Meeting & Agendas

The agenda was reviewed.

This committee consists of representatives from Distance Education, Information Technology, Academic Technology, Student Affairs, Instructional Affairs, Adult Education, and Classified Employees. It is hopeful that the Student Government Association will soon be represented as well. The functions of the committee were reviewed and the schedule of future meetings was listed as: The Committee will meet 4 times a year; October 3rd, December 5th, February 6th, April 3rd. Member introductions were given for each committee member.

Blackboard LMS minimum standards (G/P) require every faculty member to use Blackboard Ultra. Requirements include posting a welcome announcement no later than the first day of class, having a ‘Start Here’ or similarly titled module that contains the course syllabus and informs students of how they can track their grades during the semester, and that students are provided with feedback on their grades as well as a final course grade posted in the LMS. We are considering what accountability for minimum standards looks like. A series of videos are available that provide the rationale behind the LMS minimum standards. The LMS minimum standards are for in person and hybrid classes; online classes have additional minimum standards and requirements for students to be successful.

The deadline to achieve compliance is April 24th, 2026. Our accessibility rating in Blackboard was initially around 34%, but it is now up to over 80%. Instructional designers have been providing workshops with targeted presentations to resolve accessibility issues within documents. Accessibility newsletters with tips and tricks have been sent out and a website has been generated with information on accessibility. Departments have requested department specific training sessions to bring their compliance rates up. Instructional designers have been collaborating with the Student Accessibility Services team to consolidate all of the instructional resources both teams have created.

On the OIRA homepage, the Daily Registration Report gives us an overview of the number of people enrolled in courses, but this data can be filtered in numerous ways, including modality. The success rates for distance education have been on the rise over the last few years. Another useful dashboard is the Grade Distribution Dashboard, this gives an overview of the grades per semester. This can be further filtered by demographic, department, modality or specific learning area. The last important dashboard is the Course Withdrawals Dashboard. This data can help us determine what we might want to consider for the year. Jenna from OIRA will present a deep dive into the data outcomes for online students during our December meeting.

Questions from Committee members: 

Q: Will faculty have the ability to move the announcements to the landing page so minimum standards aren’t dismissed when students log in?

A: Currently there is a popup with announcements, however students can dismiss it without opening. We can bring this to the LMS Transition Committee.

Q: Will faculty have the ability to unlock locked menus to further customize their courses?

A: The vendor (Anthology) has intentionally locked these items to provide consistent content wayfinding across all of their classes.

Q: When courses are copied from previous semesters, it copies all of the old due dates and notifies students that their assignments are overdue.

A: This issue requires a meeting with an instructional designer or a MOJO ticket to the LMS team to solve. Old due dates should not reactivate.

Q: What are DE challenges and how can we reduce them to increase DE completion rates?

A: We will reflect on the data dashboards and bring ideas and insights to the next meeting.

Q: The biology department has some of the lowest accessibility scores. This is because there are thousands of images and hundreds of pages of lab manuals that are used department wide. Are there any resources that faculty can lean more heavily into than training to improve compliance? 

A: Department wide documents will make it easier to support accessibility compliance. The first resource is an instructional designer. If we do not have the capacity to do this, we are able to send it to an outside vendor for assistance. We can also purchase tools that could be used to assist the department.

The committee was reminded of the next meeting date on December 5th and asked to submit agenda items no less than 7 days before.