Jul 23, 2021
The presenter is James Thurston, G3ict, who is joined by Chris Misra, University of Massachusetts, Amherts.
SPEAKER:
Please welcome James Thurston and Chris
Misra. James is the Vice President for G3ict,
where he leads the design and implementation of new worldwide
advocacy strategies and programs to scale up G3ict’s global
impact. G3ict is the global Initiative for Inclusive
Information and Communication Technologies promoting the rights of
Persons with Disabilities in the Digital Age.
Chris is the Vice Chancellor and CIO at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, information technology plays a crucial role in many key areas, including but not limited to student success and engagement, research competitiveness, and multi-modal education.
Today they will be looking at how leveraging accessibility and inclusion can provide an adaptive and accessible multi-modal IT ecosystem to support campuses. Chris will review findings, digital inclusion gaps, next steps for improvements at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and more!
JAMES:
Our goal with this session is to share with all of you some detail
about how the U Mass approach to being more accessible, more
inclusive through technology. Through its technology assets and
deployments and Chris and I over the next hour want to surface and
share with you, I think, what are some valuable and actionable
experiences from U-mass, that will hopefully apply to your own
accessibility journey in your higher education institution.
This particular session is the third in the IAAP higher ed series. It's also the first of the next three sessions, which relate to, and are sort of sourced from, G3ict's work with universities and higher education institutions, using our smart university digital inclusion maturity model tool.
And I'm just going to briefly give you a little bit of information on that, just so it will make a little bit more sense as Chris and I start to have a conversation about our work with Chris and what Chris has been leading and driving there at the University of Massachusetts model.
The smart university digital inclusion maturity model tool, it's an assessment tool and a benchmarking tool. And it's really to help universities better understand how their digital transformation, how they're using technology, how their use of data is either supporting accessibility inclusion of people with disabilities or potentially presenting barriers to the inclusion of people with disabilities, including faculty, staff and students. And even, really, the broader community where the university might sit.
So, the tool itself, the assessment tool, it's made up of 28 variables, we call them enablers, and they define what it really means to be an inclusive smart university. They enable accessibility and enable inclusion. These variables, or enablers, contribute to the university's building up the capabilities that we know support greater inclusion in accessibility at a university.
And these capabilities, and with the tool we're able to look at the role of things like leadership, the existence of a digital inclusion strategy or not, we look at the accessibility of the university's engagement channels, how it's pushing information out, getting information back, are those accessible, we look at things like the culture of diversity, is the university employing people with disabilities, is it training on disability and accessibility. We look at things like procurement, what systems does the university have in place to make sure that its investments in technology and its deployments of technology are accessible. So, a whole range of issues that we know are pretty critical to a university becoming increasingly accessible, increasingly inclusive. And, of course, we do dig into technology and data, which are the backbone and the life blood of a smart university.
And the way that we use these variables, these 28 enablers, these 18 capabilities, is in a three-step process. That is pretty straightforward. We do some analysis of documents, I.T. strategies, digital inclusion strategies, budgets, accessibility statements. We do some analysis of those. We make available to the university an online self-assessment where they sort of write themselves across these variables.
And then we actually do an expert site visit where we curate a team of global experts on inclusion and accessibility and bring them in to engage with the university, dig into some of these variables, and hopefully, at the same time, provide some help and assistance on pain points, issues that the university might be experiencing.
And then the final step is we deliver a road map, which includes a set of scores for each of these variables and a set of priorities and recommendations for moving forward. So, if you're at a level 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 for procurement, these are the kinds of things you might think about doing to get to levels 3, 4 and 5. So pretty straightforward.
The process with U Mass, we'll be talking -- jumping in with Chris in just a minute. We, I think, started that process last spring and sort of did the site visit, I think, in early summer this past year. And in that process, we reviewed probably more than 20 documents, these budgets, these strategies, these org charts, policy statements. We talked with more than 40 U Mass faculty and staff over ten different listening sessions. And then we delivered the road map.
And in the road map, U Mass, I think, had real relative strengths in the area of leadership and other areas identified where there's an opportunity to really make some steps to have some improvements in the capabilities and ultimately in the accessibility and inclusion there.
So that's a little bit of a background on how G3ict came to be working with U Mass. I thought it might be useful to sort of frame our conversation. And with that, I'm really excited now, and I've been I've been looking forward to this discussion, Chris, for quiet a while, of jumping in with you and hearing a little bit about the U Mass Amherst journey, where you are, where you're headed but maybe we can start, if you can tell us a little bit about the University of Massachusetts Amherst, give us a general sense of the university and how you're deploying technology there.
