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ACCESS-ed Project Executive Summary
(Accessible Campus Climate Environment Support System for Education)

Introduction
What is Universal Design in Education (UDE)?
Project Goals & Strategies
1. Seven Goals
2. Four Strategic Activities
Anticipated Obstacles and Strategies to address them
Personnel & Partners
1. Key Personnel
2. Additional Personnel & Partners

Introduction

The R₂D₂ Center (Rehabilitation Research Design and Disability), affiliated with the College of Health Sciences (CHS) at UW–Milwaukee, is conducting a major demonstration project that will develop and test models supporting universal design implementation in higher education. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education has awarded more than $1 million over three years to fund the project.

The project, entitled ACCESS-ed Project (Accessible Campus Climate Environment Support Systems for Education), is designed to develop and test a process that delivers infrastructure to campuses nation-wide, through which campus-wide universal design instructional environment is sustainable.

The major activities of the project will include: 1) providing specific professional development and training through department-based resource coordinators 2) integrating research and information into a centralized resource website, and 3) dissemination of methods and strategies and 4) conducting an assessment and evaluation.

The concept for this project evolved over several years from the University of Wisconsin System's Conceptual White Paper on Universal Design in Education created by a team within the UW-System President’s Advisory Committee on Disabilities. Additionally, a number of other constituents were consulted, including the UW-System Provosts, the UW-System Faculty Representatives and the UW-System Directors of Disability Services office. Furthermore, on the UW-Milwaukee campus, the project was discussed with the Center for Instructional and Professional Development and the Chancellor’s ADA Advisory Committee.

What is Universal Design in Education (UDE)?

Universal Design in Education (UDE) stems from a larger Universal Design movement which has its roots in architecture. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) profoundly improved general access for people with disabilities and at the same time demonstrated that many accessible design features helped everyone, regardless of their abilities. Universal design works for people with no known disabilities, mild disabilities, moderate disabilities, and severe disabilities. Since the ADA, the same strategy has shown effective with computer operating system access, and most recently website accessibility.

Universal Design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. It’s intent is to simplify life for everyone by making products, communications, and the built environment more usable by as many people as possible at little or no extra cost. Universal design benefits people of all ages and abilities.

Applying Universal Design to post-secondary education can significantly improve the access for all students to public education. Components of post-secondary education to which UDE can and is being applied include:

built-environment and teaching spaces,
information environment, and
curricular environment.

The built-environment includes all external campus areas such as sidewalks, routes, parking lots, building and campus signage. It also includes inside instructional areas such as lecture halls, laboratories, restrooms and furniture. The information environment includes both electronic and non-electronic information. Examples are the internet, registration processes, financial aid application forms, textbooks, university policy and procedures, human resources documents, library journals, radio and television shows, and master’s and doctoral theses. Lastly, the curricular environment includes all course materials supporting instruction. The materials an instructor provides in a PowerPoint slide show, information placed in front of a class on a white board, syllabi and class hand-outs.

Why is UDE better than the current system of Individual Accommodation?

Institutions of higher education provide services to students with disabilities predominantly in a one-to-one student-staff delivery model known as Individual Accommodation. A primary problem with this model is that students must declare their disability to be served. Some students with mild disabilities may not view themselves as disabled or may not desire to admit their disabilities. This student population remains completely unserved by the Individual Accommodation approach.

Additionally, the student must seek out the services, fill out applications, provide an interview, or perform other activities that may be time intensive or difficult/impossible to complete, thereby reducing the number of students served.

The Student Accessibility Center (SAC) at UW–Milwaukee reported that during the 2004-05 fiscal year, 609 students identified themselves as having disabilities and registered with the center. An additional 284 prospective students worked with SAC staff. It is estimated that these numbers reflect approximately one-third to one-half of all students with disabilities on campus. Of those served, the majority has underlying or “hidden” disabilities such as learning disabilities.

Finally, Individual Accommodation is usually conducted by disability services personnel which require additional payroll budget. With UDE, accessibility is primarily conducted through regular faculty, eliminating the need for specialized personnel.

Who does UDE benefit?

