Dr. Coombs. Hi this is Norm Coombs from EASI, Equal Access to Software Information. I want to welcome you all to our regular webcast interview. Today our interview subject is Reidy Brown.
Reidy Brown. Hello Norm.
Dr. Coombs. And Reidy is with Blackboard. And on the recording with us we also have our electronic superman, Dick?
Mr. Banks. Good morning Norm, hi Reidy.
Reidy Brown. Hello.
Dr. Coombs. And Reidy Brown works for the Blackboard Company. What is Blackboard? What do they do Reidy?
Reidy Brown. Well Norm, Blackboard as an online educational platform company. What that means is we started out working very strongly in course management software, which makes it easy for instructors to put their courses online.
And we have since expanded our network of what we do to the general educational arena. We now also supply portals, integrate with back end systems, and we even have commerce and access technology today.
In fact we are growing so quickly it is sometimes hard for me to keep up with everything that we are doing. But I work on the course and portals software.
Dr. Coombs. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by courseware?
Reidy Brown. Courseware is sort of the roots of Blackboard. It is a system that allows course builders or instructors to put course material on the Internet for their students to use.
What makes Blackboard sort of special in this arena is that we have done our best to make it very easy for non technical users to provide all sorts of course information, course documents, interactive tools, to course instructors so that they can supplement their in-class course experience with out of class Internet experience as well.
Dr. Coombs. Well let me translate into my non-technical kind of view. I think of courseware as a kind of interface to the course. Or maybe we could say it is a building where teacher teaches, and the building has a door and stairs.
And then you come into a classroom and the teacher has a desk and a podium, and maybe an overhead projector system, maybe a TV in the corner, and other kinds of tools. I think of courseware as all of this complex structure within which the teacher delivers the content.
Reidy Brown. That is a very good analogy Norm. We are sort of the infrastructure. We do the hard or boring stuff for you to make it possible to interact with the students. Then the student and the instructors provide the content and interact inside of the infrastructure.
Dr. Coombs. Okay we will come back to talk about that, because it is your main thing. It is what we really want to focus on. But you mentioned the portal, what is the portal?
Reidy Brown. Well, a portal is sort of the front end right now of the course management system. It is the entryway and it includes modules, which are essentially small places for collecting information is I guess the best way to say that. So it is an aggregator of information that the student or the instructor has decided they want to see every time they log into Blackboard. So it is a customizable homepage.
Dr. Coombs. Okay and if we use my building analogy, it is sort of like a lobby downstairs?
Reidy Brown. Right, or maybe the bulletin board.
Dr. Coombs. Okay. Then you talk about a back end. What does a back end have to do with computers?
Reidy Brown. Well the back end is not necessarily what the instructors would worry about or what the students would worry about. But it is what makes everything else work. So it plugs in the course management system to the rest of the University.
So say student enrollment, that is the sort of thing that we are talking about when we talk about the back end. So if you already have a computer system running in your registrars office that has decided who your students are and what classes they are enrolled in, it would be integrated into the Blackboard System.
Dr. Coombs. Okay, let me see if I can translate again when I think is going on here. If my college has its registration for its courses all computerized and a group of 30 students signed up from my class, the back end would automatically enroll them in the online class?
Reidy Brown. Right.
Dr. Coombs. So I would not have to put in their name, or assign names and passwords?
Reidy Brown. Right, exactly. It is sort of under the covers so you do not, as the instructor, have to be concerned about that part. That is just what makes it a lot easier for the system administrator who would be running the Blackboard software. It makes it a lot easier for them to manage the system.
Dr. Coombs. So that is student who already has a computer user name in my campus, and a password, this would automatically tie-in with all of that and connects with it?
Reidy Brown. Right.
Mr. Banks. Well sure, the instructor shows up for class and the student shows up for class. It is the same thing, only electronic.
Dr. Coombs. All the dirty work gets done.
Reidy Brown. Exactly.
Dr. Coombs. So it is integration with administrative computing basically.
Reidy Brown. Yes.
Dr. Coombs. Okay. So what do you do at Blackboard?
Reidy Brown. Well I do a lot of different things Norm. My primary job title is Software Engineer.
Dr. Coombs. I think I saw Senior Software Engineer?
