Access, Programs and Services for Students with Disabilities

Access, Programs and Services for Students with Disabilities

Report to the Chancellor’s Office

on

Technical Assistance Visits

College: Los AngelesHarborCollege

Date:May 8, 2009

Team complement:

Bette McMuldren, The Galvin Group, LLC

Brian Brautigam, Alternate Media Specialist, Riverside Community College District

Bari and Jerry Rudmann, DSPS Counselor and Associate Faculty, IrvineValleyCollege

Los AngelesHarborCollege SPS faculty/staff and college administratorspresent for the first portion of the technical assistance visit, addressing technology issues, included:

Dr. Deborah Tull, SPS Director, Dr. Ann Tomlinson, Vice President of Administrative Services, Bobby McNeel, Vice President of Economic Development, Sally Fasteau, LD Specialist and Director, Learning Assistance Center, Dr. Bonnie Burstein, Director, SPS Counselor andLife Skills Center, Amarylles Hall, Counselor/Director, Federal Student Support Services Grant Project, Sue Steele, DSPS/GAIN Counselor, and Timothy Davis,

Los Angeles Harborstaff and other LA District personnel present for the second portion of the technical assistance visit, addressing Student Learning Outcomes, included:

Dr. Deborah Tull, SPS Director, Bobby McNeel, Vice President of Economic Development, Sally Fasteau, LD Specialist and Director, Learning Assistance Center, Dr. Bonnie Burstein, SPS Counselor and Director, Life Skills Center, Amarylles Hall, Counselor/Director, Federal Student Support Services Grant Project, Sue Steele, DSPS/GAIN Counselor, Timothy Davis, SPS Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant, Lora Lane, SLO Coordinator, LA Harbor, David Ching, Dean of Admissions and Records, LA Harbor, Nina Malone, Dean of Student Life, LA Harbor, Mercedes Yanez, Associate Dean of EOPS/CARE, LA Harbor, Steve Swaim, DSPS Program Tech, LA Harbor, Joy Fisher, Counseling Department Chair, LA Harbor, Elizabeth Colocho, Matriculation Coordinator, LA Harbor, Paul Grady, International Students Program Director, LA Harbor, Yvette Moss, CAHSEE Director, LA Harbor, Karen Crummer, Child Development Center, LA Harbor, Joan Chappell, Student Services Administrative Assistant, Robbie Barker, Student Recruitment Coordinator, LA Harbor, Mark Wood, Chair of Humanities, LA Harbor, Rhea Estoya, Research and Development, LA Harbor, Randy Anderson, Dean of Special Programs, LA City, Patricia Schmolze, SLO Coordinator, LA City, David Green, DSPS Coordinator, LA Valley, Darlene Wooten, DSPS Coordinator, LA Southwest, Adrienne Foster, DSPS Coordinator, West LA, Donna Lichtman, DSPS Coordinator, LA Trade-Tech and Graciela Hernandez, DSPS Coordinator, East LA.

Background

In October 2008 the Los Angeles Harbor College DSPS Coordinator (SPS Director) contacted the Galvin Group to schedule a technical assistance visit for consultation on: Distance Education, Campus-wide computer access, technology accessibility and Student Learning Outcomes development and measurement. The first portion of the day’s activities focused on computer related access issues and was attended primarily by the SPS faculty/staff and the college administration. The second portion of the day’s activities focused on Student Learning Outcome Development and Measurement and was attended by Harbor College SPS faculty/staff, members of the college administration, assorted HarborCollegestudent services managers and district-wide faculty/staff interested in SLO development and measurement (including DSPS Coordinators from each campus). Dissemination of information on this technical assistance opportunity and resultant broad based requests for admittance to this event occurred because the Harbor College DSPS Director Chairs the District-wide DSPS Coordinator Group and co-facilitates the HarborCollege accreditation effort for Student Services.

Los AngelesHarborCollege is the southern most college in the nine college Los Angeles Community College District. Los AngelesHarborCollege has been in operation for 60 years and has grown from a technically oriented college into a comprehensive institution of higher learning with a broad spectrum of transfer, vocational, and community services programs. Campus enrollment is approximately 9300, with approximately 500 students receiving service from the DSPS program. The program at LA Harbor is referred to as Special Programs and Services (SPS).

Los AngelesHarborCollege takes pride in being a leader among community colleges in educational applications of modern technology. The event was held in the new TechnologyBuilding which has just recently opened. In fact, the TA presentation was the first event to use the state-of-the-art technology meeting room.

The college also takes pride in the fact that Harbor’s DSPS Coordinator serves as the District-wide Chair of the DSPS Coordinator Group and provides strong leadership as a college mental health services program developer. She also serves as a Los Angeles County Mental Health Services Act Delegate and is on the Workforce Education and Training Advisory Committee for Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Also noteworthy, is the fact that HarborCollege is the only college within the Los Angeles Community College District which has developed a Federal Student Support Services Grant Project which exclusively serves students with disabilities.

