Accessible Course Management courtesy of Moodle

by Rosemarie Punzalan, CFILC's Training Specialist

The CSUN's 27th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference was held in San Diego from February 27 - March 3, 2012. I had the opportunity to attend Thursday sessions as well as network with professionals, especially the vendors. The session that interested me the most was: Creating Accessible Online Learning Content: Learn how to create Accessible Online Learning Content using the Moodle LMS to Deliver your Courses Online.

Moodle LMS (Learning Management System) is a course management system designed for educators who want to create quality online courses. It is a free and open source software that is used by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is not 100% accessible. Some built-in Moodle features are barriers like the multimedia filters and the "File Picker" widget.

Luckily, there is a solution. Carroll Center for the Blind has created an online course that instructs curriculum developers on how to create accessible course materials using Moodle. Their solutions include:

• Configure Moodle to create the most accessible framework for delivering courses. 
• Provide effective and easy-to-use tools and filters to make it easy for content creators to embed rich media into their curriculum. 
• Instruct course creators in the use of Markdown, a lightweight markup language, designed to reduce the learning curve required to publish semantic, standards compliant HTML instead of a WYSIWYG. 
• Create a system of best practices and clearly define and illustrate them to content creators. 
• Introduce accessibility and usability concepts by interweaving them with concepts already familiar to content creators. 

In the past I created a quick AT Network Moodle as a test for the Training Program and did not complete it because there were some accessibility challenges. With the above solutions I am thinking of spending some time creating an AT Network Training Program that consists of Self-Paced Trainings and Archived Trainings.

Have you heard of Moodle LMS? If so, have you used it and what for? Let us know in the comment box below.

Resources:

Presentation in Markdown (text) format (good for screen reader access) - http://media.carrolltech.org/csun2012/presentation.txt

Presentation in HTML (best for screen reader access) - http://media.carrolltech.org/csun2012/presentation.html