Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, with Thomas Tobin

Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 227 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Thomas Tobin speaks about his new book, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in higher education. Also coauthored by Kristen Behling.

Production Credit: [00:00:22] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives can be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:58] Welcome to today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m so excited to introduce you to today’s guest, Thomas J. Tobin is the Faculty Associate Conference Programming Chair for the Distance Education Professional Development Department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. As well as an internationally recognized speaker and author on topics related to quality in teaching, enhanced education, especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practice, academic integrity, and accessibility universal design for learning. Thomas Tobin holds aPh.D. in English literature, a second master’s degree in information science, a professional project management certification, a master online teacher certification, Quality Matters certification, and the recently completed his Certified Professional in Accessability Core Competencies, CPACC certification. He tells his nieces and nephews that he is an 41st grade. Tom serves on the editorial boards of E-Learn Magazine Insight, a journal of scholarly teaching, the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, and the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration.

Bonni: [00:02:20] Tom, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Thomas: [00:02:22] Thanks a lot Bonni. I’m glad to be here.

Bonni: [00:02:25] It is great to finally be getting to have a two way conversation. I sat in one of your sessions- It must have been two or three years ago at my first online learning Consortium Conference. And you lit the room on fire and had just completely engaged in a way that was very distinct and different from most conference presentations. So it’s so fun now to have the back and forth now- we had back and forth but it was just a very large room so I didn’t get as great a percentage of your time.

Thomas: [00:02:53] Well I’m really grateful and that’s one of the things that I hope will come out of this conversation is I specialize in things that tend to scare the heck out of faculty members and designers at OLC, for example, we were talking about copyright- something that could be a really dry, boring kind of thing. It’s really essential for all of us to have a back of the envelope understanding about that. And maybe not turn ourselves into case citing mini lawyers, but definitely want to make those kinds of things fun for people and engaging, help people to take a first step. And that’s what my work is all about in areas like accessibility, copyright, evaluating higher education teaching online, and academic integrity. So I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to share a little bit with you and your listeners.

Bonni: [00:03:41] One of the patterns I am now seeing through those threads is that it isn’t just about making the material, the resources, the presentations, the workshops not boring. Yes that’s important. And certainly you are incredibly gifted at that. But it’s about making these topics practical- it’s not a fear based thing. That’s one of the things I really remember from that copyright thing and certainly resonates throughout your entire book is just the idea that we don’t have to build everything out of fear or legalism, but there’s actually more of a service mindset and really coming back full circle to learning.

Thomas: [00:04:22] Very much so. And one of the challenges for a lot of us who have faculty roles or we’re faculty developers, instructional designers, students support people, we get into our roles and then suddenly we’re confronted with some thing that we think we should already know about. Somebody should have taught me about accessibility when I was in graduate school. Shouldn’t I have learned about academic integrity and how to discourage cheating?

Thomas: [00:04:52] And one of the challenges for us is that we are experts in our fields. We are chemists. We are art historians. We are nursing professors. And so we are in a position as experts. And it can be embarrassing. And it can be a fear inducing kind of realization to know oh wait I should know about this, but I don’t.

Thomas: [00:05:14] So one of the big things that I like to do is to give people permission to be in that beginners mindset and give people permission not to have known about these kinds of topics before hand. You want to be open, you want to be welcoming, yes give people the information. But really my role as an author, as a speaker, as a facilitator is to help people to get their brains around big weighty topics. And then give them permission to take it one small piece at a time and learn how to take that first step. And that’s actually why Kirsten and I wrote the book. Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone on Universal Design for Learning in Higher Ed.

Bonni: [00:05:57] I am so glad to have had you start this way because I felt like today might be an episode of True Confessions and I actually do want to share a little bit with you and I know I’m not alone in this. But I did have a certain degree of guilt- and I’d like to kind of talk about this because really what it was was just a lot of misnomers that I had and the first part of the book looks at where we are now with Universal Design for Learning with accessibility.

Bonni: [00:06:26] And I know for myself, I think I’m afraid to admit this because it seems like I didn’t care about the people who would be in my classes but my thinking was off. It is a myth. But I thought that I would both be following the law and also serving my students well if when I came across someone with hearing loss or I came across someone who was visually impaired. Well I thought that was the time then to respond both again legally and also just ethically because I cared. And so I would get to know enough about it that when I would come across it, I would feel like I was equipped.

