Preparing Visually-Disabled Instructors to Teach Online

Thomas J. Tobin • Westmoreland County Community College	

Abstract

Much has been written about how to deliver online course materials to visually-impaired students.  This essay explores the methods by which an online support staff may assist visually-impaired faculty members to teach online, with special emphasis on identifying which strategies for assisting visually-impaired students are transferable to the process of assisting visually-impaired faculty, as well as identifying areas of concern specific to helping visually-impaired faculty members to prepare and to teach an online course.  This essay outlines the current research, as well as a narrative of the difficulties encountered when the author was assigned to help a visually-disabled faculty member to develop and to teach an online course.  The author concludes with an executive summary of best practices for supporting visually disabled faculty to teach online, as well as a compilation of useful references and resources.  The focus of this essay is to outline successful techniques and to highlight potential pitfalls in serving visually disabled faculty who will teach online.

Literature Review

The literature on supporting visually-impaired students in an online environment is immense, and many of the same techniques advocated that body of literature are effective in helping visually-disabled faculty members, once their courses have been put together and a re up and running.  Such a caveat leaves a large lacuna in the scholarship on disabled-user support, and the field of visually-impaired faculty support is relatively new.  Despite the relative dearth of research and support material, there are a number of good case studies and general-practice articles in the scholarly record, chief among which are resources spearheaded by Donald P. Mitchell and Norm Coombs.  Mitchell is a visually-impaired faculty member at Nova Southeastern University, and Coombs is a visually-impaired faculty member at the Rochester Institute of Technology; both scholars are pioneers in the field of disabled-user support in distance education.

Mitchell and John Scigliano authored a groundbreaking case study entitled “Moving Beyond the White Cane: Building an Online Learning Environment for the Visually Impaired Professional” (2001).  In this study, Mitchell uses his own experiences to point out four main barriers to his success in online teaching: physical, intellectual, psychological, and technological.  Mitchell astutely observes that traditional support techniques focus on the intellectual and technological barriers for visually-impaired faculty.  However, Mitchell reports that the psychological and physical barriers to his effective teaching were nearly as difficult to overcome:

The psychological and social barriers he [Mitchell] faced had the effect of making one feel powerless or impotent.  He wanted to achieve at higher intellectual levels and continue to grow mentally.  This was to be his most difficult challenge. . . .  Now, he had to rebuild his people network to accommodate his new online environment (Mitchell, 2001).

Mitchell’s approach stemmed from his gradual loss of sight due to macular degeneration; he had been sighted for most of his life, and the adjustments reported in this article were due in part to Mitchell’s desire to re-create a workable environment in which he felt capable and comfortable in tasks for which he had been well suited before he lost his sight.  The factor that most allowed Mitchell to be successful was a desire to try everything until he found workable solutions.  

Another view is that of the professor who has been blind for most of his life.  Norm Coombs was blinded at age eight, and now uses computer technology to help mediate his teaching.  It is interesting to note that both Coombs and Mitchell began to use computer mediation close to or after their retirement from their professorial duties.  Coombs’ experience is related in a series of articles relevant to visually-impaired faculty support.  Coombs earned his doctorate in history and taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology for many years; in the early 1990s, he was introduced to computer technology, and he has adopted it to help mediate his experience with his students.  Several article relate Coomb’s techniques, such as Hildreth (1992), Quittner (1994), and an interview published in The Node (1998).  From the Node interview:

Then it began occurring to me that the computer wasn’t only useful for me as a blind person. RIT has over a thousand deaf students -- we have the International Technical Institute for the Deaf on our campus. Early on, I was giving a term paper assignment to the class, and I asked for volunteers who would submit their term papers to me in e-mail. I wasn’t sure whether I would like that or whether it would work or not in those early days. One of the ones who volunteered was a deaf girl. I graded their papers and sent them back in about a day, and she asked me a question about my grade and I answered it, and she asked a question about something else and I answered it, and a question about something else and I answered it......and then she said, “I’ve never talked to a professor without an intermediary before.”

