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‘’Big Pitch’ won
Bazile Panek, who presented “NIIM,” was the Business Plan Winner as well as the Big Pitch Winner in the recent Northern Michigan University student business competition. (Photo courtesy of NMU)
NMU student Panek wins ‘Big Pitch’
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MARQUETTE — Northern Michigan University student Bazile Panek won the written business plan and business plan presentation — the Big Pitch — in the April virtual “Big Pitch” competition.
The Crowd Favorite winner was Jimmy Flom with 60.2% of the vote.
The competition is an opportunity for NMU students, either individually or in teams of up to five, to submit their plans for a new business and compete for cash prizes and business couneling services.
The following excerpts highlight each of the four competitors’ business ideas:
Panek, “NIIM” — “Niim sells socks adorned with traditional Indigenous designs by Indigenous artists, giving our customers a fun avenue to appreciate Indigenous art and our artists an avenue for their art to appear on physical pieces,” Panek said. “There is currently a lack of representation of Indigenous people within our society today.”
Flom, “The Burger Boat” — “Imagine a beautiful summer day, and having the ability to come straight out onto the water to be able to get some fresh food cooked and served to you right then and there on the sandbar,” he said. “You might ask how? Imagine a restaurant on the water, and when I say on the water, I don’t mean on land close to water. I mean a boat serving food directly on the water.
“You might ask how I would attract people to come and get food from my restaurant, but thetruth is the people will come to me. Sandbars attract hundreds of people per day and I will be able to serve up food for all of those people.
“This ‘Burger Boat’ restaurant will be located on the Torch Lake sandbar, which is a highly visited place by all boaters on Torch Lake. This boat will be up to code according to the health department. It will have an enclosed area, which will be most of the boat which will help the chef and other employees Ally from 11
have unique learning abilities, needs and devices. It is beneficial to provide content in a variety of ways to make learning more inclusive.
Course resources posted in EduCat that feature the Ally “A” icon — Word documents, PowerPoints and PDFs, for example — are available for download in about a half-dozen alternative formats.
“The formats range electronic braille and BeeLine readers, which change color slowly as students go across the words and from line to line, to audio files of text, which can be helpful for international students or someone whose second language is English,” said Tom Gillespie, senior instructional technologist. “It’s also possible to tag PDFs so screen readers can read headings and jump from section to section rather than scanning a full document from top to bottom.”
Gillespie said faculty members can monitor gauges for resources provided in alternative formats to ensure that they function to their full potential.
“It helps them determine how accessible their course content is and how to improve that,” he said. “If something’s missing, like perhaps they don’t have headings identified in a document, or if they need to convert a PDF image totext for conversion, they can click on a side tool bar that walks them through the fix.
“After they download the resource, make the necessary change and upload it again, the gauge automatically regenerates to show the improvement. It brings attention to accessibility issues they didn’t know they had.”
Boal said, “Ally gives Northern a bird’s-eye view of inclusive learning. It looks at individual courses, but it can also analyze accessibility at the departmental and university levels.”
While the new tool helps to make content more inclusive, it is not a “magic bullet” that instantly makes courses completely accessible or follows all principles of Universal Design for Learning, Boal said.
After a pilot program in the fall, NMU fully implemented Ally in January and offered workshops for faculty. Northern will participate in Global Fix Your Content Day on May 20. Schools can opt in to a 24hour competition in which the school that uses Ally to make the most accessibility fixes, weighted by enrollment, wins. In addition to the global activity, NMU will simultaneously mark the day with an on-campus event.
For more information, visit www.nmu.edu/ctl/ally.
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