Bonni: [00:07:04] And that is not the way to go but I don’t have to feel guilty. You can talk me through where are we today both legally and then also ethically. How are things evolving?

Thomas: [00:07:15] The really nice part about that concern of I’m just going to wait until I have a student who needs an accommodation. And when we talk about accommodations that’s making one change. One time. For one person. This is a familiar conversation to many faculty members and staff members in colleges and universities.

Thomas: [00:07:38] So you have a student with a hearing impairment or a visual disability or any other kind of physical barrier or perhaps a learning disability. That student comes to you, Professor Bonni, with a piece of paper that says I need time and a half on my tests or I need to take my tests in a quiet room away from everybody else. And how should you respond?

Thomas: [00:08:01] The answer is… Yes OK I’ll help you. And so that honors your desire to be forward thinking, to be following the law, and also to be an ethical instructor because you’re doing what you are supposed to be doing. And that’s what the law says the law says that we should provide reasonable accommodations. And we’ll come back around to what reasonable means which is where a lot of this fear comes in. We should provide reasonable accommodations for people who need to have barriers lowered so that they can have the same opportunity for learning as any of our other learners who are in our courses.

Thomas: [00:08:43] So. For a student with a hearing disability, perhaps the student needs to have captions on video resources that you’re using for your class. Here’s where the law is evolving. And here my co-author Kirsten Behling and I are indebted to Andrew Lessman from Temple University in Philadelphia. Andrew is a disability studies lawyer. He’s also part of the Temple University team who advises everyone at the university about law and accessibility.

Thomas: [00:09:14] Andrew gave a really excellent keynote a couple of years ago at a disability studies conference that I attended and he made the point that accessibility is a civil right. And instead of just here’s the law and let’s level the playing field, which is where a lot of people start out. He noted that over the past decade, judgments in legal cases have been moving toward not only leveling the playing field, but also having to do with equality of access and time. Time is one of the factors that is now part of how judges are actually deciding cases. In other words, let’s just say Professor Bonni you have some videos in your course. You have a student with a hearing disability. The student comes to you at the end of week 2 out of 15 weeks because of course that paperwork is never ever done on time. And then you say OK great I’ll make sure that this happens. Well maybe it takes you and your media services team three weeks to get all of those videos that you’re using captioned or there’s transcripts created that you have some kind of alternative access for this one student. That’s actually now being seen as still discriminatory practice because that student didn’t have access in time to catch up and keep up with the rest of his or her classmates.

Thomas: [00:10:44] And so what we’re doing in the book is we’re saying OK. If we’re going to follow that accessability response mindset of doing one change, one time, for one person, making individual accommodations. We need to have institutions that are flexible and fast enough to actually make those accommodations so that the students don’t lose time when they make those reasonable accommodation requests.

Thomas: [00:11:14] Now. Universal Design for Learning, as we’re talking about it now, this is a concept that was created by neuroscientists at the Center for Applied Special Technology or cCAST in Boston. Back in the 1990s they figured out that when they were trying to help students with disabilities, they discovered that there are three different brain networks that get involved whenever anybody, at any level learns anything. We have to have a why for the thing that we’re learning. Why do we want to know it? Now as adult learners, all of us, we are on YouTube or we’re asking Siri or Google all these questions. Hey where can I find a plumber who’s near me? Or how do I fix a broken pipe? You have a definite need. Oh yeah my garbage disposal is making a funny sound in the kitchen sink. That’s a why. That’s a really immediate why. But that expands back into OK I’m learning differential calculus. Why am I ever gonna need that?

Thomas: [00:12:24] And so having that why. The neuroscientist discovered if you gave students more than one way to stay engaged, more than one way to keep answering that why question then they were much more likely to set the stage in their minds for retaining that information, interrogating it, making it part of long term memory, and keeping it.

Thomas: [00:12:48] The second part of that is the WHAT of learning. This is just the information. This is the kind of stuff that as a faculty member or a course designer, this is our bread and butter. These are PowerPoint decks. These are lecture notes. These are videos we want our students to watch. These are Journal articles that we’d like them to read. And the what of learning. Here’s a here’s a little myth busting for everybody. You know about the VAK theory of learning styles: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. That’s a myth, it doesn’t exist. Learning styles don’t actually exist.

