The Digital Accessibility Office is the latest University group to move its training registrations to Carolina Talent.
As of March 1, permanent faculty and staff can sign up for training by the Digital Accessibility Office via the Learning component of Carolina Talent. Originally called “My Learning” when it launched at UNC-Chapel Hill last summer, the component’s name has been shortened to “Learning.”
The Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) is a unit within ITS. The DAO joins several other groups and content providers in offering registrations through Carolina Talent Learning. On the site, permanent faculty and staff can register for LinkedIn Learning courses, training for compliance with the Clery Act, and training provided through the Office of Human Resources’ Organization and Professional Development.
Soon, ConnectCarolina training registrations also will move to Learning.
Go-to place for training
The hope is that, in time, Learning will be the go-to place for most professional development and compliance training at UNC-Chapel Hill. Employees will have a central place to find most of the development opportunities available to them across the University. Learning also enables managers to see the training records of their reports.
Now that the DAO’s training can be accessed through Learning, the number of people who sign up with digital accessibility training may sway higher, said Chelsea Porter, a Digital Accessibility Consultant with the DAO.
Some people actively seek DAO’s training, of course. Other permanent staff and faculty members, though, might stumble across and take an interest in digital accessibility training when they’re visiting the Learning site to sign up for other training.
In general, the DAO team has noticed an uptick in campus community members’ interest in digital accessibility. The group is receiving more emails and questions about document accessibility, links and other issues.
“More people are thinking about digital accessibility in their everyday work, which is fantastic,” Porter said.
More training coming
Currently, the DAO offers seven training courses. More are in the works. Most people who take digital accessibility training are University staff members, Porter said.
For now, the DAO builds out its training sessions in two separate platforms — Learning for permanent faculty and staff and another for temps and students. Previously, all campus community members signed up for digital accessibility training by going to the DAO’s website.
Now, people who start on the DAO’s website have two paths, depending on their employee classification — permanent, temporary or contractor. Permanent staff and faculty members are taken to Learning. Students, contractors and temporary workers, meanwhile, still register from the DAO’s website.
Robust system
The DAO team members all trained on the system. Then, as DAO’s training lead, Porter was able to build out DAO’s training events in a pilot program, learn and test things out, and when she was more comfortable with it, she replicated the training events in Learning.
“We received lot of training that helped us learn to navigate the robust system,” Porter said. Once she has a DAO training session built in the system, “it’s really easy to just go into a session, copy it, change the date, change the time, publish and go.”
Users supported through change
ITS’ Change Management team created the training for this shift to Carolina Talent and the Carolina Talent team from central HR conducted the training.
“The Carolina Talent team has been great,” Porter said. “Every time I’ve sent an email, I’ve got a response back with all the information I need, or they would jump on a Zoom call to try to help.”
“Everybody has been wonderful,” she added. “You can tell they really want the project to succeed and flourish.”