technology that’s actually in these–on these higher ed institutions, you know, they don’t really mend those together, and that’s what we’re attempting to do with this application, and we’re excited about the release in April, so its going to foundationally give you a–you know, one of the technologies–let’s use the example of Kurzweil here, but what’s it’s application into the classroom? You know, what does it–what boxes does it check with UDL, you know, how can you–what is the student really learning and what is the faculty really learning when they use this tool? And then outside the classroom, what about the workspace, you know, UDL in the workspace is becoming a huge movement right now. We need to take care of our staff, employees, you know, we need to take care of our administration, you know, we need to take care of them and provide them as many tools as we can with UDL in the workspace kind of thinking.
[00:07:08]
[Lillian] Yeah, so what are some of those things that this universal access toolkit might be able to do, we might see somebody using it on campus, what would that look like?
[00:07:15]
[Jeremy] Yeah, so, I mean, we’re also, I mean it–I’m going to kind of pitch one of our fun ones–is a walking map of campus, with GPS, allowing all users to kind of click on a building and find out what’s inside that building, but also how to get there. You know, Google Maps does a pretty good job of getting around the main parts of campus, but there’s lots of little sub-areas. If I need to go to, you know, the Dreamer Center, how do I get there? And what’s the staff in there’s names, you know, so I know who to contact, you know, all of that built into a walking map is something we’ve long wanted you know for five, six years. We actually started working with students on this campus as a project, and they’ve continued to make it grow and it’s become a fantastic tool that’s part of the app and, you know, it’s kind of–again–blending that inclusive design that we wanted to have on this campus. And so that’s one of the big parts that people are looking forward to is the map, but, to answer your question, what someone might find aside from the app is how to use a tool effectively in the classroom and at your desk, like I said before, but broken down by theory and research as well. So, we’re going to have some videos on how to practic–when you use it in the classroom, what that could actually look like in an assignment in a course. What serves–what outcomes that checks. So, if you’re not really thinking in that direction yet, maybe reading that will say oh, that actually is one of my learning outcomes as well in my class. Maybe I can try this
[00:09:10]
[Lillian] Yes, as so many campuses are.
[Jeremy] We’ve definitely been guilty of that. So, we’re just trying to do it different, and put everything in one place. That’s the other part is you can search all day for months and then you’ll hear something the next day that you just bought that someone else already had, you know, so we want to be able to provide our university community with an easy place to get all of these tools and the research behind them.
[00:09:33]
[Lillian] Wow. That sounds like–from the things you’ve told me about this, this accessibility toolkit, you are making things accessible for those folks who might need some technology like you said, the map, could tell you if you’re going in the wrong place, right? Or, could help somebody who is visually impaired and get them to the right place, but also its going to reach out and touch a whole mess of people who are going to be helped by this in ways that they hadn’t even thought about. Its not necessarily a need, but it is something that allows them to do better in their classes, to listen to the lecture again or to have the screen reader or things like that, that really suits our students today that are drawn in a million different directions and have jobs and all the things that make it harder to do the classwork that they’ve, you know, that they have to do. So, you’re making it, you know, you’re giving them the tools and including everybody in that.
[00:10:37]
[Jeremy] Yeah, I mean, its–I totally agree and I think its just been great to have the partners to be able to do that kind of thing with. You know, I really hate using the term “mine” in any of these things because, like I said, my partnership with School of Ed. And OATS is actually bigger than that, its even academic affairs and student affairs, you know, allowing this to happen, it’s the president allowing this to happen, you know, its one of those things like I always want to harp back on that because that’s where all this comes from, this inclusive access, you know, flipping the accessibility into inclusivity, it’s a movement, you know, its not something that, like oh it would be nice to just offer it to all folks, like no, let’s just start from the very beginning and not even use the term. Let’s get our terminology right, because that has a big effect on the way that we think daily. So, if we get that terminology correct, then we can start to move forward in the right direction.
[00:11:29]
[Lillian] What a great story. I am so glad that you’ve been able to do this first of all, when I say “you” I mean the plural you, ok, so all of y’all as we say in the South, that all y’all have been able to put this together to really make an inclusive campus that reaches out to everybody. Thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise and all of that with us. So, thanks Jeremy!
[00:11:55]
[Jeremy] Yeah, no problem, thank you.