Thomas: [00:13:31] What I mean by that is that if I say I’m a visual learner does that mean that I can never learn by listening to something? Of course not. So learning styles are not fixed characteristics of people in the way that they learn. We tend to talk now about learning preferences and those change from moment to moment. Sometimes it’s because we prefer to read something over listening to it. But sometimes those learning preferences are dictated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Thomas: [00:14:02] So imagine you have a single mother who has to put her kids to bed at night but still wants to study for her chemistry professors lab for the next day. She can’t put a pair of headphones on because she wants to listen and see if the kids are crying at night. She can’t just keep the sound on. But if she were able to turn the sound down and put the captions on and watch the lab prep, then she’s just found 20 more minutes for study that she didn’t have before. Thats the what of learning. And that is the second brain network. Once you understand why you need something, and then you can have some choices about how you get that information, then that allows our students to exercise those learning preferences either because that’s what they want or that’s what circumstances dictate they’ve got to do this time.

Thomas: [00:14:52] And the third part of that is the HOW of learning. We have to practice what we learn. We have to do things over and over again. We have to fail at stuff until we get it right. And being able to iterate, being able to practice over and over again, that’s what really cements learning whether we’re talking about K12 learners, a third grader writing a one paragraph essay or we’re talking about graduate students who are doing in-depth analysis and research. It’s that iterative practice that allows students to cement things from short term learning into long term memory and practice.

Thomas: [00:15:29] And here’s the fun part. If we make sure that we give students options for how they demonstrate those skills, then they are less likely to have to say oh wait I have a barrier that prevents me from doing it the one way you said to do Professor So-and-So. And that way we’re actually making it so that fewer people have to put a hand up and say treat me differently or do something, one change, one time for just me. And that’s where we go back to what Andrew was talking about, accessibility as a civil right. He’s talking about making sure that we’re as open, as diverse, and as welcoming as we can be in the way that we have designed the learning interactions for our courses and for our students services.

Bonni: [00:16:16] As we think about adopting Universal Design for Learning, I wonder if it might be fair to frame this as both easy and difficult all at the same time. So I wanted to see how that fits with you because that’s one of the things that is one of my takeaways. On one hand, I’m teaching a class right now Personal Leadership and Productivity. And right now they’re reading and I wanted to have there be some accountability for finishing that reading. And it’s really reflective work that I’m asking them to do. So I want them to identify five takeaways that they had from doing the reading. It could be a quote. It could be just a concept. And then three ways they could apply that or have applied it in their lives. And then one question that they have for other students who are in the class. And this is something that they’ll be doing throughout the two books that we’re reading in the class. And as I set up that assignment in my learning management system, we happen to use Canvas, but if you use another one you can also do this and every one that I’ve ever taught on. Set up the assignment. They could submit text. Actual typed copy paste text. They could submit a picture which a number of them did for this first reading, we’re recording this fairly early in my semester so they actually drew what is often referred to as sketch notes. And I loved it because this gal, she knew how to draw the ear and she’s got the brain, it is so fun to see. And then I also said that they could record a video of themselves sharing their reflections that way.

Bonni: [00:17:50] And I don’t remember what else I had, but basically I’m not testing writing skills. It’s not a writing class, although certainly writing as a form of reflection can be helpful but it did not matter the way in which they conducted that reflection. It was not important. So choice. But literally all I did was check check check check check the boxes and have in the instructions that they can make that choice. So I see UDL, if I want to get into this as both easy. But also if you’re going to be good at it, you talked earlier about the why, the what, and the how. Tom, it haunts me because every class that I teach I want to be better at all of that. And I’m never where I want to be. So you reflect back? Does that sit well with you? This idea that I can get better incrementally but I also always strive to do this work better.

Thomas: [00:18:44] Absolutely. And Bonni I have to congratulate you because you don’t get a prize for knowing the answer to a question, but you definitely get a prize for being able to apply it. This is where we really want to focus with all of our readers of the book. And your example is perfect. So in the assignment that you have put together, you want your learners to read a piece of content and then respond to it in some fashion. And you also told me what your grading rubric looks like. Now granted, you said you’re just checking boxes to make sure that people are performing the assignment. But what’s your criterion for checking that box or not checking that box? What’s your mastery level criteria? Well you want to have five of these kinds of takeaways. You want to have a question for somebody else. You listed all of the things. So you are doing specifications grading here. Now that is a key to being able to do UDL in the first place.

