kaRen soRensen

The day is finally here when I submit my comprehensive (final) project for my M.S. in Educational Leadership and Policy from Portland State University.

As the number of online courses and their use of media continue to expand, following a traditional classroom style of making accommodations for a student with a disability (as required by the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act) after the student registers for a class will become an unsustainable practice.

My intervention is to make accessibility something that’s integrated into the course design and development process at the community college I work. It will take effective online accessibility standards and guidelines, stakeholder buy-in and faculty and staff training.

Read the entire project literature review and intervention: “To Comply and To Care: Ensuring Online Education in a Community College is Accessible” (in MS Word doc format, but also available in PDF format.)

This walnut tree at the farm carried us kids on a tire swing for years and years.

The summer I was 8 yrs old, my parents took the family on a drive. My dad (pictured with me in the header of this blog) is big on drives down roads he is unfamiliar with.

By the end of the day, my folks owned a 75 acre horse farm at the end of a long, rocky, dirt road in eastern Pennsylvania. (No horses included.)

My parents were city and suburban folk. They didn’t know what they were doing for the first few summers we were there. The nearby farmers and my grandparents who had grown up on farms helped my folks figure things out, and my parents read books, studied what others did and tried doing a lot on their own.

I learned that you can install a wood stove if you work together to figure it out. I learned that you can learn to fix the well’s pump even if you never have before. I learned that you don’t need to know everything, you just have to know how to learn and then you have to try. The farm was the root of my active learning style.