The spring semester is coming to a close, but the University of Iowa decided to make strides in student accessibility before it fully rolled away.

On March 26, UI launched a change to ICON, the university’s Canvas website, allowing students with disabilities to have their extended quiz time for Canvas quizzes automatically approved. Now, instructors will no longer need to manually approve each request a student in student disability services, or SDS, puts in for extended time.

According to Laura Sinn, the director of online course administration and exam services, the fix was practically asking to be implemented. She said while many accommodations require discussion between the professor and student, extended quiz time does not.

“Extended time is so well defined,” she said. “You get 1.5 times, you get two times as much time, there really isn’t any discussion to be had. If a student elects to use it and they’re approved for it, it’s approved, and so it needs to be applied.”

Sinn walked through the many interviews the Online Course Administration team went through, gathering feedback from students and faculty.

“One of the recommendations was to simplify things for both,” she said. “This was kind of an easy win for us, because it could be automated, but there were just so many rote steps for each of them to deal with, and now those are eliminated.”

One of the faculty members who preferred the simplicity of the change was Alexandra Nica, director of undergraduate studies in economics.

“It definitely reduces anxiety for both sides,” she said. “And it’s so much more important for the students, because they’re already anxious about the exam itself, and then being anxious about this type of stuff is not something that we want to add on to their anxiety.”

As an instructor of many online courses, Nica found setting up quizzes over Canvas often stressful before the change.

“There would be times when I would wake up so desperate, thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I forgot to add the extended time for my students.’ So, then I would go to my computer, breathing in panic mode,” she recalled.

Extended quiz times aren’t the only change Nica appreciates.

She said new additions to ICON, like the Anthology Ally tool, improve accessibility features for all students, even those not in SDS. Launched in early April, Ally helps give instructors feedback on improving their content by using color-coded gauges to show how accessible a file is and offers tips for fixing issues like poor contrast, missing alt text, or untagged PDFs.

Nica is also excited for ICON’s new AI assistant, Khanmingo. The assistant gives instructors access to 23 tools for creating lesson plans, assignments, quizzes, and discussion posts. Instructors can pick a tool and customize AI-generated content to match their course goals, and all prompts and results are saved for easy editing and reuse. Students can’t see or access it.

Khanmingo is still in its pilot phase, and Nica plans to join it, believing the more supportive and personalized learning material will lower the pressure students feel to participate in class.

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“This would be a great way for them to get over that shyness a little bit and force us to use AI and then build up the courage to also see us, which I always tell students when we see them for the first time,” she said.

UI first-year student Rylande Stewart said the change would ease students’ stress in obtaining SDS accommodations, like himself.

“I would rather not have to deal with all the struggles of going through my teacher asking him, ‘hey, extend this for me, please,’” he said. “Instead, it just happens automatically now, so that’s pretty nice. I’d just rather not have to think about it.”

For Stewart, ICON still has some changes to make to ease his struggles with using the website.

“I would rather have more notifications for the calendars and all that,” he said. “I have ADHD, and with that, I will typically forget everything I’m supposed to do in a class.”

While feedback for extended time has been good, Sinn believes it will be more fully appreciated in the future.

“Unfortunately, we were already well into the semester, so a lot of instructors had already gone through and clicked on all 20 items to fix it to extend the time,” she said. “But next year, it’ll be a really big time saver and just probably eliminate a lot of frustration for folks next semester.”