Thomas: [00:19:45] And we should say right off the bat, UDL is not a set of specific teaching practices. It’s not a thing that makes you change from a flipped classroom model or an active learning model or a PBL problem based learning model. No it’s a framework. It’s a way of thinking about the interactions that we have so that they are more inclusive. And you can do UDL with any of those models, any of those teaching approaches. So let’s unpack that assignment that you just talked about and then let’s talk about why this is scary. And how to make it not so scary.

Bonni: [00:20:23] And I still want it to be a little scary because I want to keep getting better. Scary, but not terrifying.

Thomas: [00:20:30] And I want to replace the scary with encouragement and ways that you can find resources. In the example that you’ve provided, let’s do it in a single stream way according to the way that we might do that if we were just traditional professors and had never heard of the Universal Design for Learning stuff. We might ask our students to read a journal article or a chapter in a textbook. First off. Second, here are the criteria that I would like you to follow in your response to this reading. Give me five of these, two of these, and one of these. And then type that up in a word processing file and send it in through the learning management system.

Thomas: [00:21:15] What that does is it allows students to have one way to take in the information. One-Way to give their response. And it allows only one way for them to stay engaged or involved. Now when we wrote the book what we figured out was if we then go to a professor who has the all that sort of single stream design. And say oh yes multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representing information, multiple means of action and expression and we talk about neuroscience, sometimes people’s eyes glaze over a little bit because it’s a lot. And it can sound like oh I put in 50 2 minute videos into my course. Are you telling me I’m going to caption those like yesterday? And people get into seeing the scope of what they could do which is the scary part, they see how much work or how much effort it would take to do an entire course fully UDL. And they suffer from analysis paralysis and they just don’t start.

Thomas: [00:22:21] So. I love the fact that you started with just one assignment. And what we say is take all of the sort of three brain networks and the what, the how, and the why. All of that stuff, set that aside. Don’t talk like that to your colleagues. Let that be secret knowledge for you people who read the book for, you people who have these responsibilities. When you are sharing these kinds of tips with others, just think about Universal Design for Learning as Plus. 1 Thinking.

Thomas: [00:22:57] What I mean by that is, think of all the interactions that you have in your course. How do students interact with the materials like reading something? But how do they interact with one another? In conversations, in small groups, in studying. How do they interact with you as the instructor? And how do they interact with the wider world? Perhaps you ask them to go out and interview someone who’s doing the job that they’re preparing for. So think of all those interactions. And if there is one way to have that interaction now, plus one. Give them one more way to have that interaction. So your example is absolutely. Bonni gets the prize because you wanted your students to read a chapter or a journal article. If you provide them that information in a way that is in inaccedable, they only have one way that they could get that information in.

Thomas: [00:23:54] But if you give them aMicrosoft Word document that is this journal article. Or you give them a PDF where you can actually take your mouse and click and drag and it will select the words. That’s something that anybody can turn into an audio of the text. And it’s not just people with disabilities if you go out onto the Google Play Store or onto the iTunes Store you can find free read out loud applications. And it’ll take any PTF or any Microsoft Word document. And there’s literally hundreds of these many of them are graduate student projects that will take any piece of text and read it out loud to you. This is not just for somebody who has a visual challenge. This is for somebody who can study only for your course on their way into work in the car in the traffic jam in the morning. So if it takes you 45 minutes to get into work and you’ve got nothing better to do than sit in traffic, why not listen to the reading you’re supposed to be doing for class. So that’s one plus one in the assignment you’re talking about.

Thomas: [00:25:03] The other plus one you’ve already designed into it. You say OK give this back to me as text but also post a picture, do a drawing, do sketch notes, do an audio. Now here’s a scary part. The plus one means instead of giving it to me as text, maybe offer them not the chance to do any other format which is kind of frightening. But just the format Plus one. One more. So maybe do a drawing or something by hand and take the picture or give me text and don’t even bother with audio at this point. That allows you as the instructor to set a few boundaries around what you’re going to receive and how you’re going to look at it.

Thomas: [00:25:49] The last piece of the puzzle for UDL is plus one in how you respond to it. Or plus one in how students understand that they’re on the right track. And you also did that very well. You have in your assignment the idea of here are the things in the rubric that I’m going to be looking for. And you can grade those no matter the format that the students are sending stuff in. So if you’re using the same criteria, you can grade a text based response the same way that you can grade the sketch notes that a student would submit.