Coombs also recognized early on that the same kinds of techniques that helped his disabled students also were effective for his own classroom needs and for the needs of his able students: in other words, the best way for Coombs to teach effectively was to treat every member of the class, including himself, the same way:

So I began to think that perhaps the computer opens up all kinds of doors for people with disabilities in education.  And I found not only that, but also that a lot of people who don’t have disabilities interact differently on the computer than they do face-to-face. I teach a lot of courses in Black History, which is a hot topic, and students are often afraid to talk frankly in the classroom. If they’re black, they’re afraid they won’t take the right party line and the other black kids will be down their throat, and if they’re white, they’re afraid they won’t take that right party line and they’ll get in trouble. And yet on the computer, even though they’re not anonymous, they talk much more openly. So much so that when I was still doing classroom courses (I’m only doing distance learning now), I would take a regular Black History class and make them do part of the work in a computer conference, because I knew they’d talk much better there than anywhere else. I gave them another legitimate reason for doing it -- I didn’t say, “I want you on the computer because you’re going to open up!” But that was my first agenda. I remember one girl who said, “I like using the computer because in the classroom I’m afraid of saying something stupid and then getting a crazy look; whereas on the computer, nobody’s going to look crazy at me.” They might still have thought she was crazy, but she didn’t have to see them looking at her thinking she was crazy. I like to say that when there’s no stage, there’s no stage fright.

Coombs’ experience is now being tapped as CEO of the Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI) group, which helps faculty and administrators to support their disabled students through the use of adaptive technology and sound pedagogical techniques (http://www.rit.edu/~easi/).

An issue not raised in any other of the extant literature is that of “disclosure.”  G. Denise Lance (2002) explores this concern in “Distance learning and Disability: A View from the Instructor’s Side of the Virtual Lectern.”  Lance suffers from cerebral palsy, but the issues she discusses are relevant to visually-impaired instructors, as well.  Lance debated as to when, and indeed whether, she should reveal her disability to her students.  In a face-to-face classroom, it is difficult to remove one’s disability from the awareness of one’s students, but in the online environment, students and their instructors may reveal only as much data about themselves as they wish.  Coomb’s idea of having a more open discussion has another side: Lance’s disclosure dilemma:

When I accepted a job teaching a course on inclusion for general educators, I faced a dilemma associated with the anonymity of online communication. The purpose of the class was to make general educators more comfortable with teaching students with disabilities. Would my disability help create positive attitudes about individuals with disabilities, create negative attitudes, or have no effect at all? 

I felt strongly that my experiences as a student with cerebral palsy in general education was important to share, as part of my expertise on inclusion. However, I wanted my students to begin the course examining their concerns about teaching students with disabilities. I feared that my disclosing my disability at the onset might temper the teachers' real anxieties and that they might not be as forthcoming, fearing that they would offend their instructor. 

Fortunately, Lance discovered that her students evinced few patronizing or negative reactions to her disability, no matter when she disclosed it.  However, Lance’s results are based on a class in which pre-service teachers were learning methods for teaching students with disabilities, a possible limitation that Lance acknowledges, and which is discussed in better detail in a previous study (Lynch, 1996).

Further reading on the topic of universal design in distance education, most of which is only tangentially related to the topic of preparing and supporting visually-impaired faculty, may be found in Burgstahler (2002), Saba et al. (2001), and Graves (2001).

The literature on the topic of supporting visually-impaired faculty to teach online consists largely of case study reports, often at first hand, as visually-impaired authors attempt themselves to find solutions for being able to use technological mediation in order to achieve a higher level of function than they otherwise had in their face-to-face classrooms.  The extant literature suffers from lacunae in the areas of preparing visually-impaired faculty to teach online, supporting such faculty in as hands-off a manner as possible, and in allocating staff time and resources to able and disabled faculty in a fair manner.

Overview

This case narrative covers the process of training a visually-impaired instructor to create online materials, to learn the course-management software adopted at the faculty member’s institution, and to teach a pedagogically-valid, successful online course.  The author is the Coordinator for Instructional Technology and Distance Education Support at Westmoreland County Community College, a medium-sized two-year college in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  The visually-disabled instructor is a member of the faculty at Westmoreland County Community College who volunteered to teach an online course in Labor Relations during the Fall 2001 academic term.  The author would like to express his gratitude to the instructor for allowing the author to relate this narrative and to use potentially identifying information in this essay.

This case narrative will follow the narrative method, primarily because there are few published resources available on the subject of offering support services to visually-disabled faculty who teach online.  The conclusions of this narrative are, therefore, specific to the case narrated, and generalization from the conclusions of this case narrative is not recommended until a larger number of cases can be reported.  The author invites readers to attempt to reproduce the conditions and results of this case in order to test the validity of its conclusions.

