An advantage - and disadvantage - of online science
I get an email about an incident like this, a fire caused by a "rainbow" experiment, every few years, often with more far more tragic results. These tragedies never happen in an online chemistry class! What an easy selling point for academic administrators.
On the other hand, when one teaches future teachers who will be expected to provide rich and engaging live learning experiences, one feels an obligation to make sure they can walk into an on-ground lab and handle themselves, their chemicals, and their students with a realistic combination of confidence and caution. I can provide my online students with articles, videos and lectures about chemical safety, yet I am still uneasy. Perhaps it is a generational trait that I need the students to belly up to a fume hood sweating under protective gear, to resist the temptation to mouth pipette, to heft a stock bottle and re-store it safely, before I send them off to be the teacher, the guardian of class safety as well as the architect of amazing and wondrous adventures in science.
When I taught a blended "non-major" Consumer Chemistry class to undergraduates, I actually used a version of this experiment that was much less dramatic, required the expense of spectroscopes, and didn't work all the time, but involved nothing flammable (other than students themselves). It was done by student pairs rather than as a demonstration. After the experiment was over I had students compare their observations with a video of the more dramatic experiments and discuss safety considerations in the teaching lab. But I did have them working with open flame on rainbow day. And of course there were more days when no open flame was allowed because there were organic solvents in use. And did I mention that oxidizer cabinet?
How do we know how much risk is reasonable? Is any risk reasonable when you are reading about in a newspaper article or a blog? When you drop your own child or grandchild off at school?
My last assignment for the BrightSpace Accessibility MOOC was to create an accessible Microsoft Office Document, and then use that document to create an accessible PDF. I allocated myself a couple of hours to do this simple task on my Mac and write it up. I didn't expect to break a sweat. Wrong!
Word
First, I had to find a Word document, preferably one that could justify the effort to make it accessible! As an instructional designer, I serve up online content as (mostly) accessible HTML pages. But no problem, I teach a biology class that has homework sheets attached, as .doc, to D2L Dropbox folders for students to download and fill out if they wish. (They can also read the questions on an HTML page and upload any sort of document they choose for their answers.) I chose the first homework assignment worksheet as the starting point. I looked over the document and saw a few things, including accessibility features, that I wanted to modify before re-using the assignment. Thus began a modification cascade.
Lists, Blank Lines, and Different Boxes
An early change I put in actually hurt accessibility. The homework questions were presented to look like a numbered list, but actually were not a list. The reason I set it up that way was because students would hit enter/return in a list to make a place to put their answers. This would affect the numbering of the questions and cause confusion for both students and graders. So when, in the interest of accessibility, I restored the list functionality to the pseudo-list, I inserted some blank lines after each list item for students to type into without being inside a list. But that only made things worse. When I ran an accessibility check (on a PC; try doing that in Word 2011), I realized that in Word (as well as in HTML), extra blank lines or spaces are an accessibility no-no. I removed the blank lines, but was left with the original concern about student-entered content affecting question numbers. Time to think outside the box, or at least to re-draw the box. In the next version of the homework document, question numbers became headings (h2), and question body text became paragraphs rather than list items. This solved the accessibility issue plus students could modify the document without introducing visual awkwardness.
A Data Table
A question in the homework presented a few rows of data in a table and asked students to fill in the empty cells. The table created three challenges. First, the empty cells were an accessibility no-no. I thought about checking into the accessibility of form fields in Word and PDF, but I wimped out and put "replace me" into each formerly empty cell. Second, when I went to add the table description (for accessibility), I found that I could not even do that for a .doc. When I saved-as .docx, there was a place to put my description. (Yay for accessibility, but not so much for compatibility.) The third challenge was a total surprise, and not limited to Word on Mac. My table had a header, or so I thought. In "format table", the header row was checked. Yet Word 2010's compatibility check turned up the error of no header row on the table. The fix was equally surprising. To quote from AIM (link: http://webaim.org/techniques/word/):
There is no way to assign table headers or <th> elements to a table created in Word. You can indicate that a row should Repeat as header on the top of each page; in the Table Properties menu. When saved as PDF, the cells in the first row are detected as table headers, though the headers are not maintained if the file is saved as HTML.
