Make friends with technologies to enable access to anti-doping education opportunities

Faire amie avec la technologie avec les technologies pour permettre l'accès aux opportunités d'éducation anti-dopage

Hongyang Gracie Li and Soledad Silvera, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)

Track: Institutional technology/ Volet: La technologie institutionnelle

Type: Innovative teaching, technology or design technique

Name of the innovation:

As the global regulator (WADA) for anti-doping, we have made education a priority for athletes and athletes support personnel a priority. We would like to increase the reach of our education solutions to the global audience, despite the ongoing pandemic restrictions. To solve this issue, we would need an LMS platform that is easy, intuitive to use for the global audience. More importantly we were looking for solutions to help us speed up the course content translation process. The logic is simple, if we are able to make the same education program in as many languages as possible, then we are increasing the equal access to education in less developed countries. A 3rd issue we would like to address to respond to our learners request in a more professional way to monitor the frequently asked questions and improve our service level to the anti-doping community regarding education.

Type of innovation: Technology

How the innovation works:

The LMS is the easiest among the 3 challenges to solve. With a lot of experiments and trial and errors, we decided to use Articulate Rise for content development and then a machine translation tool for content translation. Finally, we found a customer support system to manage our users requests about how to use our LMS systems.

Accessibility in an online communications course

Carol Sparkes and Carolyn Teare, Thompson Rivers University

Track: Learning experience design/ Volet: Conception des expériences d’apprentissage

Type: Case study in innovation:

Name of the case: Accessibility in an online communications course

Focus of the case: Design

Background

CMNS 1811: Professional and Academic Communication is credit course offered through Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University. It is delivered in an asynchronous format and a student has 30 weeks to complete it. The assessments are built around a case study on The City of Beautiful. With so many courses moving online due to COVID it is important to share ways to make to design an online courses to be accessible.

Problem addressed by the case:

The problem addressed is the accessibility issues remaining after document accessibility checkers, from Word for example, are used. Focus is on supporting those using screen readers.

Solution devised:

Unique solutions for each scenario.

Process for developing the solution:

We analyzed each situation as it presented itself. Creating tools such as OneStep.trubox.ca to help guide ourselves and share the approach with others.