CHRIS:
Sure, thanks, James. So, U-Mass Amherst, for those of you who
aren't familiar with Massachusetts geography, I grew up in
Massachusetts, so I know, we're about 90 minutes west of Boston,
175 miles north northeast of New York City. It's a relatively rural
area, but it's a significant institution.
We have about 24,000 undergraduate students, about 7,500 graduate students. About 1,500, instructional faculty. Largest state institution in New England, research one, $233 million, $1.3 billion budget, big. 1500-acre campus, which is the biggest thing is trying to find your way around the campus.
Our journey of accessibility came about really through just conversations and advocacy within the campus in terms of this has to be a key responsibility for us. Our technology platform is really very traditional, higher education. We migrated many of our services to the Cloud, excessive use of Zoom recently, Google, exchanging out platforms, and the challenge with the campus of this size is really just managing the breadth and depth of both a campus and a highly decentralized institution.
JAMES:
Great, thanks, Chris.
We probably started having conversations about a year ago, actually, just as we were coming into the pandemic and universities, in particular, I think, we're scrambling to try to figure out, okay, how do we fulfill our mission in this environment.
Can you talk a little bit about sort of what that looked like as we were coming into the pandemic from a CIO perspective, the kinds of things that you were thinking about and needing to take steps on?
CHRIS:
Sure. There were sort of two interesting aspects.
I mean, aside from it's amongst the longest days of my career in the past and probably ever going forward just in terms of how do you migrate an institution that size to an online education. We made a very early determines, we were one of the early schools who decided to go remote, we thought it would be two weeks, we took a double spring break. We quickly ramped up the technology portfolio.
We were fortunate that we already had tools like Zoom, we had pretty good practice of online education, fairly robust online education school, but not a lot of digitally native capacity to teach instructionally remote.
So, there's really two principal areas of impact. There's a principal area of impact in academics, and the impact in administration. Since we extended out the spring break for an extra week, we actually had two weeks to figure out how we were going to do these academics. But that meant we had to move the administration into an online world in a very short order of time. From the basic things, how are we going to pick up the mail to how are we going to communicate, how do staff meetings work, and recognizing that institutionally we were a face-to-face campus, our staff meetings were face to face, our one-on-one meetings were face to face and we had to comport all of that. So, the social change was actually significant, and that led quickly to substantial change in the academic side as well.
We saw increases of -- astounding increases in Zoom utilization. One of my favorite statistics on Zoom utilization is in the first week of -- I'm sorry -- in the first day of the first week when we brought our academics online, we used more Zoom time the entire month previously. So, each day in April, we used the same number of Zoom hours in the entire month of February. And that pace continued through the balance of the spring semester.
JAMES:
Chris, I remember that data point as well. And I often use it
myself because I think it is a really easy, compelling example of
this accelerated digital transformation.
Can you talk a little bit about where -- how accessibility fits into I.T. and into the university in general? I know, you've got a really great I.T. strategy, accessibility is embedded in there. I don't think that there's a specific digital inclusion or necessarily accessibility strategy, but maybe a little bit about strategy and organizational structure, just so we understand how accessibility fits in.
CHRIS:
Absolutely. So, we've actually been fortunate from an I.T.
perspective, we've had staff supporting accessibility but a very
modest staff. I think when James did the assessment, we had a
single staff member, at a high point we had two staff, and we're in
the process of transitioning that as well. So, our overall
accessibility strategy comes multi fold. My team is responsible for
the information technology, and that's across the board. That means
we support students' technology use in the classroom, we support
faculty's technology use, we provide general technology use for
administration.
We do not have responsibility for accessibility accommodations per se, we have a disability services team on campus, it's organized in our student affairs area. So, really, it's a key partnership working between student affairs, working with my central I.T. organization.
I will say from a maturity perspective, though, we had staff, it was very much more about boutique service, solving discrete individual accommodations, and it hadn't crossed the line of being generalizable to most of our day-to-day normal use of population technology. It was very much targeted at a subset population that had self-disclosed a need for an accommodation.
JAMES:
And I know as part of this conversation, we'll get into a bit
later, a discussion of these issues of silos and coordination and
collaboration, which we had a lot of conversation about when we
were working with you.
So, maybe we can jump in now a little bit into this sort of notion of accelerated accessibility that happened for U Mass for sure but probably for most universities around the world because of the pandemic and what that looks like. And how -- maybe start with a little bit about how does the university deploy technology assets that are accessible and really are working for everyone, and what did it look like to have this sort of intensified effort to include a focus on accessibility as you were becoming more and more -- using technology more and more to do all of your services, both administrative and academic and teaching?