Technical Assistance Issue(s):The following is a list of issues sent to the team by the Center outlining their technical assistance needs:

• Student Learning Outcomes
• Distance Education
• Campus wide computer access
• Technology accessibility

Brief analysis of issues:

Technology Issues:

The first portion of the visit involved a meeting with the LA Harbor SPS faculty and staff to discuss technology issues. The meeting began with an update on development projects at LA Harbor provided by the Vice President of Administrative Services. It was exciting to hear that LA Harbor is in the process of rebuilding its entire campus. Currently work is being initiated on the third bond Project that has provided funds to the college for this complete reconstruction. Special Programs and Services is slated to be relocated to a new StudentUnionBuildingwhich will house several student services programs.

The team within SPS has long tenure at the College and it is apparent that they work well and closely together and share a deep commitment to services for students with disabilities. The program’s LD Specialist has begun to assume the position of the Director of the LearningAssistanceCenter. She and the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant are working closely in the area of distance education accessibility. As the meeting began, the group was provided with a review of on-line classes that was prepared by the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant in consultation with the college administration, Distance Education Committee and other SPS faculty/staff. He shared his findings which included a careful review of 26 of the 63 on-line courses currently being offered. The links to these courses had also been provided to the TA team prior to the visit and were also reviewed by the Alternate Media Specialist participating on the TA team.

LA Harbor College is extremely fortunate that the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant worked previously in the Information Technology Services for the college. As a result, he not only has a broad knowledge of technology, he also has long standing relationships with the personnel in the IT department. These relationships have contributed in a positive way to the current state of adaptive technology available at LA Harbor. These relationships will be instrumental as LA Harbor College continues to strive for campus-wide access of their assistive technology programs.

The results of distance education course reviews were shared. The reviewers found a number of similar problems, including absence of descriptive text and alt tags on images, courses that send students to linked websites which may or may not be accessible and inappropriate use of color text. There were no instances of multimedia/video with captions that were observed. The staff was reminded that College of the Canyons holds a state grant to help pay for the captioning of distance education-related multimedia. Most puzzling is the use of five different platforms for the courses. The discussion centered on recommendations for addressing some of these issues. The procedures that have evolved at RiversideCommunity College were shared. Their process involves sign-off by the Alternate Media Specialist at two points during the approval process for on-line courses. First, a review occurs at the point that the faculty is proposing the course and second, when the course is ready to deliver. A system that involves accessibility checks prior to offering the course was suggested for LA Harbor as well. Because the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant sits on the distance education committee, this suggestion was felt to be viable. Additionally, the LD Specialist serves on the curriculum committee and the SPS Director serves on the Academic Senate. This is an important link for inserting an accessibility review into the approval process for on-line courses. The suggestion to add intermittent checks while the course is offered was also made.

Additionally, RiversideCommunity College has an 8 hour monthly training during which the Alt Media Specialist has 2 hours to educate those attending on web accessibility. An invitation was extended for the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant to attend the next distance education faculty training to be offered at RCC. This RCC course is actually being converted to an on-line course, which will be shared with LA Harbor when complete. Because of LA Harbor’s proximity to Cal State Northridge, this college may be an excellent resource for training and distance education procedures. Beyond the education and training of faculty, the recommendation was also made that counselors within SPS and other Student Services counselors may need additional training on available technologies in order to make appropriate referrals.

While faculty sometimes complain citing academic freedom as a reason for their non-compliance, the group was reminded that the federal laws supersede academic freedom.

LA Harbor reports few requests for alternate media. This is attributed to extensive use of Readings for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D). LA Harbor is also a participant college in the Universal Design project headed by Stacey Kayden. Through this project two chapters of text books are being provided to students. The recommendation was made to educate the students as to the capacity of e-text to provide the entire book, without page-by-page scanning. It was recommended that LA Harbor enroll with the Alternate Text Production Center (ATPC) so that they could begin requesting textbooks from them. While RFB&D is often an excellent source for textbooks, they often lack the latest editions of necessary textbooks. The ATPC could be an invaluable resource for filling this void.

An assistive technology course is offered at the High Tech Center. It includes an overview of assistive technology, internet, email, and other computer applications. New students who may benefit from assistive technology are encouraged to take this course. The HTC offers four Kurzweil stations with flat bed scanners. Dragon and closed circuit televisions, JAWS and ZoomText are networked throughout the college’s academic networkand are also among the adaptive software in the HTC. A recommendation to add Deep Freeze software to the campus was made, to prevent issues from happening, such as disabling the hot keys for JAWS and ZoomText causing difficulties in accessing these programs.

