As a University of Minnesota instructor, you have likely heard about the new accessibility requirement for course materials outlined by the Department of Justice in their clarifications on Title II of the ADA : all content in course sites with student enrollment–such as academic courses, professional development sites, or resource sites your department created– must be digitally accessible by April 2026. This new requirement comes at a time in education where instructors are busy on multiple technological fronts (can we have a blog post without mentioning AI?). Yet here we are at another intersection of technology and teaching. This intersection brings about good for all learners. Research shows that making content accessible helps all of your students, not just those who use adaptive technologies to access content. While the task to meet the April 2026 deadline may seem overwhelmingly large, academic technology staff and the Office for Digital Accessibility are breaking it down in...

Overview Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) and the Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA) tested the usability of the Canvas: Remove Course Content article text and video with UMN instructors. Participants identified three key findings: time commitment, rationale, and archiving. The project team addressed the findings by making targeted changes to the article. Usability partnership & study process For this study, the Canvas: Remove Course Content article was selected for two reasons:  instructors and staff are preparing to meet the April 2026 digital accessibility deadline ATSS had heard from the academic technology community that some instructors are confused about removing vs. deleting content from a Canvas course With the University of Minnesota Usability Services team, our project team developed a focus question to guide our study: What motivates people to improve the accessibility of their course? We then determined the criteria for participant recruitment, ...

  This fall and spring Extra Points will feature a series of conversations focused on how faculty and staff around the University of Minnesota are using Generative AI to do University work.  Colin McFadden, Technology Architect for the College of Liberal Arts, presented to the Emerging Technologies Faculty Fellows on the topic of GenAI in September. His comments are edited for clarity and length. In your role as Technology Architect for CLA, how do you use Generative AI? Colin McFadden: I use Generative AI day-to-day for both technical and non-technical work. When I’m working on software or hardware development, generative AI provides both code suggestions, and can help me think through complex requirements. I also love to have generative AI do an initial proofreading pass of documents or articles that I’m working on. I’m still learning where these tools are useful and where they’re not - for example, some programming languages or frameworks still present a challenge, and y...