Accessibility Compliance Office lies: video recording and pptx in LMS

[Puget]

I don't disagree with most of what all of you write.

In a most recent example, I myself spent countless hours modifying my materials, so that a dyslexic student could read my materials. (Accessibility office here is more about compliance than actually doing anything to support students and the faculty to support students.) The kid failed anyway because they simply didn't do the work. That's just one example out of too many.

Another more recent example, the students simply are not watching the videos (whether in a flipped classroom format or redundant multiple modality format), and they show up to my lecture, (which was already pre-recorded) or activities, and complain that I speak too fast.

Sure, there are some students that are helped. I would never argue with that. And, I totally believe in the intent of what the Accessibility Office is trying to do. But it's painfully obvious that all these efforts are not working.

And I'm sure a number of your students without accommodations also don't do the work and complain about stuff. We all have gripes about students not taking advantage of all the things we do to try to help them-- it is an old and constant professorial song. This has very little to do with disability. I'm not sure what your goal is with this thread, unless you are just wanting to vent.

I probably didn't do the best job of articulating the goal of my original post. So, I'll repeat it here, again, with more clarification.

Is there any data out there at other universities that support the notion that these efforts actually help disabled students? Like most universities, my university has an extensive Assessment-Data-Industrial Complex that is supposed to provide data on learning. This data is supposed to help with decision making, especially resource allocation. At least at my university, they can't seem to generate a report on the efficacy of a lot of our student support programs, like the Accessibility Compliance Office--and these student support program cost a lot of $$ and are beginning to make really unreasonable requests like access to all of our materials that we use for teaching. It's going to take me a considerable amount of time to gather, curate, organize, label, organize, and deliver all of my materials for a class. Likewise, it would take a considerable amount of time for some staffer or admin to look over my files. I really do think they have better things to do than that (e.g. like actually showing up to an office hours meeting with me and a struggling student).

In order to really test that, you'd have to have random assignment of students who qualify for accommodations to either receive or not receive those accommodations,  a study no IRB is going to let someone conduct.

It sounds like your real complaint is that they are asking you to do things that take a lot of time. But if you are posting those things to your LMS anyway, it really takes no more time, you just give them access. If you aren't posting materials to your LMS, why is that? That's a genuine question, not snark. I do think it would be potentially helpful for you to think through your current teaching practices and whether you can use universal design to make things easier for both yourself and your students.

[lightning]

I don't disagree with most of what all of you write.

In a most recent example, I myself spent countless hours modifying my materials, so that a dyslexic student could read my materials. (Accessibility office here is more about compliance than actually doing anything to support students and the faculty to support students.) The kid failed anyway because they simply didn't do the work. That's just one example out of too many.

Another more recent example, the students simply are not watching the videos (whether in a flipped classroom format or redundant multiple modality format), and they show up to my lecture, (which was already pre-recorded) or activities, and complain that I speak too fast.

Sure, there are some students that are helped. I would never argue with that. And, I totally believe in the intent of what the Accessibility Office is trying to do. But it's painfully obvious that all these efforts are not working.

And I'm sure a number of your students without accommodations also don't do the work and complain about stuff. We all have gripes about students not taking advantage of all the things we do to try to help them-- it is an old and constant professorial song. This has very little to do with disability. I'm not sure what your goal is with this thread, unless you are just wanting to vent.

I probably didn't do the best job of articulating the goal of my original post. So, I'll repeat it here, again, with more clarification.

Is there any data out there at other universities that support the notion that these efforts actually help disabled students? Like most universities, my university has an extensive Assessment-Data-Industrial Complex that is supposed to provide data on learning. This data is supposed to help with decision making, especially resource allocation. At least at my university, they can't seem to generate a report on the efficacy of a lot of our student support programs, like the Accessibility Compliance Office--and these student support program cost a lot of $$ and are beginning to make really unreasonable requests like access to all of our materials that we use for teaching. It's going to take me a considerable amount of time to gather, curate, organize, label, organize, and deliver all of my materials for a class. Likewise, it would take a considerable amount of time for some staffer or admin to look over my files. I really do think they have better things to do than that (e.g. like actually showing up to an office hours meeting with me and a struggling student).

