Body
Question
When is Panorama being turned on for courses?
Why the switch to Panorama?
What differences does Panorama have?
Answer
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YuJa Panorama is a digital accessibility and remediation tool that also provides students with alternative formats of documents similar to Blackboard Ally. After a thorough review process, the SDBOR has selected Panorama to replace Ally starting with 2024 fall courses.
Panorama will be turned on for all courses—including those offered prior to 2024 fall—on Monday, August 5th. Ally will be turned off at this time as well.
Background
In 2020, the SDBOR signed a multi-year agreement with Blackboard for Ally and since that time, the tool has helped the system make great strides in ensuring that digital content is accessible to students. The first full term in Ally (2021 spring) the system’s overall score was 63% and for this most recent spring term (2024SP), it was up to 71%—some institutions were even 80% or higher.
Despite this success, the system has faced a number of challenges with Ally:
- Ally only checks materials in the Content area of Brightspace, but students have encountered accessibility issues in other areas of courses, such as quizzes.
- Much of the guidance to instructors on how to remediate common accessibility issues has been listed as “not yet available” since the system’s adoption of Ally in 2020.
- In that same vein, there have been virtually no feature updates or substantive upgrades to Ally.
- The system has experienced reporting issues and extended outages.
Nearly two years ago, the SDBOR’s Learning Management System Committee (LMS)—composed of technical and academic representatives from each SDBOR institution, and the system office—began the process of reviewing the digital accessibility marketspace. After a thorough evaluation, the SDBOR selected YuJa Panorama as a replacement for Ally due to several factors including, but not limited to:
- In addition to the Content area, Panorama checks discussions, dropbox folders, news items, quizzes, widgets, etc.
- Panorama includes a real-time accessibility checker in the content editor within Brightspace. As instructors create content, Panorama will instantly check to ensure it is accessible.
- In addition to better remediation guidance—including detailed how-to steps and videos—Panorama allows instructors to fix the most common accessibility issues directly within Brightspace itself.
- Panorama provides a centralized dashboard for instructors, where they can remediate issues across courses, instead of needing to go into each course.
For questions or assistance with the transition from Ally to Panorama, instructors and staff should utilize their regular institutional support channels: