Resources

There are a range of identified suitable resources which are available for organisations to use.

  • These include two different observation proformas, in use by two of the colleges involved in the London regional strand. Both proformas are available as separate documents by following the link [insert link]
  • The making judgements tool is a very useful handout from the LSIS Excellence Gateway which supports making evaluative judgements in any self assessment process such as writing SARs, course reports and graded observation reports. This is available as a separate document
  • Suggested JISC Techdis resources such as the Online Accessibility Self Evaluation (OASES) and the senior manager briefings are built around the JISC TechDis accessibility maturity model which attempts to move organisations to embedded, holistic approaches to inclusion.

Summary Introduction to OASES : Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Service (OASES)
  • People like to have a reality check; they like to put their current performance, past performance even where they’re planning to go in the future into context within their peer group or within the sector.
  • People can find advice on risk reduction for strategies on how to meet the demands of the legislation under the disability discrimination act, under the disability equality duty and ways in which they can adopt strategies and make collaborations and connections across institutions to make that happen.
  • People can find a range of resources to help them through the process of doing the evaluation. Often institutions or people within institutions have got the ideas that they want to develop but often need some guidelines or advice on how to put those into practice, so some of the pointers in these resources enable people to do that.
Benefits
This resource can help in seeing what resources are available, through getting a census to areas of risk where you haven’t got the practice that you perhaps ought to have. There’s some mileage in actually tidying up what you mean by reasonable adjustment. What you mean by your new Single Equality Duty statements for example. There is a declining vagueness about what reasonable means and we certainly work with a range of agencies to help clarify, say ‘look this has got to be practical’, and what you’ll be looking at in these is certainly practical.
Process
  1. Do the online self evaluation as a team within an institution, so you might get all the library staff together or all the marketing staff together and work through it, have a look at the survey results, have a look at the links that it takes you to and come up with some actions.
  1. On the other hand a number of communities of practice exists, so here you might have a group of librarians meeting regionally once a term or a group of network managers and IT managers getting together in which case they might do it, either online or separately but at the same sort of time or even physically in the same building filling it in individually, anonymously and then looking at the group’s collated anonymous results.
  1. And a final way of using it would be across institutional teams, where you have the person responsible for libraries, for marketing, for additional learning support and so on all working together, looking at areas of overlap, areas of priority perhaps where they could make the biggest difference in the shortest time.
  1. Coming back, 6 months’ time doing it again might give you a very clear, measurable way of seeing how much progress you’ve made.

  • Wider useful JISC TechDis resources

JISC TechDis Senior Management Briefings
Briefing 1 - e-Learning as an Accessibility Investment
Briefing 2 - Accessibility in the Mainstream: Roles and responsibilities
The focus of these two briefings is to use mainstream tools well enough that learner’s support needs are minimised; for example the need for notetakers is reduced if accessible resources are available on the VLE. Ofsted’s recent SEN review clearly identified that where teaching and learning were effective and inclusive support needs were minimised.
Briefing 3 - Transition Arrangements - Partners, Processes and Funding Issues
This briefing is dated in terms of funding but is still relevant in terms of identifying good practices in transition and the practical needs of learning support managers in effecting smooth transitions for learners.
Reasonable adjustment guidance
Creation of Learning Content
This guidance – available both on JISC TechDis and Excellence Gateway websites – explores alternative ways of adjusting teaching resources and learning experiences in order to meet different access needs.
The JISC TechDis resources have been grouped into eight categories, which you can access by clicking a category below:
Users who have difficulty seeing things
Users who have difficulty hearing things
Users who have difficulty understanding things
Users who have difficulty concentrating
Users who have difficulties handling & manipulating things
Users who have difficulty communicating with others
Users who have difficulty accessing text
Users who are dyslexic
Follow this link for more information on the Web2Access application designed under the JISC Users & Innovation: Personalising Technologies Programme.

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