UDE benefits all students, of all ages, from different cultures, with diverse learning styles, regardless of their abilities. Examples of individuals that need more UDE options include the blind individual who wants to read a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation from their library; the prospective student who is scanning a university website to download and complete a university application; the student with a learning disability sorting through the complex maze of financial aid forms; the student with a visual impairment trying to read PowerPoint slides; the student in a wheelchair trying to turn in an assignment in front of a big stadium lecture hall; or the student who cannot use a standard keyboard in a computer lab. As UDE is developed, as through the ACCESS-ed Project, unimagined benefits will be discovered.

Additionally, as campuses adopt the UDE philosophy, they will be key beneficiaries of the ACCESS-ed Project. The deliverables and outcomes of the project have been designed to serve as essential resources for campus administrators and educators.

Why is the timing right?

Virtually every higher education institution has observed budgets are tightening every year. Yet the number of students with disabilities is not shrinking, but increasing. Thus, the current system of one-on-one accommodation becomes cost-prohibitive, and creative management of a large number of students, particularly with mild learning disabilities, has become mandatory.

Additionally, it appears that Wisconsin has reached a critical period and is ripe for implementing and testing a launch to these ideas. UDE has been discussed on many of the 26 campuses in the UW-System and among other Wisconsin private institutions. The UW-System White Paper on Universal Design in Education [link to be added] has served as a recent vehicle for this discussion.

Specific indicators reveal the energy, focus, and readiness of higher education to implement UDE in Wisconsin. At least four major grant proposals have been submitted by UW System campuses pertaining to disability and higher education applications. ACCESS-ed has received formal letters of support from the University of Wisconsin (UW) System, UW System campuses and from out-of-state public and private institutions. Beyond these, interest has been extremely positive, and campuses volunteer eagerly.

Project Goals & Strategies

The ACCESS-ed Project specifically targets the transition of higher-education campuses from a primary mode of using Individual Accommodation to meet the needs of students with disabilities to a mode that emphasizes the use of Universal Design strategies to benefit all students. To reach this objective, ACCESS-ed identifies seven goals, and four strategic activities to accomplish the goals.

Seven Goals

Implement Universal Design as a first order approach to meeting needs of students with disabilities and to providing more equal access to education for all students.
Develop a department-based information system (Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinators or DARCs) to infuse ideas most broadly and directly.
Motivate faculty/staff at the department level to implement UD techniques.
Train the trainers, the DARCs, to provide a broad base of expertise readily available to faculty and staff locally in their departments.
Implement a web-based UD resource database to allow faculty and staff to quickly retrieve answers and solutions to challenges they face.
Replicate the DARC system across various types of higher education campuses (public/private, urban/rural, local/state/national, etc.) to better understand unique needs of various settings.
Collect feedback and data to determine effectiveness, and improve methods.

Four Strategic Activities

1. DARCs (Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinators) Protocol Development

For a number of years, UW–Madison has implemented a system of Access and Accommodation Coordinators, primarily to implement standards for web accessibility. ACCESS-ed builds on this success and takes it to the next level by broadening the content and attempting the mode on other campuses. These new-level coordinators are known as Departmental Accessibility Resource Coordinators (DARCs).

The first ACCESS-ed activity will be to develop a protocol for how the DARCs are created on a campus. The DARC protocol will describe how to implement DARCs and will create a set of “getting started” materials to include: background information, answers to common questions, how to select a campus DARC Manager, how to recruit DARCs from departments, integrating DARCs with existing workloads, approaches for different size campuses, setting up initial and subsequent trainings/meetings, and more.

The protocol will also detail the different roles of DARCs. For the ACCESS-ed project, a DARC will provide training and be a central point of contact for all partner campuses. Each campus will designate a campus DARC Manager who will help create and recruit the campus set of DARCs from each department.

Detailed training materials will be developed for use by ACCESS-ed staff in Milwaukee and Madison. DARC trials will expand to UW-Platteville and UW-Parkside with customized protocols and revisions needed for the smaller campuses.

A second round of campuses will activate four replication partnerships, as well as seven more seed campuses. An ACCESS-ed team will review proposals to select a group of campuses that are likely to be the most successful in implementing the ACCESS-ed systems and that provide a cross section of different types of campuses.

