Canvas Student ⊹ Integrating accommodations into course planning
I designed a service to improve the disability accommodations for students and professors.
Research + UX Design
Outcome: Created a feasible and actionable design solution backed by research and institutional needs.
Timeline: 2 month intensive (Georgia Tech research study)
Canvas is a popular LMS (Learning management system) that facilitates an online learning environment for students and instructors. My team designed a plugin that seamlessly integrates accommodations into instructors' course planning. Integrating accommodations into the educational system not only ensures equitable access for all students but also helps schools maintain compliance with legal and ethical standards.
Final Presentation.
“We don’t have time.”
With only 2 months, we quickly iterated on learnings to pivot to a solution that allows for students to easily request accommodations, and for professors to honor accommodations.
The process of landing on a problem space was much longer than the time it took to solution!
Students feel burdened to communicate their needs to professors.
We asked students about their experience with:
Requesting disability accommodations from the Office of Disability Services (ODS)
The process of communicating needs to their professors.
A common theme in our research artifacts? Our participants were feeling bogged down by bureaucracy in their journey of requesting accommodations in the classroom. Services such as healthcare and transit services are by no means perfect, but the path to improving those was more integrated into institutional process.
We previously thought that students had a hard time getting accommodations in the first place. But we quickly found that participants had to contact each of their professors on their own, and some of their instructors weren’t honoring their documented needs.
We learned that the highest friction points occurred at the start of each semester and around exam times, when students had to communicate their needs to up to 8 professors seperately.
Professors can’t keep up with all of their student’s individual needs.
This surprised us the most — Professors don’t have a way to automate accessibility accommodations on behalf of their students. So, it became difficult to keep track of multiple requests. When you consider that teachers and professors often teach hundreds of students a day, it’s no wonder that things get lost in translation.
Why isn’t this a built-in feature?
Streamlining accommodations.
Through our current solution, students do not have to take any action after getting formal approval for their needs. ODS, the Office of Disability Services, integrates directly with Canvas. Instructors only need to approve accommodations, which will automatically update due dates or testing details accordingly, depending on the circumstance.
This flow completely cuts out the back and forth communications between student and instructor!
A professor’s journey with adding accommodations for an exam.
A professor being notified that their student requires accommodations at the start of the course.
We drafted simple prototypes for initial MVP.
Flow 1: the professor’s default view When there are no action items, the new ‘Accommodations’ tab will be empty. The UI otherwise remains the same!
Flow 2: instructor approving automatic accommodations Time and a Half accommodations are very simple: they give students 150% of the normally given time for assignments and assessments. Once the professor approves the change, the affected students will immediately see a change in their student view.
Flow 3: instructor denying accommodation When the instructor denies an accommodation, the Office of Disability Services is contacted to begin a conversation with the professor regarding how they will ensure the students are accommodated.
What’s next?
While my team’s solution is a start at improving the accommodations process for students and instructors, there is a long way to go to improve the digital accommodations process and inclusivity of teaching apps.
Future Steps:
Design more intuitive site navigation and a more eye-friendly notification system throughout the app
Integrate these features into mobile support
Implement more user flows to show how the plugin would handle different accommodations that we’d previously explored. A few examples:
Location-based accommodations
Transcriptions from uploaded lectures
Synchronous test updates to alternate locations
Takeaways:
While our research was so full of depth, the final product was very simple in nature. Creating a feature that professors can use to customize coursework for students with needs is a simple solution but one that can go far to help students succeed in class.