Setting release conditions and special access to support students with different needs

You can use Special Access and Release Conditions to set criteria around the availability of content, which can be useful for accommodating students with other needs.

The following examples show when you might use release conditions or special access to improve accessibility:

• Create groups for students with special needs and use release conditions to provide course material, tasks, and work areas that are not available to other students. This is a good option if you do not want other students to see or have access to the additional items.
• If you are teaching a large course, you might not be aware of the individual needs of all of the students enrolled in the course. Set up a checklist that learners can use to request extra resources, help, or course material in a different format. For example, for each week or major assignment, create checklist items for text-only versions of course material, an extra help discussions forum, additional reading material, and alternative formats for multimedia material. Set release conditions for the checklist items so the requested content is automatically released. This option ensures that the majority of learners access the material as you intended, but learners needs are supported.
• Set up a survey to help you determine the learning needs of students. Use the survey results to determine what special access rights and extra resources to provide for the learners.
• Set up quizzes, surveys, or dropbox folders with time restrictions (availability), but give special access to learners who need more time because of physical or cognitive disabilities. Alternatively, people creating quizzes might prefer to not set any time restrictions because they can impact the quality of answers.

See Also:

• Cobra Learning - Accessible course design
• Cobra Learning - Organizing your course accessibly
• Cobra Learning - Meeting web content accessibility standards