Dr. Jared Colton, assistant professor in the English Department, was one of six teachers to receive Instructure’s 2019 Canvas Educator of the Year Award. The award represents education innovation in both K-12 and higher education fields.

According to Instructure’s press release announcement, “Jared has engaged his technical communication students in innovative activities to both learn HTML and provide more usable class materials for other students. Specifically, he created a class project for his students to take PDF files from online courses and convert them into Canvas HTML content.”

Colton worked regularly with Christopher Phillips, the Center for Innovative Design & Instruction’s (CIDI) electronic and information technology accessibility coordinator, to create the class project. In addition to helping Colton make the assignments, Phillips worked with students to help them understand accessibility, reviewed their work and then made sure the assignments were published back into the relevant courses.

Each student was given a PDF file and Colton worked with CIDI instructional designers to create a process allowing students to convert the PDF to HTML, clean up the content to match that of the PDF file, and then publish it to Canvas. The students learned basics of HTML and principles of accessibility to make sure the content was usable by all students.

“I want my students to think they’re not just creating this document, and later if someone points out they couldn’t access it because of a disability, that they then correct it,” said Colton. “I want my students to be thinking ahead and to think of those processes: creating captions, creating HTML that is readable by screen readers, for example, for blind readers. I want them to think of those things as a natural part of the document design process.”

The vast majority of student feedback was positive. They found the assignment more fulfilling because they were able to create content that would be more accessible to students with disabilities. Although the assignment requirements were rigorous, the students worked through the project with enthusiasm.