On May 20, 2021, Assistant Professor of Teaching Mine Dogucu was named one of 15 Teach Access Curriculum Development Awardees for 2021-2022. Teach Access is a collaboration among educators, industry leaders, and disability advocacy organizations that aims to support faculty across the country teaching accessible technology design and development to undergraduates. The Curriculum Development Award comes with $5,000 in funding for creating modules, presentations, exercises or curriculum enhancements that introduce the fundamentals of accessible design in classroom-based courses.

Professor Dogucu’s work in statistics and data science education in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science (ICS) focuses on curriculum development and modernization. Her goal is to make statistics and data science physically and cognitively accessible.

“I will use the award to develop teaching materials on accessibility in data science,” she says, noting that the materials will be taught as part of the Seminar in Data Science, a course required for all data science majors at UCI. “The materials will introduce students to evaluating the accessibility of data products — more specifically, data visualizations and dashboards,” she adds. “The award will pave the way for ensuring that all our data science majors graduate with some understanding of accessibility.”

This supports the Teach Access vision of “a fully accessible future in which students are equipped to enter the workforce with knowledge of, and skills in, the principles of accessible design and development and the needs of people with disabilities, which results in technology products and services that are born accessible.”

— Shani Murray