Sure enough, when I checked to repeat the header on the top of each page, the error went away in my comparability check on the PC.
Satisfying the Assignment
Those changes got me an accessible Word version of my original homework document, but I wasn't quite there with the MOOC assignment. Our accessible document was to include a list (ordered or unordered), three levels of headings, and an image. Just for the assignment, I added an extra page to my document, and structured the content on that page to invoke h3 without raising eyebrows. The other requirements took a bit of finagling.
An Image
The image took some thought, but since students would need to consult a periodic table in doing their homework, I an image of the periodic table. The alt text was, appropriately, the 1000 (or more) words that still did not equal the image. The periodic table is a real accessibility challenge when teaching chemistry to students who have visual challenges. it is, after all, the visual organizer for the chemical elements. Simply tabbing from cell to cell in no way gives a person who is not already carrying a mental picture of the periodic table a real insight into the periodicity of the element properties. So, besides the alt text, I wanted to give students a link to an accessible, free online resource with more info than my paltry 1000 words. There are a surprising lot of websites that claim to have accessible online periodic tables, but if you read the reviews you will realize that the Webmasters are engaging in wishful thinking. I finally found one that had no negative reviews, so I wanted to link it in association with the image. (In an HTML page, the figure tag would do just what I needed in grouping an image with other resources, but this is word.) I didn't know whether a screen reader could link to a URL in "alt" text, so I made a link in the heading that was the only visible text associated with the image. Word 2010 told me the heading was too long for accessibility, so I removed the link from the h2 and put it in a paragraph. (After this last change in Word I forgot to make a new PDF. Emailing my files to myself and chasing them from my office to the computer lab and back gets old pretty quickly. Think about it, Microsoft and Adobe.)
New Links List, With a Surprise!
The document had originally contained a list of questions, but since I put the homework questions into the new format, the list was gone. So on the new page I made a list of resources to which students might refer while doing the homework. Some of the resources were on external Websites, so I made links. According to our accessibility guidelines, I made the linking text be short and descriptive, rather than displaying the URL's. No problem in Word for this one, but things got funky in Acrobat. Hint: it wasn't the list structure that caused the Acrobat problem, but the links.
The PDF
At various stages, I saved as PDF from Word and then opened the PDF in Acrobat professional to use the Accessible PDF wizard. When I did this in Mac, I found I had to re-type all my document information into the PDF. It does not carry over. Interestingly, when I ported my Word 2011 (Mac) to Word 2010 (PC), the document information did carry over the whole way. There were random accessibility things that did and did not get re-used from Word 2011 to PDF, but they were all driven from my mind by the big surprise. Working links in a Word 2011 (Mac) document do not save as PDF links. Links in Acrobat Pro X (Mac) get made by dragging a box over the text of the link and making the box go to a URL. I could not imagine this would be accessible, so I abandoned saving as PDF on my Mac and trotted over to the PC lab. The links in my Word 2011 file worked just fine in Word 2010, and when I saved as PDF from Word 2010, I got a PDF with working links. So, sadly, it's worth trotting over to the PC lab if I need to PDF a Word doc.
Bottom Line
Microsoft and Adobe, are you listening? Please? Teachers have to use your products, and use them together, on a daily basis. And many of the teachers are on Macs. And the teachers must meet federal requirements regarding accessibility. Do your bit for accessibility so we can do ours.
eTeacher, eLearner, eDesigner -- Whatever I do seems to have an "e" in front of it. Already that feels retro. I wonder whether, with the advent of the printing press, tutors who used textbooks were called pTutors. A good teacher uses the tools at hand that are best suited to the situation, whether it is conversation illustrated with a stick drawing in the sand or a MOOC going out a hundred thousand eager learners. At what point can we take the technology for granted and move on with the essentials?