In order to really test that, you'd have to have random assignment of students who qualify for accommodations to either receive or not receive those accommodations,  a study no IRB is going to let someone conduct.

It sounds like your real complaint is that they are asking you to do things that take a lot of time. But if you are posting those things to your LMS anyway, it really takes no more time, you just give them access. If you aren't posting materials to your LMS, why is that? That's a genuine question, not snark. I do think it would be potentially helpful for you to think through your current teaching practices and whether you can use universal design to make things easier for both yourself and your students.

Thank you for your direct answer to my original question on my original post. I'm beginning to suspect more and more that there is no data. It seems that the spirit & goals of "Assessment" & data-driven-decision-making in education do not apply here.

I should mention that I already have all my content in the LMS. The higher-ups want access to my actual files that I upload to the LMS, in addition to the text that is entered into the LMS. They don't explain why. It's ridiculous. Maybe it's because they knew they failed miserably, when they refused to help me make my materials accessible to a dyslexic student, and I had to do it myself.

To your other point (no snark taken, BTW), I already took the time to implement universal design years before universal design was a buzz-word in higher education (drawing from the Design Principles of Don Norman and others who adopted his principles). And, since I used to make my own web sites and host my own LMS built from scratch and hosted by me, because not every educational institution had fully adopted an LMS in the mid-1990s, (and no snark intended here with my next comment) I've probably been examining and re-examining effective teaching practices with an LMS, longer than you have.

After years of doing this, yes, I concede, I'm questioning if all the mandated efforts are actually working and if they are worth the time. And, I'm questioning whether the Accessibility office is really interested in student learning, beyond going through admin motions in order to keep the federal money coming.

Thanks for your responses.

[smallcleanrat]

Don't have energy to spend much time personally pursuing this, but a few minutes testing out different key word searches on Google Scholar makes me extremely skeptical that "there is no data" from any university anywhere.

But I can certainly believe an individual admin or office may not be especially knowledgeable about the actual research or particularly thoughtful in how they make decisions about accommodations.

However, it doesn't really seem as if evidence that having access to ppts/videos does in fact have a positive impact on student learning with other instructors at other universities is going to greatly alleviate your frustration that you have not personally seen a worthwhile return on your time investment.

Maybe the accommodations office could do more here. Coaching students on how to get the most out of their accommodations? Study skills workshops? Peer mentorship program? Better communications with faculty regarding particular courses or circumstances in which certain accommodations don't make sense?

It still seems to me a stretch to say there must be no data whatsoever supporting the benefits of such accommodations at any university anywhere and that it's all a lie.



A lot of courses I've taken/TA'ed for provided lecture slides and/or lecture recordings as a matter of course (not as part of anyone's accommodation). I personally found it extremely useful and have heard other students say the same. I also personally observed students making extensive use of the material available. Many students came to lecture with the slides already printed out so they can take notes directly on any images or diagrams. Students would come to office hours showing me lecture printouts they had heavily annotated themselves, pointing out specific points they were unclear on.

Among other things, I have occasional bouts of tinnitus which can make it difficult for me to follow a lecture in real-time. Being able to play (and replay) a lecture recording at home to get another chance to process the parts I had difficulty hearing the first time has been immensely valuable. And I've only ever done this with courses in which the material was already provided online or the professor was ok with students making their own recordings.

I probably could have gotten an accommodation for courses in which this was not the case, but I've encountered enough vitriol from professors regarding what a pain in the ass it is to comply with disability accommodations that I never pursued it. I've heard enough snark in the same vein as your "motor capabilities" comment to get the impression that besides frustration with the Accessibility Office there is also an underlying contempt for the students with accommodations.

But this can always be dismissed as non-representative anecdata.



I can understand acknowledging that a specific action helps some people, while still questioning whether it helps enough people to be worth the time (or other considerations, such as those regarding intellectual property).