[00:11:57]
[Lillian] And, thank you so much, Jeremy, and from now on, you might hear some background noise around us because the first time that we talked, our conversation together was in the midst of the symposium, so for the rest of this episode, we’re going to have some live noises behind us, but its exciting for me to talk about accessibility into inclusivity at Chico State.
[00:12:22]
[Lillian] We are here with Jeremy Olguin at the California State University-Chico, and he is the accessible technology manager, and we’re here at CAST’s fifth annual symposium here at the campus of Harvard Law School. And I’m very thankful that you took the time to come and talk to us at the Think UDL podcast. And you’re here talking about one thing, but I want to hear even more of your story that’s happening at California State-Chico, but the first thing is about the roll-out, and I hear your roll-out was long and also the first for the Ally, Blackboard Ally. Can you tell us about that?
[00:13:02]
[Jeremy] Yes, so we actually got into the–we call it the Ally game, which is what it’s become with 23 universities in our system, and we were in there really early when they were actually still technically frontier, they were not purchased by Blackboard yet, they were going through that process. So, we were there early on that because we saw there was some promise in there. You can’t effectively have a change of culture when you don’t know what’s in your learning management system, there was no way for us to inventory other than manually going in and changing small pockets here and there and giving the best guess estimate of, this is how many files we may have, and this is maybe how many we need, but we didn’t really have that information, so we got involved with the Ally tool. We were able to see for the first time that there was, you know, 300,000 plus files in our learning management system, over the last seven years we can see our scores, I mean, all these things we never knew before which was scary, obviously very scary at first. But it allowed us to kind of start working through, you know, what’s going to be our plan moving forward. What’s going to be the strategy around this. And so, yeah, we jumped on it early and we’ve been able to share our information with those others in the system.
[00:14:14]
[Lillian] So, tell me about this, was it an 18-month roll-out? How did that go? Tell me about that.
[00:14:20]
[Jeremy] Yeah, so 18-month roll-out because as in any higher education institution, there’s a little bit of worry about when you start what appears to be scoring faculty on their materials. The Ally product, with their red, orange, and green dials, can be a little bit intimidating for faculty. So we were a little bit afraid of the backlash, so we took a bit of a methodical approach to it with 18 faculty to start off with, let’s just–and our fellows, you know, our partners, the ones that we’ve worked with pretty consistently, you know, just kind of our comfort area–its, we call it our comfort blanket, you know, with those faculty, and so we definitely went to them first and then from there, it kind of spread word-of-mouth into what we called pilot session two, which was second semester, went really well with 40 faculty because at this point, we’re also testing multiple things. We’re testing faculty reaction, but we’re also testing out our scaleability with remediating documents and content working along with that faculty. What does that training look like for faculty along–around this tool.
[00:15:21]
[Lillian] Yeah, what were you doing that was helping the faculty? How were you kind of training them to be using this new roll-out tool?
[00:15:27]
[Jeremy] Yeah, so in first two semesters we learned very quickly what faculty were comfortable doing, and what they weren’t. Very–it was pretty evident that PDF’s were going to be the big elephant in the room for everyone, and no one wanted to talk about it, but when we saw faculty working through the different Ally pockets in there, we saw they avoided PDF’s almost every time because there’s no knowledge of how to edit them, and even if you ask content remediators out there, you know, in the nation, they’ll all tell you that’s the hardest thing to do because they can vary. They can go from, you know, thirty minutes to three hours for a complex PDF. So, with that we wanted to be able to provide the resources and the Office of Accessible Technology and Services at Chico State is the campus partner around that and it’s a centralized center for remediation and we took all of that on so we wanted to test that scale of being able to do all those PDF’s for our campus community.
[00:16:20]
[Lillian] Yeah, so that’s– PDF is something that’s hard for a screen reader, let’s say somebody who needed to hear it or, right, what are the problems with the PDF that the faculty was sort of afraid to approach, can you explain that a little more?
