Queen Mary University of London
Background
Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) is a Russell Group University with five campuses in London and additional sites across Europe and Asia. Queen Mary serves approximately 32,000 students, with 41% being international, and employs over 5,000 staff, including around 2,000 academic staff.Â
The university offers both undergraduate and postgraduate programs, organised into three main faculties: Humanities and Social Sciences, Medicine and Dentistry, and Science and Engineering.
The team responsible for the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is based near the main London campus in Mile End, east London.
Challenges
Queen Mary has faced several challenges in its journey to improve digital accessibility, particularly in relation to its VLE content on Moodle. While the university is aware of the 2018 legislation and has taken steps to audit and improve its external website, there is less awareness that the legislation also applies to VLE content.
The responsibility for supporting accessibility falls to learning technologists, but without senior management backing, it has been difficult to push the accessibility agenda forward. Additionally, the previous accessibility tool, Blackboard Ally, faced functionality issues.
It became evident that staff weren’t uploading accessible content to our VLE, leading to the decision to explore alternatives.
Outcomes
In response to the challenges, Queen Mary decided to switch from Blackboard Ally to Brickfield Education Labs, with their accessibility toolkit specifically developed to be integrated to Moodle. The decision was influenced by recommendations from colleagues who had attended Moodle conferences so it was a natural choice for us.
To address the issue of staff awareness and engagement, efforts have been made to integrate Brickfield training into the university’s mandatory staff training list, alongside other essential training such as risk and health assessments.
Additionally, the Brickfield synchronous workshops that happen weekly makes things very easy, we are just trying to encourage more academic staff to participate.
Recommendations
A couple of weeks ago, we did a presentation on Brickfield at a Moodle user group meeting. We noticed that many of the other institutions represented there have dedicated teams, or at least one or two individuals, focused on accessibility as part of their roles.Â
This is a resource we currently lack. Our key advice to other institutions is to ensure that someone at the senior management level has responsibility for accessibility. Without senior buy-in, it becomes very difficult to advance the conversation, which is the challenge we are currently facing.
Another approach we might consider is identifying accessibility champions within our faculties—perhaps one or two academic staff members who are knowledgeable about accessibility and actively improving their content.
We could then leverage their expertise to write case studies or share best practices with others.