CHRIS:
Sure. So I'll say the structural change that really occurred was, I
think, originally we treated accessibility as meeting the needs of
identified individuals who had to have accommodations and making
sure our web content was accessible, doing basic accessibility
reviews, it was basic, W3CG, not a lot of detailed work and it was
not invested across the board in terms of we had a lot of natively
accessible tool set but it was really natively delivered accessible
tool set, there wasn't a lot of work and push for us to drive an
institutional priority around making sure our content was natively
accessible, except where there was either liability or like I say,
a dedicated accommodation.
As we went into the pandemic, that really had to pivot because we realized, we no longer had the mechanism, we couldn't deploy a notetaker for a student in a classroom because there wasn't a classroom.
We couldn't make point by point accommodations on either technology or use case basis. So, we had to start generalizing. We were fortunate that we were in the midst of a transition of our strategic plan, so we were actually at a point of making that type of pivoting. Of identify digital inclusion as a core property going forward. And, so, we had a lot of the substrate work, but I'd say the pandemic really drove us to recognize it wasn't solely about a compliance obligation but much more about reaching our community where they're at.
JAMES
And as you were making that shift, were you -- some of what we had
talked about in the past, when you were in the middle of all this,
is there some -- much like what you would probably do on the
security side of your work, any sort of risk rating system, and
trying to make these decisions about where are we going to
prioritize and focus first and those types of decisions when it
comes to accessibility?
CHRIS:
Absolutely, yeah. So, one of the things, for me, I consider
fortunate is prior to my role as a CIO I've been in a number of
roles at U Mass. I came from a very technical background. But I
spent many years in a security role. So, I was responsible for
information security at the organization.
Within the information security field, it's very much a derivative of risk management field that works very heavily on risk and concepts like maturity models play very heavily there. So, when you're assessing implementation of controls to mediate security risk, you have to assess what is the cost of control, what is the value, what is the return. The easiest way to assess that is against a maturity model so I had a lot of familiarity with the concept of maturity models.
One of the things that made me very excited about the engagement of G3ict was the application of this discipline-type technology of applying a maturity model to a domain like accessibility because I had not seen that done before, but I had a lot of experience.
What's nice about that, it gives you an abstract way of measuring your progress, although there can be a metric and a rating, it also talks about where you are legitimately relative to your peers but what steps you can take, and gives you a better mechanism to start prioritizing resource allocations.
So, as I moved out of information security, into a CIO role, I changed from being responsible for compliance to be responsible for budget, priority and allocation. So being able to have a document like a maturity model that can help guide investment and show return relative to cost was a better framework for us to make ongoing decision making and I felt more at home in that security field, like oh, we know this is a high risk, let's apply a resource here, even if the resource is fairly modest, it's going to get us significant return against that issue.
JAMES:
Can you -- if you're able, can you talk a little bit about some of
those areas where you were making decisions at the time in this
accelerated period of focus on accessibility in addition to a lot
of other things?
Where you are identifying risk and taking some steps specifically around improving the accessibility of your technology assets?
CHRIS:
Sure. And in some cases, what's interesting with the technology
assets is our first task, because we are technologists, is let's
just fix the technology. What it really came down to in many
cases it's about the business process as well. So, when we started
going through the assessment process, we realized the first and
foremost, we have a 24,000 student population moving remote. We had
to get in front of the faculty and instructors to explain why this
was relevant.
So, it wasn't so much about, hey, don't put a poorly scanned PDF up on your website, we'd already been providing those types of instructions, but it really had to pivot to, is your course content accessible natively. And in that case, it is still digital accessibility, but it may be, have you applied alt tags to your PowerPoints, have you made sure you're not doing poorly rendered PDFs, is your content screen reader able. It was these sorts of things that are actually technology related but it was about the business process behind it.
What we did, we formed a working group between my team, our university library, our center for teaching and learning, and our instructional designers, we call our ideas group, it's a big long acronym I can never remember, but we put those together as ideas is the support resource, faculty primary interact with. Library is a resource that provides a lot of the supplementary external materials, I.T. is a lot of times the bridging infrastructure.
So, it was really about forming a coalition within campus, identifying priorities, it was helped inform by the maturity model where those risk areas are, and providing guidance, which wasn't just apply technology, but help individuals creating content to make the content accessible natively, because the incremental cost to them was much smaller than us throwing lots of money at making the technology do it for them.
JAMES:
You touched on a really important point that I think would resonate
with any university around the world, which is the sort of
decentralized structure of universities, we'll dig into that more
deeply in a minute.
But I'm just wondering, as you were partnering, and leading this accelerated digital transformation during the pandemic and focus on accessibility as part of that, how was that received? I recall in part of our conversations, for example, there was, with the faculty, there may have been some incentives around going digital, maybe even going digital and accessible at the same time. But, in general, how would you say this accelerated accessibility was received?
