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A list of key tactics for community engagement organised by

Growth tactics

•Related articles / blogs - to signpost community

•Newsletter promotion

•Social media campaign

•Member referrals

•Partnerships

•Direct invitations, Relationship managers

•Product/service integration

Engagement tactics

•Welcome newcomers (onboarding process)

•Tag groups / people in replies

•Design low friction interactions (polls, careful humor - emoji / GIFs)

•Share & celebrate milestones (group or personal)

•Source the topic ideas and let members vote to see what’s hot

•Post questions in the community asking for experiences and expertise

•Invite members to share any useful templates, resources, tools they use

•Member interviews

•Co-write the resources

Event tactics

•Formats (Workshop, lightening talk, show and tell, thinking room, power hour (group activity to solve a problem)

•Pre-event: raise awareness and register

•Post-event: summary post or blog

•Post-event feedback

Content tactics

•Write a newsletter (summarise popular or unanswered member posts and industry updates)

•events

•Blogs (what is the community interested in learning?)

•Case studies (more in-depth look)

•Host a podcast

•Create a post schedule to share the above ideas

Influence tactics

•Solve a problem together - easiest to get people to join, hardest to get people participating

•Seize an opportunity - members get together to share their latest ideas, research

•Explore a passion – find out what your community really cares about?

•Exclusivity - find whom most people in the sector admire and invite those people to form a group

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Question: What online teaching tools meet accessibility needs? 

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Question: What online teaching tools meet accessibility needs? 

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Can you offer any advice or examples of online teaching tools that are doing a good job of meeting accessibility needs?

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How can AI help create practical accessibility tools for everyday challenges?

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How can AI help create practical accessibility tools for everyday challenges?

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In last month's International Ally User Group meeting, I demonstrated how AI has helped me develop a suite of free accessibility tools that solve real-world problems in digital content creation.

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How can AI help create practical accessibility tools for everyday challenges? In last month's International Ally User Group meeting, I demonstrated how AI has helped me develop a suite of free accessibility tools that solve real-world problems in digital content creation. I showcased several tools including a Colour Vision Deficiency Image Tester that allows users to drag and drop any image to see how it appears to people with different types of colour blindness, a Brand Accessible Color Contrast Suggester that helps find accessible color combinations within brand guidelines, and a Responsive Vimeo Embed Generator that eliminates horizontal scrollbars. I also demonstrated what I'm working on next. What makes these tools special is how they bridge the gap between technical accessibility requirements and practical implementation - offering simple interfaces for complex problems. The AI assistance helped me create these tools more efficiently, allowing me to focus on solving the exact pain points educators and content creators face. All tools are freely available:
SVG Palette Adjuster for Colour Vision Deficiency: https://lnkd.in/eiM7c_eu
Colour vision deficiency friendly palettes: https://lnkd.in/eakC4h7T
Colour Vision Deficiency Image Tester: https://lnkd.in/e5ceft7e
Brand Accessible Colour Contrast Suggester: https://lnkd.in/epx5Zkc9 Responsive Vimeo Embed Code Generator:
https://lnkd.in/edH7G-Ey I'm using both Claude and the OpenRouter API along with tools like RooCode. #DigitalAccessibility #HigherEducation #AI4Good #WebAccessibility #WCAG

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Jisc Sq Logo (2018) RGB for Digital (transparent-800px)

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Join the Jisc assistive technology community (JiscMail)

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Join the Jisc assistive technology community (JiscMail)

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Dedicated to sharing good practice about assistive technology.

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Dedicated to sharing good practice about assistive technology.

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Data Science Students Perspectives on Learning Analytics: An Application of Human-Led and LLM Content Analysis

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Data Science Students Perspectives on Learning Analytics: An Application of Human-Led and LLM Content Analysis

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This study is part of a series of initiatives at a UK university designed to cultivate a deep understanding of students' perspectives on analytics that resonate with their unique learning needs. It explores collaborative data processing undertaken by postgraduate students who examined an Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD).

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Data Science Students Perspectives on Learning Analytics: An Application of Human-Led and LLM Content Analysis

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Objective This study is part of a series of initiatives at a UK university designed to cultivate a deep understanding of students’ perspectives on analytics that resonate with their unique learning needs. It explores collaborative data processing undertaken by postgraduate students who examined an Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD). Methods A qualitative approach was adopted, integrating a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and a Large Language Model (LLM) technique with human-led content analysis to gather information about students’ perspectives based on their submitted work. The study involved 72 postgraduate students in 12 groups. Findings The analysis of group work revealed diverse insights into essential learning analytics from the students’ perspectives. All groups adopted a structured data science methodology. The questions formulated by the groups were categorised into seven themes, reflecting their specific areas of interest. While there was variation in the selected variables to interpret correlations, a consensus was found regarding the general results. Conclusion A significant outcome of this study is that students specialising in data science exhibited a deeper understanding of learning analytics, effectively articulating their interests through inferences drawn from their analyses. While human-led content analysis provided a general understanding of students’ perspectives, the LLM offered nuanced insights.

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Should accessibility be on your institution’s risk register?

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Should accessibility be on your institution’s risk register?

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The transparency and scrutiny that publishing an accessibility statement requires has raised awareness of the barriers that many with accessibility face when engaging with public sector bodies.

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Accessibility, assistive technology and inclusive practice

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Since they came into force in 2019 The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR)) have been effective in highlighting the need to treat accessibility as a serious responsibility. These regulations have reinforced the obligation to make reasonable adjustments to digital content that the Equality Act 2010 established.

