When Stacy Kelly debuted SEVI 205/505: The Blindness Experience last spring, 80 students from throughout the NIU campus registered for the new general education course.
And then they told their friends.
Enrollment has nearly doubled to 150 this semester – and Kelly, a professor in the Department of Special and Early Education, attributes the rapid surge in popularity to word of mouth as well as the unique content covered in just eight weeks.
“This course is special, and we’re living that right now,” Kelly says. “Students are seeing signage about it in random places when they’re running errands on campus. Students are talking about it to other students. Recommendations are flying from one student to the next because the course is so meaningful, and that’s what students are hearing from each other.”
Students learn about reading braille, guide dogs, the ocular system, assistive technology and representations of visual disabilities in media.
Meanwhile, they reflect on lives different than their own while hearing first-person perspectives from people who are blind or visually disabled.
Course evaluations from May 2024 showed just how seriously students were affected; academic advisors reported to Kelly that many students called the course the most impactful they’d taken at NIU.
One of those – a General Studies major from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – even was moved to attend an informational session on the College of Education’s M.S.Ed. in Special Education: Visual Disabilities and will begin that graduate program this August to become a teacher of students with visual impairments.
Kelly is overjoyed.
“That student had an open mind and was there to learn, and found that this was something where they could make a difference and have a fulfilling career, whether it be with kids or adults – any human of any age with a visual impairment,” she says.
It’s even baked into the eighth and final week of SEVI 205/505’s online, asynchronous curriculum.
“Module 8 is entirely devoted to how to become a vision professional at NIU, whether it be for yourself or for someone you know, so this transitions very well,” she says. “We have the program right here in the College of Education, so we couldn’t be more happy that this is also a pathway for recruiting into this profession.”
Next, Kelly says, is to continue growing the course to meet the big demand, offering more than the current five sections and looking to add fall- and summer-semester offerings.
“We had students who came to us saying, ‘I have to take this course,’ so we opened several extra sections,” she says. “That’s the best news ever. That’s the biggest compliment. It’s beyond our wildest imagination.”
Despite the glowing reviews, the proof in numbers and the proverbial line out the door, she is most inspired by what is immeasurable.
“For our students in their future careers, what they’re going to take into the professions, and for the people they’re going to serve, is a difference in perspective, maybe on disability or just in supporting people,” Kelly says.
“They’re going to have a bit of information on a disability that most people don’t know much about,” she adds. “This could change the course of their lives and the lives of the people they’re serving – no matter what service they’re providing – even if it’s just knowing to announce themselves when they’re entering a room.”