Thomas: [00:26:33] Now there is an asterisk to this last part and it gets us into a wider conversation. The asterisk is if your assignment is the format, don’t offer choice. So for example I teach English composition courses. My Ph.D. is in Victorian literature. Believe it or not. And in my English composition courses, I do want to make sure that students know how to use a word processor, know how to do APA formatting, know how to use fonts, how to use formatting, margins, spacing, all that kind of stuff. And if I gave my students the option to do a quick two minute video response as their essay, could I tell how well they were doing with formatting requirements? No. Now, if the format is the assignment, don’t offer choice. But when my students are drafting pieces of it ,like a few paragraphs here or a few paragraphs there. I allow them choice there. I open up that plus one as much as I possibly can. Full well knowing that yeah when the rubber meets the road you do have to do this thing. This particular thing.

Thomas: [00:27:43] And so when you talk about being a little afraid that UDL can be so big that we don’t know where to start, here are three questions for your listeners to ask themselves and their colleagues to take some of that fear away because we’ve just worked through an assignment that you give and you’ve done plus one in it already. And so when you want to strengthen, when you want to build on your foundation, but you don’t know where to start. Start here.

Thomas: [00:28:12] First question. Where do your students always send you the same question by e-mail 700 times? Now if you’re like me, I’ve been teaching my courses for 20 something years. But even if you’ve been teaching for five years or you’re just starting out. You’ve taught for at least a few times the same course over and over. And you know that in week two, in your intro to biology course that your students are going to have questions about the difference between meiosis and mitosis in the cell energy transfer process. They always muck it up. They always ask a million questions about it. That is an excellent place to START with a little plus one design. If you give that information in one way. Hey read this in the textbook and just take a look at that. Give it to them in more than one way. Just one more. And by doing that, by creating that one minute quick video where you do a screencast and show hey this is a concept that people always get questions about and always get it wrong. Then giving that explanation is actually saving you time and effort on the back end of things and it’s making it easier for your students to approach a difficult concept.

Thomas: [00:29:30] Notice what we’re not doing here. We are not making it easier to understand the concept. We’re not dumbing it down. We’re not spoon feeding anybody. What we’re doing is we’re lowering the barrier to access. But we’re not lowering the rigor of the content itself. So, question one where do students send you the same question by email 700 times?

Thomas: [00:29:54] Question 2. Where do your students always get a concept wrong on the tests and the quizzes and causes you to have to reteach? You have to spend valuable class time to go over something again because students typically just don’t get it. That’s an excellent place to employ a little plus one design thinking as well. So this is where you create a study guide. This is where you ask your students to create little quick videos. Ask them to take their cell phones and turn on the camera and put that selfie camera to good use. Hey my name’s Tom I’m a student in professor Bonni’s class and here’s my explanation of this difficult concept. And ask for their permission to share it with future classes. You don’t even have to do the UDL stuff yourself all the time. Giving students that agency, giving students that plus one really helps them with difficult and challenging concepts and it helps reduce the number of things that you have to go back and reteach. That was question 2.

Thomas: [00:30:56] Question 3. Where did your students always ask for alternative explanation? Professor Bonni I really liked what you said but I still don’t kind of get it. That’s an excellent place to start doing some plus one design as well. Here’s where you can really outsource it. Talk to your colleagues who teach the same courses that you do and ask them to create a study guide, a pamphlet, a quick video, an audio podcast about that particular difficult or challenging concept. Just having more than one way of explaining something or more than one perspective on it is something that helps to lower the barrier to entry for that concept and keeps the rigor high and reduces the number of questions, confusions, and problems that you’re going to have as an instructor.

Thomas: [00:31:46] So those three questions that make it less scary. Let’s figure out where to start. Where do your students always ask the same question over and over again? Where do your students get things wrong on the tests and quizzes causing you to reteach? And where do your students always ask for alternative explanations? Those are great places to start. And it sounds like in the example that you provided, you’re already doing some of that so excellent, excellent Bonni.

Bonni: [00:32:10] Tom has given us today so much to think about in terms of UDL. Where are we now? How is our approach to UDL evolving so that we can better serve our students? And then how do we adopt it so we can start or continue to use it on our campuses. And I wish we could talk more but all I can say is go get the book. It’s a great book and is just well worth the investment in terms of the time and also the expense. It’s not that expensive. And we should get our hands on a copy. How’s that?

Thomas: [00:32:43] That’s great. And I can add to that just for your listeners, if you go to WVUpress.com And you search for our book, there is a discount code that your listeners can put in to save 25% on the book if you’re so inclined. That code is all capital letters REACHTEACH. And that for your listeners will get you 25% off our book and our undying gratitude for purchasing it.