Reidy Brown. Senior Software Engineer, yes that is right, I am a Senior Software Engineer. I came on early with Blackboard so I got in on the ground floor. So what I do primarily is I actually build the software.
The project that I am working on right now is very focused on accessibility. And that is a good thing, because my second job title is Accessibility Coordinator.
And what that means is I am sort of the public face of accessibility at Blackboard, things sort of go in and out through my phone or my computer just to make sure that we are well coordinated, that we know where we are, that everyone internally and externally stays focus on where we are going with accessibility.
Dr. Coombs. Okay well that is obviously the heart of why we want to talk to you. And if we can stick with my corny analogy, then it is your job to make sure that a disabled person can get to the classroom through the infrastructure with elevators or ramps or whatever it takes, or the electronic equivalent of something like that? And to make sure that the teaching tools that are used in the classroom are also accessible?
Reidy Brown. Right. Exactly.
Dr. Coombs. So in trying to make the infrastructure accessible, what kind of problems did you find when you first got your accessibility hat?
Reidy Brown. It is interesting because there were some things that where perhaps a little bit difficult. But there were some things that were already inherently built into the software that put us in a fairly good position to start out from.
When I started working with accessibility at Blackboard, we already had some basic text only functionality built into the software. The software itself, because of the type of learning software that it is is already very well suited for accessibility.
And what I mean by that is that good learning methods are somewhat inherently accessible. Because if you are teaching say to a visual user, you also have to be prepared to teach someone who learns better by hearing or by writing, or who learns better by doing.
And since the software was already built to take advantage of those sort of learning theories, it was a fairly easy transition to make sure that it also provided information say that a blind user or a deaf user would be able to take advantage of. It is sort of the idea of having a bridge-learning environment that supports different types of learners.
Mr. Banks. So it was a learning style issue as much as it was accessibility?
Reidy Brown. Exactly, it is sort of an extension of what instructors already understand very well as a learning style issue. Things that were a little bit more of a challenge.
I think that for many web developers, if accessibility is not built into the requirements of the piece of software from the very beginning, it is a little bit harder to build the technical accessibility back into the software.
And this basically is the sort of thing that say the World Wide Web Consortium Web accessibility guidelines point to, looking at the actual technical code that will enable software to work well with assistive technology. We had a very good theoretical underpinning, a very good understanding of the way different types of users will be able to interact with material. But it was a bit of a challenge to figure out how best to go in and takes the actual college is how I would put it.
Dr. Coombs. I believe the jargon for that is retrofitting?
Reidy Brown. Exactly.
Dr. Coombs. So going back and fixing code that is already there is always a pain in the neck. If you write code like I do, you seldom document it. And that makes it really hard. I assume your people document it, it would help them.
Reidy Brown. Right.
Dr. Coombs. Will you really excited that you are doing this because more and more college courses are using various kinds of online tools, including courseware. And then of course the whole field of distance learning, which relies on it rather heavily, is really exploding.
I noticed that Blackboard is involved with a couple of grants working on this. One as part of the WebAim Project, then FIPSE, the Learning Anytime Anywhere Program from Utah State University. And we are involved in that grant, and that is pretty much where we got to meet.
Reidy Brown. Exactly.
Dr. Coombs. And then there's another one that you are working on with The National Center for Accessible Media, SALT I believe is what it was called?
Reidy Brown. That is exactly it.
Dr. Coombs. I cannot remember exactly what that stood for?
Reidy Brown. It stands for Standards for Accessible Learning Technology.
Dr. Coombs. It is really about the technical stuff under the hood, as I understand it.
Reidy Brown. Right, what we are looking at there is the National Center for Accessible Media is partnering with the IMS Global Consortium and working on accessibility standards. What we are focusing on is building accessibility into their current specifications packages. So when you say create different types of specifications, which is what they do, we are going to make sure that each of the different packages will support accessibility is well.
Mr. Banks. So that is your part in it then is to help them with their accessibility issues by looking at the stuff I suppose?
Reidy Brown. Right, well it is still fairly early in this project. The first IMS Project that I have personally been involved in, one of the other Blackboard members is also involved in the project. And he is a real IMS veteran.
We are relying on him to guide me along as we go to the process. He has the expertise in creating specifications, and I am there to push in the right direction for accessibility. And I think we are making a pretty good team for this working group.