[00:16:36]
[Jeremy] Yeah, you know, what’s really interesting about PDF is how many of the ones that were inaccessible with a zero percent rating that were just an image we found that were simply created on Word or Powerpoint, and the issue was they were incorrectly saving it. Because on the Microsoft side of it, if you hit “File,” the first thing you see is “Save to PDF.” Which actually creates it as an image. And it takes away all the accessibility foundation that you created in that document. So that was our first thing is let’s just get rid of these easy ones that it was just saved incorrectly. Do you have your original source? We can move from that. After that, it does get a little more complex. It’s mostly tables and lists that cause issues with screen readers when not done correctly. Improper tags, no navigation, all of those things that faculty is simply–and, as most faculty, just, you have no knowledge of that. It’s hard to say well what does this screen reader do, well who does this affect, and I always tell them not just the screen reader, you know, we’re talking to students with ADD/ADHD that are using reading programs and the OCR might not be as good on that or whatever it is. So, I mean, there’s different things that are wrong with it.
[00:17:41]
[Lillian] Right, and thinking about the variety of students that are everywhere, you know, students who are commuting or if they’re listening to something and there’s a graph or a picture having an alt. text, right, or something that is going to help them in all of the kind of non-traditional ways that somebody’s going to study. Having that ability to have an alternate representation or even things like color blindness as well is going to be helped by having an accessible document. And honestly, I didn’t think about that when I started, and we love the professors who–because they are content experts and they don’t learn and I certainly didn’t learn in graduate school about the teaching part, right, or the accessibility part, or just don’t even think about how this material that I find wonderful and would be so fantastic for my students to read or know, I didn’t realize there was a barrier to them getting to it. So, you’re doing kind of this undercover slew things–work, it seems.
[00:18:46]
[Jeremy] A little bit, yeah. So, it’s one of those things we don’t like to be right in your face saying “this is how this needs to be done, here’s the education behind it,” it’s more of let us start helping you, and during that process of helping you, we’re providing you with training and education that you might not even understand that we’re giving you. It becomes pretty evident when they start to see the difference between a document that has been tagged and has all the meta-data behind it, and we play it as an audio file, and it says “heading level one” and you know exactly where you are in the document. Its kind of a little bit of a game-changer when they hear it that way, because they understand, well I’ll just make all my documents like that, or, teach me how to do that. And in Word and Powerpoint, they’re doing great things, the faculty are really doing wonderful things with very minimal training. The PDF stuff, we can’t ask faculty to take on twenty more hours of work with their content. We really can’t ask that, so I took that message to our executive leadership, and they allowed us to, you know, fund, you know, being able to do that for the faculty and staff.
[00:19:48]
[Lillian] Yeah, I remember when I was a student–an undergrad student, and learning how to read a painting, like just how the lines worked, and understanding that I got a feeling from it but not knowing why I got that feeling until a professor explained to me about the diagonal bodies or the highlights, or the chiaroscuro, which is the use of light and dark, and you know, I got this feeling from it, but they helped me to see the steps that got me to that. I remember specifically a Rubens painting, of the “Fall of the Damned into Hell,” you know a terrible, kind of scary title, but it was the most amazing use of light on these bodies and it really showed this strong diagonal. And it wasn’t until it was explained to me, it was like the veil was lifted. To understand how I was reading that, that my brain was already doing it, but I didn’t understand how and why. And it seems like there’s a lot of that de-coding that happens to go on for students that we don’t know how to do sometimes.
[00:20:49]
[Jeremy] Right, that’s a great analogy for exactly what we’re doing. It’s–sometimes it’s a little bit more clear to some, and others it could take, you know, six months to two years, or never. But, you know, we have to prepare ourselves for any of those situations.
[00:21:04]
[Lillian] Yeah, so our students–you know, if you’ve got thirty students, 100 students, 1,000 students, then they’re going to be reading or de-coding that document or whatever it is, a paragraph, a chapter in a novel, whatever it is, in a variety of different ways, and I know as an instructor, I need the help of everybody like you who’s going to help me to say oh I didn’t know that as a barrier, or I didn’t know that this thing wasn’t readable by my students.
[00:21:33]
[Jeremy] Yeah, it’s been the goal of my career actually to make all of this technology and these documents and these accessible formats available to all students. I’ve just, over the years, and I’ve been sixteen years into this at four different Cal State schools and one in the state of Washington, just really trying to push that message of, we’ve got to stop just giving these remediated files to only the student that requested it for accommodation. Why? I mean, it opens it up for so many uses for the student that doesn’t want to say “I’m struggling.” Or the student that is commuting, you know, or the student who plainly is just in the wrong subject field, and they’re not really good–can’t understand the content, I mean there’s probably more of those than we can even track, I mean there’s data out there, but I mean there’s obviously nothing conclusive but I do think its something that, by opening up all of these things, we are really doing the right thing for the campus.
