Cycle 2 Reflection

Cycle Two Research Questions:
How will the online training videos be received by the participants and will they find them to be useful, helpful, and relevant? How much of the assigned training will the participants complete? What will be the average completion rate? What will be the average time spent on the training?

Prior to my research I asked all participants a set of questions in the Pre-survey invitation some of which included:

• Years teaching in higher education:
  3-"too many to count" (presumably more than the second highest answer of 20 years)
• Previous accessibility training:
  Yes- 2; No- 4; Cannot Remember- 3
• 'Yes' participants were then asked about type of training and when it was completed (in-person; 3+ years ago) Neither of these participants had used (were aware) of Lynda.com and felt they needed to update their training
• Awareness of Lynda.com accessibility training:
  Yes- 1*; No- 8 [*This participant and one other withdrew during Cycle Two]

As the shortest of three cycles I did not want to over-stress participants with hours of online training. I chose two different Lynda.com titles:
1. Creating Accessible Microsoft Office Documents with David Rivers  (1hr 31m total)
2. Creating Accessible PDFs with Chad Chelius (4hr 5m total).
I then chose to break apart these titles into categories: required, recommended, and additional. No one attempted the recommended or additional categories.

Required category breakdown:

1. Understanding Accessibility and Creating Accessible Word Documents = 40m 39s/45%  

2. Creating Accessible PDFs  = 1h 7m/27%

Total time: 1:47:39

The required sections of the first title were completed to varying degrees by all participants (~25%-74% or 27-65m). However, not everyone completed the second title (0%-72% or 1-117m) but more on that in the Cycle Three post.

Required completion breakdown [title 1 and title 2 completion percentage]:

• Green = 25.37% and 0%
• Thompson = 43.04% and 8.2%
• Cameron = 44.63% and 0%
• Gellar = 46.52% and 12.57%
• Jones = 50.01% and 24.38%
• Matthews = 50.24% and 71.99%
• Jackson = 73.89% and 26.43%

Cycle Two was very stressful because only two participants actually completed the requirements during the original time frame and I was concerned with losing more participants. At the beginning of the cycle I stipulated that the training  and revisions must be complete prior to our last one-on-one in Cycle Three. Despite the last week of this cycle falling during spring break the majority of participants did not complete this cycle until much later (often just before our f2f). I recognize that this semester was quite hectic at CI especially for my participants since all of them are naturally busy and even over-committed across campus prior to my research. Initially I was quite concerned to see how few looked at the second title but that was cleared up in the third cycle.

This seems the perfect time to move onto the last cycle to tie it all together.