I am very much enjoying the process and learning a lot from it. But we are going to be not only looking at the existing and new IMS specifications, but we will also be working to create best practice documents and other information that would be useful to the end-users.
Mr. Banks. Wow.
Reidy Brown. So it is quite an ambitious plan.
Dr. Coombs. We were in your office a couple of weeks ago spending sometime working with you and talking about working on a tutorial. One of the things that struck me when I was there and I became a little more aware that you, like any software company, comes out with a new version. It struck me that in a sense your job is working with a moving target.
Reidy Brown. That is a very good way of putting it.
Dr. Coombs. Maybe to working targets because the WAI Guidelines and the Section 508 Standards have been evolving and changing. I heard someone talking about the problem of keeping current with computers.
And I said that if you want to work with a moving target and you want to shoot it, you have got to aim in front of it where you think it is going. So the guidelines and standards have been evolving and changing and you are coming out with new versions every few months, say cannot only be concerned with access. There are all kinds of other features that are involved in it so that trying to balance all of that stuff must keep you pretty busy.
Reidy Brown. It does, it does. With section 508, we were actually fairly lucky. Because even though our next release the 5.5 release was already under way, we had already gone through the WAI and the proposed 508 regulations and pulled out the pieces that we thought were going to be potentially more doable for the 5.5 release because the 5.5 release is sort of a retrofit release.
And because it is difficult to do extensive retrofit, we sort of evaluated the software to decide how much energy to put into a retrofit and how much energy to put into a sort of new built from the ground up accessibility approach.
And we pulled out probably I would say 75 percent of the 508 guidelines and had already started to implement those by the time 508 was published in December. And I was actually a little caught off guard when 508 came out because it was less strict than I expected it to be.
So some of the bullet points that we had decided we could not implement in 5.5, we were then able to go back and re-evaluate those. And we are feeling pretty good about the implementation of the section 508 guidelines. In our 5.5 release we are going to be documenting the features, the accessibility features, that we have added into 5.5 that show how we have implemented all of the standards.
And we will also be, and I think this is equally important, we will also be releasing documentation for instructors and course builders. Because Blackboard is the infrastructure, it is the building, it is very important for the building to be accessible.
But it is equally important that the teachers how to make the learning materials accessible themselves. So we will be working with the instructors to make sure that they understand how to use the new features in Blackboard, and to help them understand the importance of specific 508 guidelines.
Dr. Coombs. That is very impressive. What part of Blackboard's infrastructure is most difficult in terms of achieving 508 standards?
Reidy Brown. Well the parts that are the most difficult are really the parts that are the most difficult for us to control. In other words we can make our core software accessible, but some pieces of the software are licensed from third party vendors. And it is difficult for us to; it is more the timing issue.
If we know when we make a deal what say section 508 is going to require, then we can make sure to list that in the business sale. But sometimes we are already locked into a product ahead of time so if we can access to code ourselves and upgraded, then it can still be a challenge but with software all things are doable. We can pretty much make the software technically accessible, assuming that is our own software.
Dr. Coombs. It would seem to me that the parts that where the hardest where the whiteboard and a chat room.
Reidy Brown. And that is exactly where I am going. That is the piece of licensed technology. And we have had difficulty with that because we do not have access to making changes in the source code.
So what we are doing right now is we are working to create workarounds for that software. And we haven't yet to come up with ones that are 100 percent usable. People using assistive technologies were still trying to be fairly inventive with that.
And we have created a way for people to access transcripts from that software. But we are also exploring alternatives for instructors as well. We're looking at working with either Web Aim, or Salt partners, to use existing accessible chat software. One of the things that I think was actually the most difficult about creating accessible software is not the technical issue.
I can to look at things sometimes from the technical prospective because I am a software engineer. But I think that what actually is a much more challenging approach is making sure that the software is not just accessible but usable. And that is where we are really expecting to get a lot of benefit from our partnerships in the world accessibility.
From you Norm and Dick, and from Utah state, and from the University of Toronto, and the National Center for Accessible Media, all of the groups that we are working with in our LIAP projects, I think that is one of the main advantages that we received from becoming very active in the accessibility arenas. So this is a wonderful group of people and their very motivated to help you, everyone is on the same set of the fence on this issue.
