Improving OSU Add TA... with Gender Mag
By: Academic Technologies
Posted on: October 5, 2022
OSU has a custom tool in Canvas named Add TA… that can be used to add OSU individuals to Canvas courses as teaching assistants (CanvasTA), graders, designers or observers. The Learn@OregonState team worked with individuals involved with the GenderMag project to evaluate this tool over the past year.
GenderMag is a method that helps IT product owners find and fix gender biases in technology workflows and interfaces, and even in workplace practices. The method, created by OSU College of Engineering faculty and Project Co-directors, Dr. Margaret Burnett and Dr. Anita Sarma, is a set of guides and processes for identifying gender biases implicit in IT products including software, web pages, web-based forms, and support protocols. Using GenderMag, IT developers, managers, UX/UI professionals, and other IT professionals find and remediate gender biases in IT products. The outcome that is the IT product aligns with the OSU IT Strategic Plan initiative for gender inclusivity. At its core, the GenderMag method is a gender-specialized developer walk-through using personas that focus on five cognitive factors. The GenderMag method has been used in practice by organizations since 2016, in 45 countries across the world.
The evaluation provided feedback on user experience and the Learn@OregonState team paired the GenderMag recommendations with planned improvements to the tool. The OSU Add TA… tool has been updated for Fall term to improve the user experience. These changes include displaying all people added through the tool on a single page and allowing instructional faculty and staff to sort by user or sort by section when removing people with the tool.
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