Research Questions

Online support staff can rely on a large body of literature when constructing mechanisms by which to assist visually-disabled online students.  Such techniques as providing text-only versions of resources, using alternate-text HTML coding with graphics, creating audio files, and offering training with screen-reader technology are well-established methods by which support staff can decrease the burden on visually-impaired students.  However, the underlying assumption of supporting visually-disabled students is that support staff are assisting students to retrieve content that is already there--the content of the course has been created by a sighted professor and is modified or augmented by the support staff to better fit the needs of the visually-impaired student.

In terms of preparing a visually-disabled faculty member to teach online, several questions arise.  First, teaching an online course almost always implies the creation of new online course materials, or, at the very least, the transition of traditional-medium materials to electronic formats.  This raises the question of how to train a visually-impaired faculty member to be able to make the “jump” in formats, how to assist the faculty member to learn how to use the software involved, and how to help the faculty member to become as independent of the support staff as possible in terms of creating and posting class materials.  Secondarily, once the course begins, similar questions to those faced by online students arise: what accommodations must be made by the institution, the students, and the faculty member in order to maintain the accessibility of the materials created and used by all of the members of the class?  A third area of inquiry has to do with the manner in which support staff train the faculty member how to handle the online class once it has begun; what are some successful strategies that can alert the students to the fact that their instructor is disabled?  Is it even necessary to reveal this information?  How ought the faculty member to view his or her relationship with the support staff?

These basic questions give rise to other, more specific issues, but these three areas--preparation of materials, training on the software, and online teaching techniques--appear to be the focus points facing any faculty support staff who wish to work well with visually-disabled faculty members who will be teaching online.

Propositions of the Narrative

Before this case narrative began, the author had already worked with online students who had a range of disabilities from multiple sclerosis to deafness to visual disabilities; recommending adaptive technologies and partnering with local social-service organizations were effective methods of giving disabled students maximum access to the materials in their online classes.  It was found most helpful to inform the instructor and  key college personnel (the counseling office, for example) of students’ disabilities up front, so that instructors had the opportunity to accommodate their disabled students.

In preparing to offer support to a visually-disabled faculty member, the author predicted that the following propositions would hold true:

•	Many of the technologies used to support online visually-disabled students would be useful in serving faculty, as well.
•	The most difficult part of supporting visually-disabled online faculty would be the software training.
•	The visually-disabled faculty member would require more time and more repetition of instructional concepts in order to master the skills needed to create online resources than able faculty members usually require.
•	The course management software our college adopted would be cumbersome for a visually-impaired faculty member to learn and use.
•	The online teaching tips and techniques the author advocated in training sessions would need to be modified to be useful for the visually-impaired instructor.
•	The most successful method for supporting the visually-impaired faculty member during the term would be as “hands on” as possible.

Units of Analysis

From 1 June to 20 August 2001, the author worked with the visually-disabled instructor to develop online materials and to train in the use of the course-management software.  From 23 August to 10 December 2001, the instructor taught a business course in labor-management relations online.  At the time of this writing, the course is in its third iteration.  In order to measure the success of the support methods used in this case narrative, the author used the following criteria, some of which are subjective value judgments and others of which are measurable outcomes:

•	The number and media of materials created by the instructor prior to the start of class.
•	The degree to which the instructor is able to post materials to the course without assistance.
•	The identity of elements from the instructor’s face-to-face and online versions of the course.
•	The number of email and discussion-board postings to and from the instructor in relation to the average in other online courses.
•	The responses of students to a mid-term and a final survey of the class.
•	The number and nature of student requests for technical help.
•	The instructor’s responses to an  end-of-class survey of the effectiveness of technical support.

Each of these criteria represents a subset of the skills needed in order to develop, post, and maintain online course materials; the effectiveness of the support methods offered by the author can be assessed by soliciting feedback from the instructor and the students in the course, as well as by collecting more objective data. 

Procedural Narrative

Beginning in the Fall 1999 term, Westmoreland County Community College (WCCC) began to offer online courses using the Blackboard course-management system.  After five semesters of offering online courses, the full- and part-time faculty at WCCC were by and large familiar with the idea of the college offering online courses, if not familiar with the software and the tips and tricks of online pedagogy, per se.  By the end of the Spring 2001 term, WCCC had offered more than a hundred courses online, and had developed an entirely distance-education AAS degree in Business Management.  In order to expand the offerings in this degree program, the subject of this case study offered to teach his Labor Relations course online, starting in the Fall 2001 term.  The faculty member has been totally blind since a bout with severe diabetes in the early 1970s, and teaches classes with the aid of two part-time student research assistants and a pocket audiotape recorder, on which he takes notes and records lecture materials.