LA Harbor uses Rapid Text for live captioning and closed captioning services. At this time, they have only one student who is utilizing the service and report satisfaction with the convenience and responsiveness of this system.

While the Assistive Technology Instructional Assistant is not responsible for the college website, it was suggested that Special Programs and Services have a direct link from the home page of LA Harbor’s site. This was agreed to be an immediate action item following the visit.

As always, the HTCTU was recommended as a valuable resource for training, tutorials, and information. ACC Monitor was specifically recommended as software that can be obtained through the HTCTU that is server-based and can monitor website accessibility. Further consultation with RiversideCommunity College was generously offered as follow-up to this visit.

An excellent document that was originally developed by Cal State San Bernardino and that has been modified by RCC was offered. This document offers sixteen checkpoints that are interpretations of 508 Compliance.

SPSfaculty/staff were urged to continue making use of the Director’s listserv, as well as the HTC listserv, and specific Colleges with areas of specialty as various topics came up for discussion. The Galvin Group online training was also suggested as a means for the faculty/staff to gain greater awareness of the field at large and to develop some familiarity with resources available through other colleges.

Student Learning Outcomes:

The second portion of the visit addressed Student Learning Outcomes and was attended by 35 participants from both LA Harbor and the other community colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District. We were fortunate to recruit Bari and Jerry Rudmann from IrvineValleyCollege to offer this presentation and lead a discussion of the proposed SLOs for LA Harbor College. The SLOs that LA Harbor has developed were outstanding choices, very ambitious and creative. They obviously thought long and hard about what their department does, how it helps students and what they wanted to ensure that students are getting from the SPS program.

A PowerPoint presentation was given that outlined the process used at IrvineValley for SLO development. Key points were stressed that generated discussion with the audience. Jerry Rudmann’s background as a research psychologist has enabled the IrvineValley program to approach SLO development in a professional manner, utilizing and modifying scales that have been developed to measure student self-efficacy, self-regulation, goal clarity and dispositional hope.

The choice of these measures came as a result of examining the research that has been done on students with disabilities coming into college and making some judgments about their needs. For example, because the literature pointed to a connection between higher student attributes and higher achievements, IrvineValley chose to use some of the student attributes considered essential as pre- and post-test measures. This enabled them to develop a profile of students who will be high risk and so strategies can be used to address their deficits as soon as they come into the program.

Examples of their pre- and post-tests were provided to participants, as well as a sample of the matrix used to identify progress with SLO development and measurement. Copies of the publication titled, “Using Cognitive, Motivational, and Emotional Constructs for Assessing Learning Outcomes in Student Services, An Exploratory Study,” by Jerry Rudmann, Kari Tucker and Sharon Gonzalez was also distributed to the attendees.

Points made during the presentation and discussion included:

• The clarification that SLOs are similar to course objectives, with the distinction being that the course objective represents “what we think we are teaching” and the SLO provides “what the student takes away from the course.”

• When determining which SLOs to study, refer to your mission to help select SLOs that are truly aligned with your program.

• Importance of narrowing down the number of SLOs to be explored to avoid becoming bogged down in data collection and analysis.

• The process is dynamic and flowing and is not intended to provide measures over the long term, but to make adjustments based on findings and then move to a new question.

• After developing questions that need to be answered, prioritize the questions and address the most meaningful first.

• The availability of an efficient computer-based tracking system is essential.

• For consistency, the use of five point scales in testing instruments is recommended.

• Focus groups are an effective way to gather information if there are numerous issues to be addressed.

• When using a focus group, it is recommended that a set of questions be developed to prompt the discussion.

• Consider what data/information you are already collecting and consider whether it might be used in evaluating an SLO.

• The use of rubrics may be more efficient with some types of SLOs, such as making a rubric of tasks that students are able to accomplish.

• Evaluating your program is a different task than SLOs, so it is important that data collected not be used to evaluate.

• Particularly if an outside person is hired to collect data or measure SLOs, take precautions that the information collected is not used for evaluation of the program and be very clear about what you need.

• Collaborate with other service programs and courses to maximize results.

• Avoid vague terms such as “enhance” and instead use action verbs such as “demonstrate, utilize or select.”

• Help to structure your efforts by selecting a day of the week or month when evaluations are distributed.

• Support for your efforts throughout the college, particularly your administration, is essential!

The SLO discussion also included a review of the SLOs previously described, that were developed by LA Harbor. These examples generated a lively discussion. The SPS program was generous in sharing their initial work and the critique of these efforts provided very excellent and practical feedback that benefitted all who attended. LA Harbor was gracious in sharing their work and very open and receptive to input from the assembly.