CHRIS:
So I would say it was received well. I was actually somewhat
surprised at how well it was received. Those of you who have been
at universities, especially in large universities, they're very
decentralized power structures, recognize that change comes slowly.
The ship turns slowly, as we like to say, right? It will get there
eventually but it turns slowly.
I was tremendously impressed with the empathy and the caring shown by the faculty and the instructors involved in supporting students at a distance, but they recognized an individual obligation. And, really, our role as technologists was to reduce that barrier to them to make their content accessible. So, there was some financial structure incentives, as we went into our subsequent semester that helped faculty teaching online to build hybrid instruction. What we did, we developed a series of standards to make sure as our content went out, it met these standards, that was sort of the condition of the incentivising.
So rather than make it a big deal, like hey, you all have to do accessibly, it was really embedded into an existing incentivization structure, but we added the accessibility obligations as additional compliance checks to go to an accessible by default role. I was concerned about the uptake we'd see from faculty, you but I was very surprised.
The other thing with decentralized higher education, as much as the ship turns slowly, once everybody gets where you're going, they generally get on board. So, we took this more adapt to the culture of the campus, adapt to the change culture of the campus, and tie into those change mechanisms that are effective, that's what really helped us be more successful, I believe, that and the empathy of the faculty and the instructors.
SPEAKER:
The International Association of Accessibility
Professionals membership consists of individuals and
organizations representing various industries including the private
sector, government, non-profits, and educational
institutions. Membership benefits include products and
services that support global systemic change around digital and the
built environment. United in Accessibility, join I.A.A.P. and
become a part of the global accessibility movement.
JAMES:
So, maybe take a little bit of a step back, but still thinking
about the deployment of accessible, inclusive technology assets.
Can you talk a little bit about your thinking, U-Mass' thinking and
approach to incident management? How do you remediate issues, how
does that happen? And then the other piece that I'd love to hear a
little bit more is about testing, when it comes to accessibility,
automated user testing?
CHRIS:
Sure. So, two-fold.
On the testing piece, we've employed students both in our help desk and our accessibility office to do some of the testing. We actually are just launching another program to do more broad usability testing, which includes accessibility testing, working in concert with some faculty in our writing program. They tend to have a good degree of expertise in there.
So, the other advantage of a higher education institution is students are fresh, motivated, focused and quite inexpensive labor and they like the work. It's great experience, it's great value to them, it's great value to us institutionally. So, we've really tied into that, this is something we've done for many, many years, tie into a workforce that's motivated, it's interesting. We've definitely seen the awareness of our student body around accessibility issues is much greater in the last five and ten years than it has been previously.
I've been asked about making sure content is accessible from a course perspective, I've been -- there's been a shift and the challenge is, that shift isn't necessarily as strongly perceived at the faculty that are instructing them because they tend to be a little bit older.
So, using the students to help motivate that work has really helped improve the accessibility piece of it because we've embedded the testing more into the core processes when we role out new applications, whether it's a PeopleSoft application or a new web application, we're commissioning that testing as part of launches of applications, as well as new web properties.
JAMES:
Chris, Mark Nichols is asking a question. If the standards that
you're talking about, before content goes out, or even other
standards that you're looking at and testing on really to --
related to accessibility, are they in-house standards or are you
using global standards like WCAG?
CHRIS:
They are in-house standards developed off WCAG. But I will get
James and Yulia a link afterwards.
We posted up our academic standards and it referred to those suggestions, it was built off of WCAG. One thing, just amongst everybody here, accessibility is not my first language. I'm an info set guy, I was a technologist, I was a Linux assist Admin. I know the acronyms, I know the space, but it's not quite my domain of expertise, I'm fortunate to have well-trained staff who understand this both on my team and the disability services team so we can absolutely share those standards. They're academic standards we posted for the fall semester for 2020.
JAMES:
So, Chris, I know, as I recall from our previous conversations and
work, there were sort of nine legacy platforms that you guys had
deployed. And I'm wondering if over the course of the many months
since we've worked together, how you're thinking about incident
management has changed or evolved or how you're approaching that
and dealing with that, how much of an issue -- accessibility issues
have become in this accelerated period?
CHRIS:
I mean, the challenge has been, before -- I believe we started
talking about the accessibility review before the pandemic. I had
high hopes that we would be able to make significant progress in
some of our core administrative systems in the shorter term. And
then the pandemic hit and next thing I knew, we were running COVID
testing sites for the western part of the state. We were running
vaccination programs. We were one of the earliest vaccination
programs for first responders. So, unfortunately, a lot of the
resources I'd have to help make accessibility improvements to our
core applications really got put aside for new application
deployment.