In the Fall 1999 term, the author began training faculty to teach using the Blackboard course-management system, developing over the course of two years a six-hour modular training seminar designed to familiarize faculty members with the software as well as with some tips and strategies for teaching online.  The author has worked with the visually impaired before, but only in support of visually-disabled students who needed accommodations for online classes.

The first meeting between the instructor and the author took place near the beginning of June 2001, and the primary purpose was to inform the instructor about the options open to him in creating the materials for his online course.  The author attended this meeting less to offer a plan for the process than to listen to the instructor and to suggest ways in which the faculty member’s skills could be transferred to the online course, rather than having to learn new skills.

The results of this first meeting were quite surprising, calling into question many of the author’s assumptions about the optimal methods for assisting the instructor.  For example, the assumption that “the visually-disabled faculty member would require more time and more repetition of instructional concepts in order to master the skills needed to create online resources than able faculty members usually require” seemed to be disproved by the instructor’s reliance on a hand-held audiocassette recorder for taking notes during meetings.  While it is true that the instructor needed to consult his notes frequently and confessed that he would require more time than sighted faculty to learn the software, the complexity of concepts and depth of instruction achieved during the first session were comparable to what might be reasonably covered during the same time with sighted faculty members.

The “reasonable accommodation” that the college had previously provided to the instructor was in the form of two part-time student assistants, who helped the instructor by reading email, doing photocopying, and taking transcription as needed.  One of the instructor’s assistants was designated as his “online” assistant for this class, and as the instructor learned the software, his assistant was also trained to use it.  This arrangement worked out very satisfactorily, at first.

The instructor made a point of insisting that he receive the same training and treatment as other faculty members, with a minimum of “special” treatment, and the author honored that request as far as possible; the instructor and the assistant were able to demonstrate mastery of the basics of the course software in approximately five hours of hands-on one-on-one training, and were expected then to post content into an online course shell in preparation for offering the course during the fall 2001 term.

With help from his “online” assistant, the instructor developed his course lecture materials, tests, questions for discussion, and other class materials.  He and the assistant were active participants in their learning, asking questions for clarification when necessary.  However, the work progressed in fits and starts, due to the many other demands on the instructor’s time during the summer months.  He was teaching a basic faculty load plus overload courses, for a total of twenty-one credits during the summer months.  The instructor was also involved in faculty union negotiations with the college administration, which further reduced the time he was able to devote to the development of his online-course materials ahead of time.  By the beginning of classes in late August, the faculty member had posted 2 of 15 units into his online course.

Subsequent meetings between the author, the instructor, and the assistant proved that some of the author’s original working assumptions had been correct.  The largest hurdle in getting the instructor to be skilled in teaching online was not ideological or pedagogical but technological.  For instance, one of the author’s initial assumptions was that the course management software would be cumbersome for a visually-impaired faculty member to learn and use.  This became especially apparent when, during the third week of classes, many students in the instructor’s online class contacted the author to complain that they had been unable to enter the online class due to the instructor not sending them the course-specific enrollment access code for the Labor Relations course.  These students were largely those who had signed up for the class at the last minute, and thus who did not appear on the instructor’s initial roster, so the author initially suspected that miscommunication between the registrar and the instructor was the cause of this problem.

On the next meeting with the instructor, however, the author discovered that the instructor had many email messages waiting for him from his students, some as old as two weeks, to which he had yet to respond.  The instructor also had not posted materials in his online class for over a week.  When asked about this development, the instructor reported that his “online assistant” had taken a job with another college, and he was therefore left literally unable to get into his online class for nearly two weeks.  The author inquired as to why the instructor did not call for support and help when the assistant left, and the author reported that he did not wish to give the impression that he was incapable of keeping up, despite the fact that this is exactly what happened.

One of the author’s working assumptions gave mixed results: “The online teaching tips and techniques the author advocates in training sessions would need to be modified in order to be useful for the visually-impaired instructor.”  Since most of the metaphors for thinking about online courses are visual ones, the author found it sometimes difficult to adapt the terminology to fit the training.  However, such common vocabulary as “main areas” and “sub-areas” and “documents” were unproblematic, and the instructor was able to learn the structure of the course software relatively easily, especially since many of the tools in the course-management system were designed to mimic classroom resources.