Everybody wants software to be more accessible, and it is wonderful for us to have access to the additional extra usability experts, technology experts. We are really very motivated to work with these groups because this is a sort of expertise that you really cannot buy.
Mr. Banks. Well I certainly got the impression that your efforts in the area of accessibility were sincere. Everyone that I met there including you I felt is making a sincere effort and not just patronizing.
Reidy Brown. All we are very serious about this. This has been a special project of mine for about two years. And it is something that blackboard has really been focusing on the accessibility issues for nearly two years.
We really believe that accessibility is a vital component of online educational software. We have been working hard to make sure that version 5.5 implements the section 508 standards. And we are looking forward to working with our users to help them take full advantage of the accessibility features.
This is something that we think is extremely important. It is not sort of a fast talking hard sell. This is in fact, I think sometimes we spend more time working on accessibility and less time perhaps talking about what we're doing. Which I think is again possibly due to the slight misjudgment of putting a software engineer in charge of it.
I am a lot more comfortable figuring out what the software needs to have done. Figuring out the plan for the next few years. Monitoring where the technology is going, both our technology, Internet technology, and assistive technology, and that can be tough to juggle.
And I have been recently prodded into doing a little bit more outreach work. Because blackboard has really been doing a lot of good work on this. And I think the development team and the product managers, I think we really all it to them to make sure that they get the credit for this.
Dr. Coombs. Well I think some companies get PR people or lawyers who focus on damage control. Other ones find someone who is going to repair the damage so that works right. We're more impressed with the latter. You used two terms a minute ago that I want you to come back to. He talked about accessibility and usability. What you mean by those two terms?
Reidy Brown. Well this may not be the technical official definition but I think of them as accessibility being more of a technological issue. Say that your software has been written to a certain set of specifications that technically the assistive technology can access everything on a page. And I think of usability as being not only accessible, but in addition something that you would enjoy using.
Mr. Banks. User-friendly.
Reidy Brown. Something that is not so inconvenient to use that it is not worth using.
Dr. Coombs. So maybe we could call it comfortable?
Reidy Brown. I would say comfortable is a very good term for it.
Dr. Coombs. Well as I said a while ago, courseware and online stuff is coming in more and more courses. And without accessibility is going to be a giant step backwards for students. And with accessibility it is going to be I think a giant leap forward. And we are excited that you are really working on this Reidy, and I sense that your kind of a little bit pleased about 5.5 and what you have achieved.
Reidy Brown. We have been working hard and we had some concrete goals. And I think we have done a very good job of working towards the goal of implementing the section 508 standards. That is a very important thing to do and I am very pleased that we have managed to do it.
Dr. Coombs. This upgrade becomes public in early summer?
Reidy Brown. Yes.
Dr. Coombs. Okay. Well I really want to congratulate you and blackboard on what you've been doing. And as a teacher involved in distance learning, I find that it is very gratifying. I would like to go back to one of the other clients though as a teacher.
You can make infrastructure accessible, but with a noncaring teacher who doesn't know and doesn't care it will not amount to much. The teacher has to make sure that his content as well as the infrastructure is accessible. So anything that we can do to help encourage teachers to follow in your footsteps and to take advantage of the tools you are getting them, we really want to do. Do you have any other things that you want to comment done before we wind down?
Reidy Brown. I think we have pretty much covered most of the issues.
Mr. Banks. And I think very well. Your explanations of things were fairly easy to understand. And I even got better understanding of what you met by a front door and so on and so forth. So it was helpful for me and I think it is helpful for people to understand who do not really have an in-depth understanding of what courseware is. It is pretty hard for you Reidy, being a software engineer, to peel that back and make it so it is understandable. I thought you did a nice job of that.
Reidy Brown. Well I think that you and Norm did a very job of working with a software engineer to get something intelligible out. I certainly appreciate that.
Dr. Coombs. Software engineers are people to.
Reidy Brown. That's right.
Dr. Coombs. We want to think very much Reidy.
Reidy Brown. Well thank you very much for having me.
Dr. Coombs. Okay, we'll see you online.
Reidy Brown. Great.
Mr. Banks. So long now.
Reidy Brown. Goodbye.