What I will say, we've been strong about implementing accessibility standards for the new applications as we roll them out. So, at this point my hope is to get us back, likely as we refactor some of our applications to do a more detailed review. It's definitely a goal, it's an asserted goal, it's part of the road map and strategy going forward. It’s just with the pandemic, the resource allocation tipped everything so sideways. I'm a little further behind than I hoped to be there. Legacy platforms, we haven't made as much progress as I was hoping to. We've certainly made progress.
What we've made significant progress in is in the awareness and the accountability that accessibility is an issue that has to be accommodated at deployment or at refresh for an application. That was a huge improvement that we hadn't been able to make as successfully in the past.
JAMES:
You've shared, at least with me, what I think are some really
interesting facts about how you as a CIO had to evolve into using
technology to support a dramatically increased public health role
of the university for the state during the pandemic, which is
pretty amazing.
There's another question from Peter, who decides the threshold for compliance? It's never 100%.
CHRIS:
And, so, again, this is where I'm going to go a little bit on my
information security soap box, right? The definition of compliance
is just bending the wheel to another. So, yeah, it's never 100%.
It's not going to be 100%.
Really what we do is use a risk-based model, understanding where the risk is. Usually that started historically, with either liability of the institution or legal accommodation requirements. That's a barrier to cross, that's a legal obligation to cross, but it's really not meeting this notion of digital inclusion as a core value of the campus.
So, the threshold is really handled generally on a case-by-case basis. There isn't an arbitrary threshold. What we focus on, these are the recommendations to make your course content accessible, to make your web property accessible. These are the standards. From a web property perspective, we do actually have a compliance check less, we actually have a team inside our university relations group that will run through both automated testing and some hand-based testing to look at, does the content render in a screen reader, does it provide appropriate alt image tags and things like that.
My goal with compliance is always making sure that we're investing the right amount of resource to ensure that we meet the largest degree of population as effectively as we can. Information security is a risk management game. Accessibility and compliance become a risk management game. And it's hard sometimes to think of it in those terms, but one of the challenges, I think, that I've seen working with some of my staff is, staff come with a tremendous degree of accessibility concern are passionate, profound and focused. The challenge is also balancing those resources against the other resource needs of campus, right? How much time can I spend on ensuring my web properties are accessible if, at the same time, I have to take those same resources to allocate them to make sure we're setting up a COVID vaccination clinic. It's really a continuum of resource allocations.
For me, thinking about how can I make sure there's always a guarantee of resource allocation towards accessibility, recognizing that that might not be core to our mission. What can be core to our mission is deploying accessible applications on an going forward basis. But our core mission is instructing students, performing research, being a land grant institution. We always have to balance that resource allocation to make sure we're moving the ball forward in these different fronts, but serving, first and foremost, what is it we're core here to do, instruct students. Accessibility is a component of that, but it can't be the dominating component. It has to be an absolutely key component, but the dominating is us delivering students with a path to their future.
JAMES:
Thanks, Chris. Before we go on to the next topic, briefly, if you
can talk about thinking about your staff, the technology staff at
the university even more broadly, perhaps, the skill and training
on accessibility and how you think about that and approach
that.
CHRIS:
Yeah, I think there's three aspects of that.
So, the first aspect was, we've had some staff transition, in our accessibility staff. Making sure we have the appropriate professional training for folks who are doing the accommodation work or engagement and consultation work. That's always been a fairly straightforward, that's an institutional investment. That makes good sense.
Where the real value we've seen, both from a leadership perspective, raising accessibility as a topic of concern at senior levels at the institution. So, raising this concept, our provost is fluid with the concept of accessibility, right? He's not going to go out and do a WCAG review, but he gets the concept that he can instruct his Deans that this is going to have to be a key component of the content their faculty deliver on a go forward basis.
From a training perspective, there's a lot of low-cost effort that we can put in place to raise accessibility on the radar from a leadership perspective, discuss it with a broad team of not just executive but operational, manager and cross-functional teams, we've also been very successful in engaging our students about accessibility conversations, what does that mean to you. Because my concept of accessibility is how big is the font is, a student's concept of accessibility may be how does it render on a cell phone. That's a very different problem set, depending on what technology you apply to that. It doesn't have to be, but we need to collect those voices in terms of understanding what that means and a lot of that does not involve a lot of out-of-pocket cost.
JAMES:
And just one more question, then we'll move on to one of my
favorite topics, which is sort of collaboration across
departments.
From Kathy, how do you decide what to test? Do you do spot checks of certain course websites and more checking of applications used by larger populations?
CHRIS:
Sure. So let me break up the administrative from the academic side
of things.