Another assumption about training and supporting visually-handicapped faculty to teach online also proved to be correct, so much so that the author needed to step in and change strategies mid-way through the course.  “The most successful method for supporting the visually-impaired faculty member during the term would be as ‘hands on’ as possible.”  Since the methods used to train the faculty member were dependent initially on the instructor’s student assistant also knowing how to use the online-course software, the instructor began with a firm conceptual understanding of the structure of the online course tools, the ideological methodology which he wished to use, and very little knowledge of how actually to use the keyboard and mouse in order to enter and administer his Labor Relations course online.  Such a situation made the faculty member wholly dependent on his student work-study for access to his course materials.  The student worker who has been trained to help the faculty member got a job mid-way through the semester, leaving the instructor literally cut off from his online course.

Because of the unforeseeable failure of the “reasonable accommodations” provided to the instructor, the author set up twice-weekly meetings with the instructor, essentially replacing the assistant’s time and expertise with those of the author temporarily (i.e., for the duration of the semester).  This placed the most direct means of support in the hands of the instructor, and ensured regular communication between the instructor and his support personnel, and further complications were avoided during the remainder of the course.

The instructor has now expressed a desire to develop another course online for the spring term, and this brings up several conclusions with regard to the amount of, type of, and reasonable expectations regarding the accommodations made for the instructor’s disability, the time-frame for development of materials, the level of involvement of support staff in course-materials development matters, and the level of involvement of support staff in actually running the course with the faculty member.

Preliminary Conclusions

One of the situations which helped to contribute to the difficulties experienced by the instructor and the author is that our college’s support staff for online courses is very limited: 1.5 FTE staff serve the needs of nearly a hundred full- and part-time faculty, as well as 1600 online students.  With so few staff who can potentially devote time to personal one-on-one training and support, the author’s ability to maintain the college’s online-courses server, train faculty, offer design advice to instructors, and staff the student help desk is already strained.  This situation is similar to that in all but the largest research universities, and the author quickly realized that he and his staff would be unable to provide the very best service to our visually-impaired faculty member without having a significantly negative impact on our ability to serve other online faculty and students.

In order to avoid the need to re-train a new assistant every time the visually-impaired faculty member’s part-time assistants turn over, the author suggested that the instructor learn to use a screen reader, such as JAWS, to help him to navigate and to use the computer independently.  Ironically, this option was rejected by the faculty member as too time-consuming when it had been suggested toward the beginning of the development process.  

This brings up two further problems, neither of which currently has a satisfactory solution.  Screen-reader software such as JAWS tends to have difficulty in reading from frames-based internet pages, and most online-course software, including that adopted by the college, utilizes frames.  Secondly, and perhaps more pressing, is the fact that the instructor has had minimal experience with a QWERTY keyboard, and has never actually typed on a computer or used a mouse for navigation.  Such skills as typing skills are well outside the range of skills that the author can teach, and there is as yet no simple solution that presents itself, since the accommodations thus far given to the instructor have been surrogate in nature; the instructor is unable currently to operate independently of his assistants in terms of basic computer and keyboarding skills.  The difficult conclusion of this narrative is that, given the circumstances present in this case, it is nearly impossible for a one-and-a-half-person distance-learning staff to provide adequate support and accommodation to visually-disabled faculty who wish to teach online if the faculty do not already have some basic keyboarding skills.

Further, in order to minimize the impact of problems on students in the course, who were, by and large, confused and frustrated by the time they entered the third week of the Labor Relations course, the author suggests the following measures for training and support of all visually-impaired instructors, which, in hindsight, may help to avoid some of the serious difficulties experienced by the author, the instructor, and his students:

•	Require that the entire content of the course be posted online before the course may be offered to students.  Ask support staff to role-play the student by sending email, posting discussion messages, and sending files to the instructor using the course-management software.
•	If possible, offer one-on-one time with support staff for the duration of the course development process, and for a significant percentage of the semester when the course is taught.  This may help to head off issues of mis- or non-communication between the instructor and students.
•	If possible, rely on training methods and resources that will leave the faculty member able independently to use the computer to gain access to and administer the online course.  At a minimum, the instructor should be able to check and respond to email, post a message to an asynchronous discussion, and send and receive files with students electronically.  These skills, especially if missing to begin with, may require a significant amount of intensive training and time for the instructor to learn, and may require training outside the purview of the traditional skills of a distance-education support staff; therefore, rely on resources from administrative support staff, other faculty who teach subjects such as typing, and community service organizations to help identify support structures that can work in tandem with distance-ed support staff.
•	Ensure that the faculty member utilizes the same skills that make him or her a good in-class instructor.  Don’t water down the content or expectations for the faculty member in order to accommodate disability; rather, explore alternative methods that still meet the requirements and demonstrate evidence of the core skills needed by your online faculty.  

