Reimagining Business Planning, Accessibility, and Web Design Instruction: A Stacked Interdisciplinary Collaboration Across National Boundaries

Abstract

The authors present the results of a study of a three-way international collaboration project among one Hungarian class and two classes from Michigan and Washington, respectively. This multifaceted study focused on business planning, web design, and accessibility with the aim of investigating the effect of accessibility instruction on the production of business plans and websites. The distinguishing feature of this study was its emphasis to orient the three student groups on disability and accessibility issues from the perspective of the critical social model of disability advanced by disability studies theorists. The researchers collected quantitative and qualitative pre/postproject survey data from their three classes. They combined this data with the text of student emails sent among the project teams and instructor notes about their teaching to arrive at conclusions about the effectiveness of the collaboration using a mixed-methods approach. The results from the data analyses revealed significant benefit of the client–provider relationships among the three classes and the accessibility instruction provided by the Washington class to the other two classes on the business plans and websites.

Chapter 1: What Are We Really Teaching? Revisiting Technical and Professional Communication�s Pedagogical Training

“…Consequently, our research approval at this time allows somewhat limited use of student work in our publications. (For more details about the purpose and nature of this international, intercultural collaboration, see Koris et al, 2019;Oswal & Palmer, 2018;Palmer et al, 2020). We, nevertheless, chose this example of participatory action research pedagogy because it was successful in achieving the desired results, required limited planning on behalf of the group, and affected the whole class' overall understanding about disabled user experience, accessibility issues, and the value of participatory design research itself.…”

Designing virtual team projects with accessibility in mind: an illustrative example of cross‐cultural student collaboration

“…The same 15 questions were repeated on the post-project survey in past tense and with additional questions that related to students' experiences with the project. The data analysis presented here focuses only on a subset of these 15 questions that are directly related to our main research questions (for a detailed list of all research questions, see Appendix A in Palmer et al, 2020). The additional questions probed students' perceptions about the effectiveness of this project with teaching business communication, intercultural communication, and accessibility know-how.…”

“…As educators from three different disciplines, at different universities, teaching graduate and undergraduate students from two countries, we have designed and taught an ambitious interdisciplinary virtual exchange that has now completed its second iteration. Through this experience and the data collected from it, we have found that such collaborations can answer the call for projects that promote both interdisciplinary experience and student learning around issues of disability awareness and accessibility (see Palmer et al, 2020 for discussion of the results of the first year of this virtual exchange.) As disability laws across the European Union (Waddington & Lawson, 2010) and in the United States (Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990) ascribe equal rights to disabled persons, accessibility know-how is not only a civic duty but is also a practical business skill.…”

“…Other cross-cultural collaborative projects follow the content and language integrated learning approach where the focus lies more on teaching a specific subject matter related to the students' discipline, which may be complemented with cross-cultural experiences (see Cunningham, 2019;Duus & Cooray, 2014;Gonzalez-Perez et al, 2014;Hernández-Nanclares, Mato, Díaz, & Koris, 2019;Koris & Vuylsteke, 2020). In spite of this trend toward internationalization and the promotion of multidisciplinary approaches in European tertiary education, such collaboration projects are not yet widespread in the university curricula of some countries within the European Union and these projects are under reported in the literature (Hernández-Nanclares et al, 2019;Palmer, Oswal, & Koris, 2020;Roy, Schlosser, & Pasek, 2020).…”

“…In accordance with the first iteration, we also used a mixed method research protocol in this second-year study where we collected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative data (see Palmer et al, 2020 for the first-year data). This data analysis approach helps to uncover emerging themes that are important to observe when students are initially introduced to concepts connected to disability and accessibility, a differentiating feature of our international collaboration pedagogy.…”