But doesn't that just raise lots of additional questions regarding where the threshold for "worth it" should be? And who gets to decide?

[Caracal]

If you aren't posting materials to your LMS, why is that? That's a genuine question, not snark. I do think it would be potentially helpful for you to think through your current teaching practices and whether you can use universal design to make things easier for both yourself and your students.

Mostly because it takes time and energy and organization and those are all things I have finite resources of. One of the problems with LMS is that everything you do creates additional expectations and deadlines. That already happens with stuff like reading quizzes and grades. It sounds easy to say "just post the pptx," but it actually creates a whole bunch of other issues. When my schedule gives me an hour or two between classes, I often use that time to look through my lecture and make changes as needed. Often those are pretty minor, but I sometimes reorganize things, or take a section out if we are behind and need to catch up. Do I not get that time anymore because students might want to print or download PowerPoints before class?

Even if I post them after class, I still have to remember to do it and put them up. Maybe that sounds whiny but when you have four classes, three days a week, little stuff like that really adds up for me. Perhaps, this all sounds silly or whiny to some, but if that's your reaction, you probably have an easier time juggling stuff like this than I do.

That gets to my complaint about universal design stuff in the classroom. The rhetoric around it seems to discount the costs to the instructor of trying to do some of this stuff.

[ergative]

Mostly because it takes time and energy and organization and those are all things I have finite resources of. One of the problems with LMS is that everything you do creates additional expectations and deadlines. That already happens with stuff like reading quizzes and grades. It sounds easy to say "just post the pptx," but it actually creates a whole bunch of other issues. When my schedule gives me an hour or two between classes, I often use that time to look through my lecture and make changes as needed. Often those are pretty minor, but I sometimes reorganize things, or take a section out if we are behind and need to catch up. Do I not get that time anymore because students might want to print or download PowerPoints before class?

Even if I post them after class, I still have to remember to do it and put them up. Maybe that sounds whiny but when you have four classes, three days a week, little stuff like that really adds up for me. Perhaps, this all sounds silly or whiny to some, but if that's your reaction, you probably have an easier time juggling stuff like this than I do.

That gets to my complaint about universal design stuff in the classroom. The rhetoric around it seems to discount the costs to the instructor of trying to do some of this stuff.

At my institution, yes, you do not get the time. My university requires that all powerpoints be uploaded 24 hours in advance of lecture for disabilities reasons. I usually interpret that to mean 'by close of business the previous day', and yes, it is sometimes irritating not to be able to make last-minute changes. But what I do is just plan accordingly: Instead of counting on the last hour before class to as my window review and revise the slides, I find a free hour the day before. It's irritating, sure, but it's also exactly the same sort of time-budgeting skills that we want our students to employ when they have strict deadlines for submitting papers or whatever. Due date is not do date, etc.

It's not more work to post the slides ahead of time. It's the same work, just 24 hours earlier.

What gets my goat about universal design is the subtitling for lectures. If we give live lectures, then the automatic subtitles do not need to be corrected. But if we pre-record lectures and upload the videos, then we also need to hand-correct the subtitles. And that is something I'm not going to do.

[mleok]

I've been posting all my lectures from my online courses on YouTube, and students seem to like the ability to play the lectures on a YouTube playlist, as opposed to accessing it through Canvas, presumably because it's easier to do so on a mobile device. I also posted the recordings of all the virtual talks I gave, and just last week, I received a very kind email from a Nobel laureate in economics asking for a copy of my slides. This lead to an interesting conversation this week, and it turns out that some of the central objects I study in my work have an interesting analogue in macroeconomic theory, so we'll be keeping the conversation going.

[kiana]

What gets my goat about universal design is the subtitling for lectures. If we give live lectures, then the automatic subtitles do not need to be corrected. But if we pre-record lectures and upload the videos, then we also need to hand-correct the subtitles. And that is something I'm not going to do.