In this case study, for example, the faculty member found it easy to put together lecture notes, since most of his lectures were already in audio format.  However, the faculty member found it difficult to follow an online discussion board, since its organizing principle is visual, with indentation and color signaling relies and unread message.  The alternative for the faculty member was to use a numbering system, to identify message threads, which allowed him to do his own intellectual work, rather than having to rely on his student assistants.  It would have been easier to allow his students to keep track of his discussions for him, but it was agreed that he needed to have mastery of the skill in order to teach online, just like all of our other online faculty.

Despite successful alternative methods, many barriers to visually-impaired online instruction still exist.  Many such expectations as those outlined above are quite idealistic.  The faculty member from the case narrative is unlikely to learn keyboarding skills in the near term (although there is considerable promise that he will eventually do so), and the budget and staff for distance-education faculty support remain in a state of zero-growth, making the choices necessary to provide quality support to faculty--even without regard to ability--increasingly difficult.

In the absence of suitable short-term solutions, the faculty member and the author have come up with a stop-gap solution: all of the faculty member’s student assistants will now take the six-hour faculty-training program, a possibility made more palatable now that the faculty training is offered online.  This solution, while not optimal, heads off the two most pressing problems encountered by the faculty member: if one of his assistants leaves or is unable to help, there are others standing by who have the skills needed (this also provides useful  and free value-added job-related skills for the student assistants).  Also, the faculty member’s own understanding of the software and of good online pedagogy is increased as he interacts with his student assistants, all of whom use a common vocabulary and understand a shared set of skills and techniques in helping the faculty member to administer his course online.

Executive Summary

In order to take advantage of the techniques that have been found to be useful, and in order to avoid the pitfalls that have been identified through this case study, six short best practices may be encapsulated from the data of this study in order best to prepare and support visually disabled faculty who will teach online.  While the conclusions of this study suggest that one-on-one training and consistent close support are best, this seems to state the obvious, and does not take into account the problems and solutions specific to providing support to visually-disabled faculty.  The following best practices may serve as a condensed guide for distance-education administrators and their staff when working with visually-impaired faculty on online courses, and may be thought of using the acronym ASSURE:

1.	Analyze the Situation: interview the faculty member to determine obstacles and skills that he or she already has.  Be honest about what you and your staff will be able to do with and for the faculty member.  Identify outside resources on which your staff and the faculty member can reply.
2.	State the Objectives up Front: list specific goals and outcomes on a timeline to which the faculty member and your staff can sign off.  Especially important are “stop-and-go-home” dates for major resource development, which, if not met, signal that the project must be terminated.  While this seems draconian, it saves much frustration and rushed work down the line.
3.	Select Methods, Media, and Materials: the technology, people, and tools needed should be investigated and tested before the process of preparing course materials begins.  This is especially applicable to visually-disabled faculty, who may need to choose from among a number of mediating technologies that may be new to them.  Build time into the schedule for testing of technology and different support methods.
4.	Utilize Agreed-on Methods: once the faculty member and your staff agree on methods for working together, stick to them.  If the faculty member wishes to work as independently as possible, accommodate him or her.
5.	Require Faculty Skill Validation: while working in accordance with the learning style of the faculty member, require him or her to prove competence in the core skills your institution expects of other online faculty.  If exceptions must be given in order to accommodate a disability, document that the alternative methods actually do satisfy the requirements.
6.	Evaluate and Revise Periodically: build evaluation into the schedule of work.  At set intervals, re-interview the faculty member to see if his or her expectations are being met, and whether changes in the methodology or schedule might be beneficial.  Once the process of developing materials and teaching the course is over, hold a major reevaluation conference.

References

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Resources

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Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards: Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board. (2000). Federal Register 36 CFR Part 1194 (21 Dec. 2000):  http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/508standards.htm.

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