by Beth Petitjean, Digital Learning Specialist, Reinert Center
The Resources Revisited series highlights existing resources available to the SLU community that may be especially timely or useful at certain points in the academic year.
I don’t know about you, but I hate to rush. For anything. I’m always minutes, hours, days early for everything…meetings, getting to the airport, and even prepping course materials for the upcoming semester. Although it’s only July and you may not be in “teaching-mode” quite yet, it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about or even drafting the materials—such as worksheets, slides, assignments, and, of course, the syllabus—that you and your students will use this Fall. And as you’re thinking, consider building accessibility into your materials from the start.
To help you with this, the Reinert Center has a new series of short Instructional Videos, the “Four-Minute Focus Video Series,” that addresses topics related to accessible course materials. Each video gives a brief overview of a topic, explains the accessibility concern, offers some easy solutions, and includes quick examples…all in four minutes, or thereabouts. The videos approach the topics from the quirky point of view of their creator (um, yes, that’s me) and aim to present the information in a simple format because, let’s face it, you have other things to think about and don’t need to be spending a lot of time analyzing serifs.
Some titles in the series include To Serif or Not to Serif, Are Students Lost in the Wilderness, Proceeding in an Orderly Fashion, and Passing with Flying Colors, among others.
For creating accessible slides, you might explore Resource Guides Designing Visually Accessible Slides and Auditory Accessibility when Presenting or Recording a Slide Deck in addition to the videos.
As always, we invite you to explore the full range of resources offered on the Reinert Center website. And if you’d like more personalized support, we’re happy to meet with you for a one-on-one consultation in-person or via Zoom. Feel free to request a teaching consultation to discuss your course materials—or any other teaching topic.
The Notebook 