ESTRO 2024 - Abstract Book

S5760

RTT - Education, training, advanced practice and role developments

ESTRO 2024

656

Digital Poster

Breaking Barriers in Medical Education: An Accessibility Audit of Radiotherapy Teaching Materials

Elizabeth Forde, Michelle Leech, Anita O'Donovan, Laure Marignol

Trinity College Dublin, Applied Radiation Therapy Trinity (ARTT), Discipline of Radiation Therapy, School of Medicine, Trinity St. James's Cancer Institute, Dublin, Ireland

Purpose/Objective:

Educational institutions utilise virtual learning environments (VLE), such as Blackboard Learn, to house educational material for students and facilitate innovative digital teaching and assessment practices. Providing material which is accessible is one way to ensure education is inclusive, irrespective of individual’s learning needs. Accessible educational materials are designed to ensure usability for all students, regardless of what format is it provided in. Blackboard Ally is a compliment to the main VLE, and allows students to download material in a variety of formats such as PDF, audio file, and HTML. It can also measure the accessibility of the material provided. The aim of this study is to quantify the accessibility of teaching material provided within the Discipline of Radiation Therapy at our University and to highlight areas for improvement.

Material/Methods:

All modules coordinated by the faculty of the Discipline of Radiation Therapy, at our institution were included in the audit. The accessibility of content provided to students which is housed on the University’s VLE was quantified using the module Accessibility Checker function within Blackboard Learn. Accessibility scores are determined by the severity of identified issues of each item. Issues are flagged as either severe, major, or minor per item, and the frequency of issues will result in an overall low (0%-33%), medium (34%-66%), high (67%-99%), or perfect score (100)%.1 Modules which are managed by staff outside the Discipline of Radiation Therapy were excluded from the analysis. Individual items of two modules were explored in further detail to identify recurring issues. Descriptive statistics were used to provide a summary of the accessibility of teaching materials.

Results:

Thirty two modules were included in the audit; 22 which are delivered at undergraduate level, and 10 at post-graduate level. The mean accessibility score of all modules was 63.3% ± 15.0%. The content provided in the post-graduate modules was considered more accessible than that of the undergraduate modules, with average accessibility scores of 75.3% ± 7.6% and 57.9% ± 14.3% respectively.

Examining one module in greater detail, of the 149 documents analysed, the top three most commonly occurring issues were a lack of language set (42% of items), documents being untagged (39% of items), and poor contrast (36%