Bonni: [00:33:14] And that is the same publisher, West Virginia University Press, that has been sponsoring the transcripts. So making Teaching in Higher Ed even more accessible to pople who want to learn more about these topics.

Bonni: [00:33:30] This is the time in this show where we each get to give recommendations and this is where I get to get a little bit geeky. I am both a Mac user and also a user of iOS devices and there is a wonderful new podcast out by David Sparks who is probably better known at this point, although maybe not for long, as the cohost of Mac power users. He now cohosts this show with Rose Orchard who is absolutely just a wonderful addition to the team, the Automators podcast, automation for the people.

Bonni: [00:34:03] And it is one of those things where I do sometimes get a little bit challenge because they really give- they will give an example like, how can you automate your calendars? How can you automate project templates.? How can you even automate things having to do with your email? And it is not one of those things where I just listen and absorb everything. It’s one of those where I listen, I get my curiosity peaked and then I got to do a little homework to automate some of these things. But boy does it ever pay off. I mean it’s amazing.

Bonni: [00:34:34] So if you like that kind of geeking out and you are either aMac user or an iOS user, I think it’s worth a listen appear interested in that topic. And now is when I get to pass it over to Tom for his recommendations.

Thomas: [00:34:47] Thank you Bonni. And to play off of your recommendations I’d like to recommend one technology that’s really changing the game in terms of accessibility for web based and learning management system based content. It’s a tool called Ally. Their web site is Ally.ac and they started out as an individual company. They were just bought by the Learning Management System company, Blackboard last year.

Thomas: [00:35:14] And Blackboard has done something that they don’t typically do. Typically when a learning management system company buys a tool or another company, they fold it into their own universe and they allow it to be used only with their tools. Well blackboard thinks that Ally, which is an accessibility tool that creates multiple versions of content automatically behind the scenes, they think that it is so important that they are putting together ways that Ally can be used in Canvas in Desire to Learn, in Sakai, in Moodle, all the big learning management systems.

Thomas: [00:35:52] So they’re making sure that this tool is available to everybody to use. And it’s kind of a game changer. In terms of making things accessible, it used to be that we would ask only faculty members or instructional designers to create the plus 1 versions of all their materials and that can be a daunting task. Imagine if all the materials in your learning management system right now today- if you apply this ally tool, and yes it is an additional cost to your institution. But if you apply that Ally tool it will create a text transcript for your videos, put automatic captions on the videos, create a visual braille version of that, create a number of different other alternative formats automatically. It takes Microsoft Word documents and make sure that they’ve got the right headings structure that a screen reader can use. It does a lot of cool things and I’d encourage people to go take a look at that Ally web site.

Thomas: [00:36:51] I also need to recommend a person and that person is Kirsetn Behling. She is my co-author on this book and you’d love to look Kirsten up. She is the Director of Student Accessibility Services at [00:37:02] Tufts [0.4] University. And Kirsten Behling, she’s fantastic. I do not have a disability services background. Kirsten does. And so with the two of us writing this book we were really able to play off of each other’s strengths and build on solid foundations, mine from faculty development Kirsten from the disability services area and it really turned into a wonderful collaboration. Both of us are available for anything from a 20 minute phone call, to a consultation with your college or university, to coming to work with you and your colleagues. So we’d love to hear the rest of your story. Please reach out.

Bonni: [00:37:44] Thoma Tobin, thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. And may I say, I hope this is just the beginning of an even more extended conversation because I know you have so many things you could come back and talk to us more about.

Thomas: [00:37:59] Thank you very much Bonni for having me. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you and your listeners. And I’m looking forward to the rest of the conversation where ever that leads us. Thanks.

Bonni: [00:38:10] It was so energising to get to talk to Thomas Tobin today for Teaching in Higher Ed episode 227. If you’d like to go to the show notes to see so many of the resources that he provided and talked about during the episode, go to teachinginhighered.com/227. You can also if you’d like make a comment on the episode there and let Tom know some of your takeaways from listening. I’d also encourage you to check out the book which is linked to at that same website. And the discount code that he referenced is mentioned there.

Bonni: [00:38:42] And if you have been listening for a while but don’t want to have to remember to go grab that the information that comes through via the show notes just subscribe to that e-mail it’s teaching in higher ed dot com slash subscribe it comes once a week has an article by me.

Bonni: [00:38:58] And also follow up with the show notes. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.