Taking Your Disability Services Virtual

Coronavirus (COVID-19) and Accommodate

With the rise of concern regarding Coronavirus, Symplicity has been monitoring the situation carefully. Several colleges and universities recently suspended in-person classes and moved their classes online. If your institution decides to do the same, there are many ways that you can use Accommodate to continue to provide students and staff with valuable resources on a virtual basis.

By configuring a few simple steps, your Accommodate site may be used to support many virtual activities including:

• Accommodations/Adjustment Requests – Students can make requests using the public URL form, staff can approve/reject requests, and students and faculty can sign electronically accommodation/adjustment letters.
• Accommodations/Adjustment Services – Students can continue to receive note-taking services, request test rooms for exams, request equipment or alternative format texts all online.
• Appointments – Students can schedule appointments online, and staff can meet with students remotely by adding a virtual meeting link (such as GoToMeeting, Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc.) to meeting appointments.
• Meetings – Staff can schedule intake meetings with students to discuss requests by entering a virtual meeting link (such as GoToMeeting, Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc.) the Meeting Location field. Make sure that the Meeting Location merge field has been added to the email body of your Accessibility Meeting Scheduled template, or edit the email in preview letter mode. If you have students schedule meetings themselves using the Appointments module, then see above for instructions.
• Events – Staff can continue to run workshop events by adding a virtual meeting link (such as GoToMeeting, Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc.) to workshop descriptions, which is viewable by students on student interface.
• Course Schedules – If you have auto imports scheduled, and your institution shifts its classes online, then we encourage you to have a conversation with your IT department to update class schedules to indicate classes will be online instead of a specific location.

In addition, our support and development teams are prepared to work remotely to support you and address issues, in the event that we need to close offices. For more detailed information, our clients can log into the Symplicity Help Center via your Symplicity Accommodate Manager interface > keyword search on "covid19". Not a Symplicity client but interested in learning more? Contact us at info@symplicity.com.