So, from the administrative side of things, we actually have a review process for our web properties in conjunction between our I.T. team and our university relations team that's responsible for our web properties. So, there's actually a checkoff evaluative process for our core web properties.
I'm fully confident there's probably some research lab websites or some individual P.I. websites that were created by word press that probably don't meet the testing. We focus on the high-visibility targets to make sure the information that's most relevant to a large population gets out there.
From a course perspective, we do have a couple of very large enrollment courses. We tend to focus most of our resources on ensuring the platform is accessible natively. There is always compliance issues, right? There's always some faculty member that wants to take their PDF from 1982, turned it 10 degrees and scan it and hope it will work.
We do spot checks, especially on the large enrollment course, but generally we focus on ensuring the platforms are natively compliant, and then providing strong guidance to the faculty to ensure they have the guidance and parameters of what are those steps that they can take that's relatively die minimums, relatively incremental burden for them but provides a more inclusive experience natively.
JAMES: Thanks so much.
Now let's shift gears a little bit, Chris, and get into the issues of collaboration, coordination, working across departments at a big university on a big campus.
One of the things -- one of the other things that stuck in my mind that you said early on when we started working together was how at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, there are some really amazing, I give you full credit for this term, these pockets of heroic effort.
Which I think will resonate with anyone who's doing work in the accessibility field, any kind of organization, that there are really good practices happening in parts of the university.
And I think some of the ones that had come up, U Mass were around UDL, instructional design, and some other areas that the Assistive Technology Center, some really good resources and practices. But siloed and not scaled because they are siloed in departments. And even some departments, I think, that may have been a little ahead of others in terms of academic departments in terms of their approach to inclusion and accessibility.
I know that since we last worked together, and during this -- these last several months, the accelerated accessibility period, that you've done some work on greater collaboration and coordination. Can you talk a little bit about that, including maybe some description of what it felt like before taking some improving steps?
CHRIS:
Sure.
I mean, for those of you who have spent time, and this is true of both large and small higher education, but higher education tends to be a very siloing structure, at least in my experience. There's a couple of exceptions but there tends to be a lot of belief that faculty are experts in their domain, by virtue of experts in their domain, that there's a lot of notions of self-rule, self governance and that sometimes extends out to administration. I will avoid pining too deeply on that. But there are some challenges that come from that. There's communication, there's logistical challenges. What you end up seeing is subcultural development about, this is important.
And what I've observed, and I've seen this both in technology fields as well as accessibility is and let me take it out of the accessibility domain, my email team for many years thought they delivered the best email application out there. They understood how it worked, nobody else understood how it worked but it made a lot of sense to them, and they thought they were doing great. And, so, within their minds, they were providing heroic effort but the impact from a user perspective was not the heroic effort they thought it was going to be.
I've observed similar challenges within accessibility at the campus as well. There are these pockets of brilliance, pockets of heroes that are out there working with good empathy this.
The challenge is, they don't always have, or they have not been provided the degree of leadership to have these conversations more broadly. So, why is it that one of the very small questions that came up had to do with a resource allocation around providing captioning for course materials for students that had defined accessibilities -- defined accommodations and it became this substantial issue that the costs were decentralized out to each of the departments? And many of our departments, by virtue of being academic, tend to run on very thin budgets. So, when we stopped this conversation, we went into the pandemic, said, what is the net budget impact can here? I can't remember what the number was. Let's say it was $40,000 across the campus. You know, when I brought it up to the right degrees of leadership, they're, like, we're arguing over this? $1.3 billion budget. Don't get me wrong, $40,000 is real money but that's not the thing we should be arguing. By virtue of us decentralizing decision making to that being 40 decisions of $1,000 each, it became much more difficult to get the resource allocation.
So the key observation I'd say is, clearly articulating why this is important, clearly articulating that when we marshal our resources collectively, we can make changes that don't seem so big when you're working in a larger context and it really involves that collaboration between and amongst groups and I've actually been very pleased, I think, going through the review with G3ict, certainly delivered us a road map, it certainly delivered us a maturity model, it gave us a sense of where we sat, but it actually opened up conversations amongst teams that have worked and sat together for many, many years but those conversations weren't as effective.
You know, we always joke, my background, like I said, is information security with auditors. If the audit doesn't tell you what you want to know, you did something wrong, right? I will say, I have been very pleased with James, had a very objective, and the team he brought in was excellent, but it told us what we wanted to hear, you've got some pockets of brilliance but there's some coordination, there's some logistics, alignment you need to do. Having a third party assert that brought more credibility to this notion of accessibility than any empathetic call from staff on campus could have.