[00:22:22]
[Lillian] Yeah, and you have said that you are kind of a tools person or tools first, can you tell me about the variety of tools that you’re offering?
[00:22:33]
[Jeremy] Yeah, it’s more–I’m more of a strategist, so I mean, I evaluate the different tools that are on the market that are maybe used for different things, you know, like School of Ed. uses this particular Google classroom, right, how can we evolve that to involve the whole campus? You know, disability services uses the Kurzweil software, how can we continue to expand that to the entire campus? And that’s kind of the big one we worked on recently, is that Kurzweil software one because I’m comfortable in it being from the disability community, I can see, there was some promise there for other students, you know, there were highlighting options, and extracting, and building case notes, and whatever else you needed to do in there, you could do, but why didn’t we give it to the entire student body? And it was mostly around management of the product. You couldn’t manage all those passwords and usernames and all the other things that go along with that in providing the service. So, what we did is we ended up calling them and saying hey we want to partner on a big project. And so what we did was we created a single sign-on version for Shibboleth, which is what we use in California and in other places, Shibboleth login, so we have the very first instance of that now at Chico State. It is live two weeks ago, where you can login with your Shibboleth credentials no matter where you’re at. I mean, we are now allowing them to push that wherever they need to push that for campuses that want to cause that expansion on their campus. We loaded it in our virtual software center so that way it goes to every computer on campus, and now users can simply click on the button and login with their Chico credentials and they have access to this, you know, beautiful, Universal Design tool, you know, and you can learn what you need to.
[00:24:03]
[Lillian] Tell us more about that one, about what happens with using that.
[Jeremy] Yeah, so I mean when you use that, it’s in the different use cases it’s students, staff, and faculty. It’s our entire community, and we’re bringing everyone together. So, with the staff, how many times at your desk do your hands just get tired, or you’re writing this email over and over again and you’ve re-read it eighteen times, you know, you plug it in here, you can play it back to yourself and go OK, that does sound the way I want it to, the same way a student can load a paper and say, OK it sounds great the way I want it to, or faculty member has to read forty papers for five sections, you know, and that takes a lot of time, those are subject matter experts, what if they just fly through it at four hundred words a minute, because they’re not grading on grammar, they’re grading on the actual content. So, now we’re allowing faculty to fly through some of these papers maybe quicker than they would have before. And we’ve seen those different use cases when it comes to the product, but it’s mostly about just giving people the opportunity to use what you need, you know, and showing them what’s available and what’s out there because we’ve never shown them before. And we went from hour increase per week of 127 hours per week was what students were spending on it, I mean, we were at 680 hours per week as a campus after releasing it two months ago. And then two weeks ago on single sign-on, I mean, that is a huge jump, which tells you, tells us, the campus community is really engaging with the tool.
[00:25:22]
[Lillian] Yeah, so you’re thinking really broadly, it’s not just disability, it’s about ability, yeah.
[Jeremy] Yeah, and it also decreases that stigma around using some of those technologies. I mean, I can’t tell you over my career how many students have come to me and said “this is great, but I just don’t want people asking me what it is, I’m afraid to really bring it out in public,” and it was like whoa, that really hit me. So, that’s why, when you do something like this and you spread it out to an entire campus, there’s no stigma behind it because everybody’s using it.
[00:25:51]
[Lillian] Right, it’s normalized.
[Jeremy] It’s normalized, right, why can’t we normalize technology the way we’re starting to normalize curriculum and pedagogy in the Universal Design aspect of things, so that’s where I come in, and that’s where I felt like, let’s bring the tools along with this.
[00:26:05]
[Lillian] Right, I must say that in the very beginning of the whole text-to-speech or speech-to-text, just hearing somebody doing that I was like, my eyes got really big, and I thought oh that is just super in the future, right when I first did it. Well, I do it all the time now, like, driving you know let’s–I don’t text and drive, however, let’s just say I might speak things to nobody in particular and then say send. But that it’s not something that was a particular need, but it’s something that has made my life so much better. And I’m just so thankful for all of these things that are making my life easier that came out of kind of these edges that were making life able.
