Welcome Brightspace!
We know this is a big change and you may be nervous, but don't worry! Your Online Learning and ITS teams will be with you every step of the way to facilitate a smooth transition!
Watch this space for updates, training opportunities and more!
Dr. Scott Schaeffer
Institutional Effectiveness welcomes Dr. Scott Schaeffer as Director of Assessment. Scott will oversee Assessment at a college level and help to establish assessment processes that meet the requirements for institutional accreditation. Scott comes to us from Jefferson Community College where he was AVP for STEM and Health Professions. He also serves as a commissioner for the Middle State Commission on Higher Education and will be a valuable asset to ensure our compliance with our accreditation requirements.
Britt Yenser
"Britt Yenser, CTS is NCC's new AV Manager. She has several years of experience in Higher Ed AV and event support. She is passionate about the student experience, leadership and management, mental health, and uplifting women and other marginalized groups in tech. Britt currently serves as the 3 Year At-Large Board Member for the Higher Education Technology Manager's Alliance (HETMA). Britt was named the AV Professional of the Year by HEAV in 2023 and was also a member of Commercial Integrator's 2023 Class of 40 Influencers Under 40. In 2024, brAVe [space] was awarded the Best DEI Program by Higher Ed AV. We are very happy to her join the NCC ITS team
Chris Hewatt
Chris Hewatt is an instructional designer with 10 years of experience in institutions around the Lehigh Valley, having worked for DeSales University and having collaborated on multiple occasions with Lehigh University, Muhlenberg College, and Lafayette College.
Their background includes a Master of Science in Instructional Design and Technology through Lehigh University’s Teaching, Learning, and Technology graduate program and an undergraduate degree in Professional Writing from Kutztown University. Chris is also an experienced video editor and graphic designer.
When not knee-deep in academia, they enjoy horror films and thrilling books, tabletop gaming (often in the role of a table's game master), and video games (particularly of the roleplaying and puzzle-solving variety)."
If you’ve attended an accessibility workshop with us (or elsewhere) in the past, you’ve probably been told that the legal requirements for accessibility are vague, undefined, and often only determined by a Judge (and only for that particular case). We’ve long aimed to be as generally accessible as we can, to try and meet the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as best as we can.
Well, luckily, things have changed! In April 2024, the Department of Justice issued a new ruling about accessibility, and has included some clear guidance and requirements. You can read more about this ruling via the ADA website (for clarity, community colleges are included under ‘state and local governments), but your OLET team will be doing our best to help make these requirements clear, and that each of us at NCC has the tools and resources we need to make sure we’re providing accessible materials for all—students, faculty, staff, and community members alike. As part of that, we’re going to be focusing on a different ADA requirement each month, so check this space for more!
For August & September, we wanted to focus first on the captioning requirement. Under the clarified ADA rules, we are to make sure captions are available for any video content, including captions for synchronous online content, such as Zoom meetings with our learners. NCC has funds available to help get videos captioned, so if you’re using video in your course and you find that the video isn’t captioned (or the captions are inaccurate), you can actually reach out to us to get captions ready! We’ll work with our caption vendors to get those files ready, and then with you to get them onto your actual videos. We can even tools to get captions onto YouTube videos that you don’t own, so if you’ve got video content and need captions, let us know!
As for synchronous online meetings, both Zoom and Teams include a live transcription button option for auto-captions. Neither are perfectly accurate, but both can go a long way towards helping your attendees follow along and participate, so if you haven’t tried those out, start today!
Have questions about accessibility? Looking to get your group ahead of the curve? Or just want to dive deeper? Check out our Accessibility Resources Padlet for guides, recordings from accessibility trainings, a link to our caption form, and more. We’ll be updating that Padlet constantly with new resources as they’re being developed to collect things into one place. And of course, you can always reach out to any of our three Instructional Designers for some more thorough and hands-on help making your content accessible.
Whew! You made it to the end, now time for some fun! Tell us your favorite movie from this summer to be entered for a prize!
Sarah Burton
Email: sburton@northampton.edu
Website: https://nccolet.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/802614507103473
Twitter: @nccolet1