President's Appreciation Award Nomination Letter
BYU is dedicated to providing the highest quality in education to everyone that attends the university. “Everyone” includes those with vision, hearing, motor, and other disabilities. Taking an online course could be tricky (or impossible) for those with disabilities if it isn't designed with accessibility in mind. Accessibility is critical to our students' success online. Because of Caroline Larsen (and the team she leads), we are able to provide a quality education online to students with disabilities. She meticulously checks every course the BYU Online team builds, typically finding hundreds of accessibility errors, and corrects 95% of those errors for the instructional designers. To add to that, she does all of this for a full semester course in a matter of a few days. That's incredible!
Besides making courses function for students with disabilities, she is saving our employees in Continuing Education huge amounts of time. Caroline is always doing something to help the work move forward. She proactively contacts those she works with to clarify information and instructions. She is readily available to answer our questions concerning accessibility. And she attends our team meetings to train us on how we can be more accessibility-minded in the design and development process.
One area Caroline exemplifies the values of BYU is competency. Caroline understands how accessibility works and how it links in with our business processes at BYU. On a recent psychology course, our communication showed how deeply she understood how everything connects. She followed up with questions others hadn't thought of, but she knew the answer would impact the success of the project.
Another area she excels in is respect for sacred resources. Caroline is really fast at what she does. In a recent training, she told us that it takes her and her team about 36 hours to check a 14-week course for accessibility errors and to correct 95% of the issues. She also knows where she needs to step in and do the work and where she can hand things off to a student employee to give them experience and conserve resources.
Caroline also represents the value of integrity. She isn't looking to make a product that is good enough, she strives for a product that is worthy of Brigham Young University's name. Caroline is an asset to our campus!