JAMES:
Thank you for that, Chris. And I think to your credits, and we've
done a good number of these reviews of universities and of smart
cities as well, I think one of the things that you did was pretty
courageous, I think, you involved an enormous number of people from
both the academic side of the university and the administrative
side in a large number of conversations. I think over these ten
conversations that our expert team had with your university
community, there were 200 participants, 40 unique individuals, I
think, but they were heavily attended, some of the discussions were
quite passionate, I will say, because the passion was there.
Can you talk a little bit about where -- recognizing and wanting to make even more progress on collaboration and breaking down some of these silos and amplifying some of these heroic efforts. Either where some of these -- what are some of these pockets that you would love to see replicated and I'd also be curious to hear a little bit about what are some of the groups that can help promote this kind of collaboration?
We had talked, in particular, in our conversations with U Mass, the faculty Senate actually had been pretty engaged on these issues of accessibility. There is an academic advisory committee, I think, on accessibility. Are there any sort of areas that or groups that can help you as the CIO promote this collaboration?
CHRIS:
Yeah, you know, that's a great question, James. One of the key
things, and one of the things that I found sort of helpful to me in
my career, both in the CIO role I'm in, and previously in the
information security role, is identifying those governance
structures and where they have efficacy. That's one of the things
that I've observed at least in some of the accessibility staff I've
worked with. They have passion, they have technical focus, they
have deep empathy and deep caring, but they don't have the
experience with how universities govern themselves or what the
governance structures are, where decision authority really
rests.
It's great to think, you know, I've had staff that think I have all sorts of decision authority, I have responsibility for my $30 odd million of budget, but sort of the extent of the responsibility I have, I have responsibility for standards, as we get into decision making, I have to tie into bodies like our faculty Senate, I have the information technology advisory council, some of these academic advisory councils. We have other both faculty and administration, leadership groups, task forces that are focused on the shared governance structure of universities, we have administrative focus units.
So working with accessibility teams to identify where those power structures exist, how change occurs in an institution, and how you can be effective at making this case amongst all the other many cases, that was one of the key things, which again, I was fortunate to have a lot of this experience in information security, I observed many of my peers in information security, other institutions, come in and try to win the day of information security solely on technical merit. Like, well, we're going to go to this, we're going to spend another $100,000 on this new antivirus thing, because it's incrementally better than this other thing. And quite honestly, when you're making that case to a CFO or to a Chancellor or Provost, that’s $100,000 for a technical thing I don't understand.
Whereas, if you can turn it into a conversation about, either mediating institutional risk, delivering institutional benefit, understanding how change actually occurs on a campus, when you make that case in business terms, it becomes more rational and plausible amongst the thousand other things the Provost or the Chancellor or the CFO has been asked in the last day. So that's the key transition for me, how do you find those power structures, how do you identify those governance structures, how do you make it a business value proposition, not solely a technical or empathetic proposition.
JAMES:
That's actually a perfect segue, Chris, into a topic that I know
you feel passionately about and that we recognize as well in our
assessment tool, the maturity model is really pretty critical to an
increasing commitment and capability on accessibility, inclusion.
And that is what we call, you know, the business case for
accessibility.
Moving beyond, particularly here in the United States, every university has a legal requirement to be accessible and inclusive, in other countries as well, but you and I are sitting or standing here in the U.S. today. But we'd like to sort of move the conversation beyond risk avoidance and legal compliance to what is the business case? As you say, the why or the value proposition, of accessibility.
Based on your experience, either over the past year as a result of or as part of this assessment, or just in general, can you talk a little bit more about that, that key issue of how you are trying to tap into the why and the value proposition at U Mass?
CHRIS:
Absolutely. So, one of the key value conversations we have on a
regular basis, and this is not a conversation unique to U Mass,
it's not a conversation even unique to the northeastern United
States, but within the United States, there is a significant
decline coming in college-age students in the coming years based
off of just changes in birth rates, patterns like that.
What you're seeing is increasing competition within the field for high-qualified students, you've seen this manifest through, U Mass was deeply involved in the closure of mount IDO, we actually took over parts of the campus, we inherited some of the students from there, you know, recently, I know Becker college in Worcester announced that it is intending to close as well.
One of the key things that drives university budgets is attracting, retaining strong students to maintain competitiveness. And if the population is shrinking, one way from a business value perspective is to make sure that you're delivering a natively accessible education to appeal to as broad a population of students as possible. If we are, by virtue of not providing accessible content, unintentionally excluding some arbitrary percentage, say, even 5% or 10% of our students. That's 10% of a student population that will not become paying students, high-quality students. We're excluding a portion of our population that could engage. And that's based on a conjecture of 10%. If the conjecture is much higher, we could be unintentionally avoiding potential population when we know there's going to be restrictions in that.