The transparency and scrutiny that publishing an accessibility statement requires has raised awareness of the barriers that many with accessibility face when engaging with public sector bodies.

In education the PSBAR have provided the opportunity to revisit how someone with accessibility needs interacts with a college or university when entering into the process of applying to become a student. It also challenges us to rethink the student (and staff) experience for those with accessibility needs. In particular, the regulations have emphasised the significance of incorporating "inclusive design" from the outset when planning the introduction of systems and processes that learners and others are required to engage with.

Whole institution approach and leadership buy-in

The regulations require that "browser delivered" content meets internationally recognised accessibility standards ( ). This includes public facing web content as well as "internal only" content such as teaching and learning materials.

No one will say that this is easy.

The changes needed to achieve it are across the institution and "building the plane as you fly it" is an analogy that comes to mind. Systems can't just be stopped and be rebuilt. Without a whole institution approach great work to support learners in one area can be undermined by something unanticipated and unpredicted. The learner with accessibility needs may be the one to experience the barriers first.

Who ultimately has responsibility for the accessible and inclusive student or staff experience is not always easy to pin down. In dealing with a number of institutions since the accessibility regulations came into force in 2019 our experience is that many institutions have struggled to get buy-in across the organisation. However, when there is strong leadership backing for whole organisation change in terms of accessibility and inclusion, progress can be rapid and effective.

We don't like to think of the confrontational side. Supporting those with accessibility needs is after all something that we all know is the right thing to do.

Nevertheless, motivation also comes from the risks that could result from a discrimination claim by someone disadvantaged by systems and information that do not meet accessibility standards.

I have listed below three areas of risk that I think need to be addressed in education. All of these may be very low risk in the education context, but the consequences could be very damaging for an institution.

The areas of risks for an education institution (or drivers) include:

EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) scrutiny following a report and monitoring by CDDO (Central Digital and Data Office). CDDO are the regulator in terms of the accessibility regulations. Recently we have seen a marked increase in audits by CDDO of education institutions in particular.

A claim of discrimination - The accessibility regulations make it more straightforward to establish a link between inaccessible content and discrimination. The regulations assist someone who will want to establish causation in a discrimination claim because the regulations state that "... failure to comply with the accessibility requirement is to be treated as a failure to make a reasonable adjustment.". The risk for an education institution is that an individual learner who has invested in and then failed a course, for example, can now more easily link learning content that does not meet accessibility standards to discrimination.

Reputational damage - This may result from 1 or 2 above or from commentary on social media, for example, references to learning content not meeting accessibility standards and to some extent is self-explanatory.

All three are undesirable for an education institution even where there are no publicly disclosed large headline fines or penalties for breach of the accessibility regulations as such.

Risk register

It is up to each individual education institution to identify and take into account what it considers risks. Education institutions deal with risk management all of the time and have well established protocols to assess and to mitigate risk. Because accessibility compliance can be considered a business risk and needs ongoing reviewing and monitoring, including accessibility compliance in the corporate risk register is recognised by a number of education providers to be a pragmatic way forward.

Let us know what you think. Is accessibility compliance on your institutions risk register? Would that be a step in the right direction for your college or university?

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Should accessibility be on your institution's risk register? - Accessibility, assistive technology and inclusive practice

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Including accessibility in your risk register could be a useful strategy to raise awareness and achieve leadership buy-in. Explore what's involved to decide if it's right for you.

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Infographic showing the mind of a community manager

Empath: Listen carefully and sense issues

Concierge: Ensure newcomers are welcomed and to find resolutions for members

Plan: Create and review the community strategy

Content creator: Create accessible and useful information and events

Gardener: Watch over the platform, ensure the technology is working and problems are escalated

Cheerleader: Celebrate success, new features and news

Monitor: Stay vigilant to inappropriate behaviour and spam

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Mind of a community manager - updated 2024

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MVC is the smallest actions needed to bring people together. It's an approach that creates experiments giving practice, validation, data and conversation points.

Starting a new community can be overwhelming. You may have lots of fantastic ideas but where do you start?

Planning for a new community is a must, but we have to be careful to not fall into the planning trap and overcomplicating things.

The minimum viable community is a great mindset to have to overcome this. Think of it as baby steps to a community.

Benefits of using the MVC approach

1. Resources don’t need to be stretched​​​​​​​ - starting small is less risky

2. Create a better understanding of community member needs - helps you listen to what your members are actually saying and doing rather than making decisions from assumptions

3. Get feedback faster - you can receive feedback from your members, build, measure, and learn at a much faster rate

4. Scale where appropriate - when you find something that works, you can build on it and turn it into a flywheel (see below)

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Minimum Viable Community - MVC infograph (1)

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A community flywheel is where you design, create, action and modify community activities that lead to natural momentum.

To follow on the idea of using small-scale experimentation.  We can use community flywheels as a visual framework of actions to focus our attention.

For many communities, the biggest pain point is with growth and engagement. There is constant pressure to grow but it's hard to build a community sustainably and organically.

The idea is to shift from a funnel perspective to an effective flywheel, creating energy or traction, which then naturally leads to growth.

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Use this template to start to create and test your community experiments

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What are the key factors that help make a community successful?

1. Established from a genuine need – creates value that everyone understands

2. Unique proposition – can offer something different to what might already exist

3. Strong purpose and clearly defined objectives/tactics

4. Engaged manager and leaders to drive activity

5. Awareness – people know it exists

6. .Builds trust and connections between members

7. Meets member expectations

8. Can adapt to change

9. Right technology

10. Variety of touchpoints