2. UDE Materials & Techniques: Acquisition and Consolidation

ACCESS-ed is aware of a variety of UDE materials and resources already available in the field. To avoid duplicating those efforts, the Project will identify and centralize existing UDE materials. ACCESS-ed will search out current materials as well as monitor for new developments. It will also stimulate development of new materials internally and externally.

3. Dissemination

Web Resources: The ACCESS-ed website will centralize the point of distribution of project-related information and materials. A highly usable, carefully designed, accessible search interface will be available for end users to quickly identify resources. It will be searchable in a variety of cognitive models, including by keyword or category, similar to many search engines with which users are already familiar.

National Conference Co-sponsor: ACCESS-ed will co-sponsor the national conference “Universal Design for Higher Education: Update for Practice” in 2008.

National Publications and Presentations: The academic home of the Project, the R₂D₂ Center at UW-M, commits to publish in refereed journals. The interdisciplinary nature of the ACCESS-ed research team also assures conference presentations at respective national venues.

4. Evaluation & Assessment

Evaluation and Assessment activities will include data collection from a variety of sources. Some activities include student experiential sampling; campus self-audits; UD skill testing of staff and faculty; UD strategy implementation and drop-out data from faculty; and state-wide and national Advisory Panel review.

Anticipated Obstacles and Strategies

The ACCESS-ed Project anticipates obstacles, and has designed strategies to address them.

Need to motivate faculty & staff

Clearly, one of the biggest challenges is motivating individual faculty and staff across the campus to create a paradigm shift. Creating new behaviors in faculty and staff will require a system that appeals to their individual motivations. Some of the motivations that we have seen affect change on campuses include: Authoritative, altruistic, social, technical, pride, legal, safety, and problem solving. We have historical examples of each style of motivation. This project designs an approach to enable a range of stimuli for change.

Lack of practical UD materials

While support for the UDE concept is strong, few resources, tools and techniques are easily available to faculty and staff who need to deliver the UD approach. UD resources are too fragmented, too few, and lack empirical research documenting the success of UD interventions. Admittedly, hundreds of thousands of websites mention UD and education, learning, or instruction, but mentions do not equal solid resources. We lack the system that brings resources together; provides assistance sorting and locating the right information from all of the introductory resources; compares ideas; or provides direction when no technique to solve a problem is found. The ACCESS-ed website will be an initial trial for such a system, and will be developed simultaneously with other project activities.

Need for research

While some UD strategies have been successfully implemented, we still know little about the comparative effects on students who don’t declare their disability versus those that do. We have tended to promote UD by anecdotal persuasion. The field needs to begin to document and describe the effects of UD. We need better theoretical descriptions and more descriptive research that can begin to provide a basis for future study. In short, we need more documentation about specific UD strategies, how they are implemented, and their outcomes from various stakeholders’ perspectives. This will be a key activity of the ACCESS-ed Project, and the research findings will be published on the website for public use.

Personnel & Partners

The ACCESS-ed Project personnel are made up of a highly interdisciplinary team from the R₂D₂ Center at UW-Milwaukee, from across campus, from across UW system and from across the country.

Key Personnel

Dr. Roger O. Smith and Mr. Todd Schwanke serve as the ACCESS-ed Project leaders, and each brings multiple perspectives to this project. Dr. Smith brings extensive experience in disability, assistive technology, and UD intervention from clinical practice and from his previous research and development work. Mr. Schwanke brings technical expertise to this project. As a rehabilitation engineer, he understands disability application and bridges technical support and implementation to practical educational challenges. Mr. Schwanke leads the UW–Milwaukee Campus Design Solutions in the area of disability access.

Additional Personnel and Partners

Additional ACCESS-ed Project personnel include highly-respected experts with UD background, higher education experience, a solid grasp of assistive technology implementations, and a broad experience with low to high incidence disabilities.

The DARC Management team is comprised of various directors of disability student services at several UW campuses, together with a director of UW-System Testing & Evaluation, and a UW-System specialist in Information Technology. This group forms a core, system-wide team that will perform as DARC managers and assist with articulating and refining the DARC protocols. The National Advisory Panel is comprised of a group of individuals with extensive interest and/or background in UD or who bring a unique campus perspective to the Project. The panel includes directors of AT and research centers, leaders of national accessibility not-for-profit organizations, and experts of higher education.