United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Administrators (USETDA)
September 2023
Title: Rallying A11Y Stakeholders: Digital Accessibility Project Planning Roundtable Session
Presenters: Dr. Lily Compton and Dr. Kristin Terrill
Abstract: Recently many of us have voiced concerns about updating our Electronic Thesis Dissertation Administrator (ETDA) practices to support digital accessibility mandates. Responding to a need for more clarity, planning, and direction, this virtual roundtable session aims to combine our collective knowledge and ingenuity towards practical guidance for our community. Iowa State University is a publicly funded land-grant university responsible for making its research available and accessible to the public. Its digital accessibility policy will be in full effect by July 1, 2026. This policy has implications for the Thesis and Dissertation Writing Program (TDWP) run by the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE), housed within the Graduate College. To ensure that our TDWP will be prepared for the policy, we have begun documenting our journey in an Open Educational Resource (OER) that will document our thought process about holistic and systemic change to the TDWP and the ETDA process. In this session, we will share a list of questions related to resources, auditing, stakeholders, and other issues. We will also share strategies and resources in place as well as tentative ones. We invite our USETDA partners to join our discussion to add to our list and focus on strategies for small, medium, and large universities and divisions of responsibility. We recognize that the process of implementing an institutional change of this size can be daunting for many ETDAs, especially those who work independently or have limited resources. Therefore, our goal is to create and share an OER that can provide ETDAs with a tool kit of strategies for marshalling expertise and determining needs and responsibilities for relevant stakeholders. The shared vision and ideas from this session will make the OER into a versatile roadmap to digital accessibility for theses and dissertations.
Title: Piloting an asynchronous ETD pre-check: Serving the off-campus and the time-poor
Presenters: Dr. Kristin Terrill, Dr. Lily Compton, and Thomas Elliott
Abstract: For some graduate students, the week or so after they defend their thesis or dissertation can be more stressful than the defense. Those who did not, or were not able to, attend formatting information seminars and boot camps, didn’t know about the available Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) templates, or are novices with digital editing technologies confront a major task of reformatting their long-form documents in the lead-up to graduation. Many are already out of state, working full-time at post-graduation jobs and may even be in a different hemisphere. To serve these students, the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE) piloted an asynchronous format check in the Fall of 2022. We used Canvas as our choice of learning management system to create a hub containing graduation resources, and we enrolled students who had filed for graduation, i.e., were in their final semester. Students could submit their PDFs as an “assignment” through Canvas, allowing them to receive format corrections before submitting to ProQuest for the official review. This pilot program complements the existing, synchronous ETD pre-check program at Iowa State University. It promises to mitigate bottlenecks in the ETD review process, which does not start until after the student completes all the other requirements of their program, including the thesis/dissertation defense. This existing workflow has led to a glut of ETD reviews in the last month of the semester, when delays in reviewing can be extremely stressful for graduate students, if not actually detrimental to their plans after graduation. By shifting much of the formatting work to earlier in the semester, this asynchronous format check gives students more time to format their ETDs and reduces stress for the ETD reviewers. In this single session presentation, we summarize the process of planning and putting together the ETD resource hub on Canvas, demonstrate the process of submitting, pre-checking, and providing feedback to students, and discuss ongoing improvements. Attendees will get ideas for how to enhance outreach and provide individualized feedback to students with an ETD resource hub in a learning management system.
Title: Flash Talk: Microsoft CoPilot as an Electronic Thesis/Dissertation Formatting Assistant
Presenters: Dr. Kristin Terrill
Abstract: The USETDA Community Engagement Group was formed in 2021 and focuses on identifying opportunities for members to learn more about important topics in the ever-changing thesis landscape, promoting professional development among members, and creating a space for networking. At this conference, we’ll host five-minute flash talks so that our members can share some of their innovative ideas, topics they are exploring, and new discoveries.