So from a very raw perspective, if budgets are driven at institutions through a combination of both undergraduate, graduate tuition, and research education, if we're not strongly positioned, meeting the market demand, and that can either be meeting market demand because there's a growth or being more competitive and approachable to a larger population, if there's a reduction in that student -- potential student population. We are not tied into the strategic mission of the institution to provide our role as a land grant, to provide instruction to residents of the commonwealth and to create a workforce for the commonwealth. We have over 250,000 living alumni from U Mass, vast majority of them stay in Massachusetts.
At U Mass, we graduate more students than the top eight private institutions from the state of Massachusetts combined. That means we're tied deeply to the workforce. So, if we cannot find a way to make our content accessible and approach that, we're not only risking our own potential economic future, but we're actually risking issues of workforce development and long-term competitiveness of the state potentially.
JAMES:
Yeah. A couple thing in there that I would love to follow up on.
One is, you've talked about the role of students, the diversity of
students as a driver for the competitiveness of U Mass in
fulfilling your many roles as a land grant state university. As
you're thinking about the why and the value proposition, are you
having discussions or thinking about, we certainly discussed this
as part of our engagement, the technology assets you're deploying,
the accessibility of them, it also impacts faculty and staff, is
that part of the calculus as well?
CHRIS:
It absolutely is. Because, again, that same, you know, rubric
holds, as we remain a competitive institution, we have to be
competitive in our hiring practices. And that means approaching as
broad a population of the available talent pool out there.
If we are not delivering natively accessible experiences, whether that is directly instructional or it's, you know, pedantic as H.R. forms, right, everybody's got to do an H.R. form somewhere, but if we're delivering, and we've had our challenges in the institution of three copy, carbon forms that, you know, our vice Chancellor of human resources loves to say, he shut off the last -- he got rid of the last typewriter not that many years ago, right? There's clearly some substantial issues that we've had.
If we're not competitive with the potential workforce, both at the highly skilled faculty level, at the highly skilled technical level, but at all levels of the organization, we're going to potentially compromise the available resource pool as well. So, again, if it comes back to business case, I see a compelling business case to make sure accessibility is core to our digital transformation because it allows our long-term access to a larger candidate pool.
With the move to remote work, we're having very serious conversations, what does that mean, long term, right? We've had staff working remotely, we're going to struggle, like every other public and private institution is now, what does it mean for workforces returning, if the pandemic slows as we're hoping? Would we accept this notion of more broad remote work? Does that increase our potential labor pool? Those are all interesting questions that are going to have to be worked out. But if we cannot position our institution to be natively digitally inclusive, we're excluding a portion of our population that may have accessibility accommodations that we're just turning our back to from the get-go. And that's a challenge.
That's a loss both to us and it's a loss of potentially high talented, high-skill individuals that could make this university stronger.
JAMES:
So, Chris, I would imagine that with your expertise and experience
in the information security space, you've sort of tackled this
issue of the value proposition, the why of security. How is the
starting conversations, advancing conversations about the business
case, the why and the value proposition, of accessibility, how is
that being received? Where is it being received well, where is it a
bit more of a struggle?
CHRIS:
I'd say it's being received well at the high level when I talk
about this notion of making sure we're finding the most accessible
pool, we're making -- ensuring we're going to remain competitive,
tying to workforce. I think the value proposition, executive level,
is very strong there.
We've always been very successful at the value proposition at a very operational level, for our students and our staff that are providing accessibility accommodations, who are working with students on a one-to-one basis, for our help desk who are taking calls.
Where the challenge is, and I think we've had a path to move forward, is for people who do not have either the high-level strategy, do not have the day-to-day blocking and tackling is trying to make the value proposition of why is this one more thing they should do, why should you take ten more minutes to ensure accessibility, alt image tags, why should you take two more minutes to turn on the captioning features in Zoom or PowerPoint? So, I ended up teaching again this fall, I taught for many years at U Mass, I took a number of years off. When I taught this fall, I taught entirely remotely, I taught entirely by Zoom. Zoom's native captioning feature wasn't there. So, I elected to use PowerPoint, use Office 365, turn on the captioning when I lectured. I use Zoom to record the lecture. And it put the captions into it. It's not perfect. It wasn't great. But the cost to me was thinking to do it, clicking a check box on Office 365 on PowerPoint and making sure I hit play and record. So, the incremental burden to me of applying captioning to course content, and I've taught this course material for 20 years, this is the first year I did that. So, there is two minutes of clicking, it took me about ten minutes going through each of my slide decks to apply alt image tags. That investment of my time as an instructor is absolutely worth it to make sure that content is more accessible.
And that's the value proposition I think we have to hit that middle portion of the population, if we can move that population, the impact is going to be tremendous.
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