[00:26:53]
[Jeremy] Yeah, it’s quality of work life, quality of social life, all of that comes into part when you use tools like this.
[Lillian] Just fantastic. And can you also tell us about what’s going on at Cal. State-Chico with your kind of the executive support structure and what makes it possible for you to do what you’re doing?
[00:27:14]
[Jeremy] Yeah, it’s a big joke amongst my colleagues at other universities that I think I’m one of the rare people that can walk into, you know, the associate provost’s office or the president’s office and them know exactly what I’m about to talk about because they’ve been well prepared on it, they’re involved in it, they know what the projects are. In fact, I’m on a zoom call with my president at four o’clock today, you know, to kind of talk through our accessibility strategy moving forward for the next three years. It’s been amazing because it trickles down from there. If you have your president knowing what’s going on, there’s a good chance the entire campus gets behind it. When emails are coming out from the provost’s office instead of my little corner of the world in accessible technology, it carries more weight and it brings in more people and it creates that unity on campus and that real culture change, which is what we’re after. You know, we could have used Ally as any other tool, we could’ve used Kurzweil as any other tool, we could’ve used Otter with any other tool, but it’s how do we really create that culture change around all of these things? Why don’t we get people– before they buy something– thinking about is this accessible and is this inclusive for everyone? And if not, how can I get it there? Or is there something else out there that’s similar that I can maybe buy to move forward in that way? And we’ve made huge strides in the area of procurement, but it all trickles down from that executive level support, that chief information officer being really involved. Our vice president of student affairs is whose driven this whole mission, I mean, she’s done her whole career, working from a director of disability services all the way now to the VP of student affairs, that’s kind of unheard of in that community, and it shows her efforts in that culture change have really, you know, made great things happen at Chico State.
[00:28:49]
[Lillian] Wow, that’s really helpful and inspiring for other universities who are thinking about this, what needs to happen.
[Jeremy] We hope so, yeah.
[00:29:00]
[Lillian] That you’ve got all of your kind of executive board and membership there onboard I should say, and does that include I guess all the funding as well? Are they the ones helping to get funding or offering that?
[00:29:13]
[Jeremy] Yeah, it’s a total mix, you know, so funding is split. Some things information resources pays for which comes from the provost’s office. Some things student affairs pays for, you know, which can come from what we call GI 2025, its graduation initiative 2025 which is an initiative coming from the Chancellor’s office out of CSU. So we do get funding there. And accessibility’s a big portion of that, you know, if we create a more inclusive environment, both technically and in pedagogy in academia, then we can make progress toward graduating more students by 2025, which will become 2030 at some point, you know, right? The goal never changes, you know, we continue to want to graduate students, so I don’t care if the year says 2025 or 2030, it’s going to eventually just keep growing, you know, so the funding comes from that mixed model. You know, it’d be great to get centralized funding for all these different things, but it’s not the landscape of higher education and it has never been, you know, to get oh this is our centralized pot for accessibility, I can’t tell you one campus that’s ever told me that, you know, but you have to get creative on where you can pull some of these resources from. And I think that’s what we’ve done and that’s–that’s me, you know, I like to be a strategist and that’s–where can I pull from and what works, and that’s kind of where we continue to move and go.
[00:30:29]
[Lillian] That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of this conference to talk to use here, and I think this is going to be very helpful for others who are hoping to do the same for their students.
[Jeremy] I appreciate it, yeah, it was a lot of fun.
[00:30:40]
[Lillian] Thanks.
[Jeremy] Yeah, thank you.
[Music]
[00:30:53]
[Lillian] You can follow the Think UDL podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find out when new episodes will be released, and also see transcripts and additional materials at the ThinkUDL.org website. The Think UDL podcast is made possible by College STAR, the STAR stands for supporting transition, access and retention in post-secondary settings, and the website provides free resources and instructional aids based on UDL principles. If you’d like to know more, go to the CollegeSTAR.org website. Additional support for the podcast is made possible by Appalachian State University, where, if you call it Appalachian, I’ll throw an apple at you! The music on the podcast was performed by the Odyssey Quartet, comprised of Rex Shepherd, David Pate, Bill Folwell, and Jose Cochez. Our sound engineer is Tanner Jones, and I am your host, Lillian Nave, thank you for joining us on the Think UDL podcast. [Music]