Yep. I used to also post videos I found on youtube that I thought were helpful and explanatory, but the captions are autogenerated and I was told that wasn't good enough. I just don't have time, so I took them back out again.

[marshwiggle]

What gets my goat about universal design is the subtitling for lectures. If we give live lectures, then the automatic subtitles do not need to be corrected. But if we pre-record lectures and upload the videos, then we also need to hand-correct the subtitles. And that is something I'm not going to do.

Yep. I used to also post videos I found on youtube that I thought were helpful and explanatory, but the captions are autogenerated and I was told that wasn't good enough. I just don't have time, so I took them back out again.

Does it matter if they're "required" for the course versus "optional"? Where I have documents I've made that are required, I have some other things I've found online that I list under "optional", and I've never gotten any pushback about that. (So, in principle, everything anyone "needs" is compliant; the extra resources are "as is" but non-essential.)
 

[kiana]

What gets my goat about universal design is the subtitling for lectures. If we give live lectures, then the automatic subtitles do not need to be corrected. But if we pre-record lectures and upload the videos, then we also need to hand-correct the subtitles. And that is something I'm not going to do.

Yep. I used to also post videos I found on youtube that I thought were helpful and explanatory, but the captions are autogenerated and I was told that wasn't good enough. I just don't have time, so I took them back out again.

Does it matter if they're "required" for the course versus "optional"? Where I have documents I've made that are required, I have some other things I've found online that I list under "optional", and I've never gotten any pushback about that. (So, in principle, everything anyone "needs" is compliant; the extra resources are "as is" but non-essential.)

I think it may depend on who is doing the evaluation. I had "optional supplemental resources" linked and was told I needed to provide transcripts for the videos. I also ended up needing to remove all the pdfs (even though every single document was uploaded in both .docx and .pdf, still, the .pdfs were technically not accessible).

None of this made sense to me, and I think that they were just following an algorithm rather than using some common sense.

[marshwiggle]

What gets my goat about universal design is the subtitling for lectures. If we give live lectures, then the automatic subtitles do not need to be corrected. But if we pre-record lectures and upload the videos, then we also need to hand-correct the subtitles. And that is something I'm not going to do.

Yep. I used to also post videos I found on youtube that I thought were helpful and explanatory, but the captions are autogenerated and I was told that wasn't good enough. I just don't have time, so I took them back out again.

Does it matter if they're "required" for the course versus "optional"? Where I have documents I've made that are required, I have some other things I've found online that I list under "optional", and I've never gotten any pushback about that. (So, in principle, everything anyone "needs" is compliant; the extra resources are "as is" but non-essential.)

I think it may depend on who is doing the evaluation. I had "optional supplemental resources" linked and was told I needed to provide transcripts for the videos. I also ended up needing to remove all the pdfs (even though every single document was uploaded in both .docx and .pdf, still, the .pdfs were technically not accessible).

None of this made sense to me, and I think that they were just following an algorithm rather than using some common sense.

Yeah that sounds like excessive bureaucracy, since having to get rid of .pdfs that duplicate .docx content has absolutely no logical justification.

[spork]

[. . . ]

they can't seem to generate a report on the efficacy of a lot of our student support programs, like the Accessibility Compliance Office

[. . .]

The point is not to improve student learning. The point is to check boxes as evidence of compliance with federal law and to recruit tuition-paying students by making a show of offering a panoply of "student services." For example, my employer has a three-person disabilities office that probably costs at least $200,000 per year to operate, yet some campus classrooms and offices are not wheelchair accessible.

[ciao_yall]

[. . . ]

they can't seem to generate a report on the efficacy of a lot of our student support programs, like the Accessibility Compliance Office

[. . .]

The point is not to improve student learning. The point is to check boxes as evidence of compliance with federal law and to recruit tuition-paying students by making a show of offering a panoply of "student services." For example, my employer has a three-person disabilities office that probably costs at least $200,000 per year to operate, yet some campus classrooms and offices are not wheelchair accessible.

The elevator to our DPSS office is often broken.