Cal State University, with its 23 campuses and 250,000 students, has signed contracts with Moodlerooms and ANGEL, according to Campus Technology. (I’ve known this was in the works for some time now, but I guess it just went official.) These are statewide pricing contracts; individual campuses still get to choose whatever system they choose. Still, it’s a big deal for both vendors, as well as for the Moodle community. Word on the street is that both Moodle and ANGEL got particularly high marks because of their strong accessibility; California has strict accessibility laws and regulations.
I have been blogging a fair bit about the IMS LIS standard. I want to point out that LIS makes this sort of adoption more meaningful. Generally speaking, individual campuses tend to be reluctant to move off of whatever they have because of high migration costs. With LIS, one substantial portion of that migration cost—namely, integration—is very substantially reduced. It also becomes much more economically feasible for campuses to run more than one of these systems at the same time. Interoperability standards may not be thrilling from a pedagogical perspective, but if they lower the barriers for IT staff to provide alternatives to faculty and students then they have a strong impact on teaching and learning at the end of the day.
I struggle to understand how CSU could find Angel accessible. From what I understand of the process here are some of the facts:
1) CSU stated that Angel’s “Normal Display” mode is not accessible and doesn’t meet 508-compliance (significant flaw).
2) CSU relied on the switch to PDA mode as the way to certify the accessibility and they admit that a sighted person is required to help someone switch the system into PDA mode (second flaw).
3) CSU testers stated that the PDA mode was fully functional, but that is not true. The PDA mode only offers a subset of features compared to the “Normal Display” and doesn’t even include basic update information or at-a-glance reports found on the homepage of a course (third main flaw).
4) CSU testers also stated that the PDA mode was accessible, Section 508 compliant and everything works with a screen reader, but that is not true. Even basic principles such as alternative text for icons is not supported for many icons (e.g. date pickers), and the interface can even block the ability to click or even see some links depending on your resolution and browser (fourth main flaw).
I’m not sure they did a very thorough review of the system — from someone that understands the process they followed it seems to differ greatly from the reality for users.
I can only tell you what I’ve heard. You may well know more about the actual state of ANGEL’s accessibility than I do.
$10 says the first commenter works for Blackboard, which was taken by surprise by their severe drubbing over accessibility in the review… read the implications in: http://www.calstate.edu/acadaff/codedmemos/AA-2008-15.pdf.
The real shame is that Blackboard’s legal issues with Desire2Learn prevented D2L from showing the version of their LMS which is 508 compliant, so they were not awarded an enabling agreement.