asking students who have flexible deadlines accommodations to work ahead?

[lightning]

I'm thinking ahead to the winter/spring semester, and a thought just occurred to me.

A few years ago, admincritters started requiring that asynchronous online courses are ready to go live one week before the semester begins to allow students to have access one week before. Begrudgingly, we complied. It was a loophole in the faculty handbook that admincritters cleverly exploited.

I routinely get accommodation notices for students. Around half of them state that the accommodation is an extra seven days (max) for extensions on assignment deadlines, if a student with flexible deadline accommodation invokes their automatic extension accommodation.

I was thinking. . . .

Since the online course is already ready (by mandate) one week before the semester begins, and students have access, can't we just tell these students with deadline extension accommodations in asynchronous courses that the course is open on week before the semester officially begins and that they are welcome to start one week early, and that if they work one week ahead by starting one week early and maintaining the schedule, then they won't need the accommodation, because they already have an extra seven days for everything in the entire course. IOW, by opening the course one week before the semester begins, I  have already added one free week to the schedule, so they already have their 7 day extension for every assignment, if they log in one week early and maintain the schedule.   

[Puget]

That would certainly not fly at my university-- students cannot be required to do anything before the first day of the semester, and limited extension accommodations are meant for situations where a student's disability causes a temporary need for one, not time to work ahead throughout the semester. You could always ask your accommodations folks and see how they interpret this accommodation though.

[onthefringe]

Agreed students can't be asked to start ahead of classes. That said, my uni's disability services is a bit more reasonable than yours sounds. The standard flexible deadline accommodation is three business days, not a week, and in a synchronous course, if all materials needed to complete an assignment are available for a full week prior to the due date, you can push back some on flexible deadline accommodations. But I don't know how they handle fully asynchronous courses.

[the_geneticist]

As others have said, you can't require students to start a class before the first day.
I'd need to know more of the particulars for how to reasonably allow for extensions. Asynchronous doesn't mean self-paced.  And extensions aren't supposed to be for every single assignment. Otherwise, the student may basically just be one week behind for all materials.
If the assignments require interacting with classmates (e.g. read something, write a response, then comment on responses from other classmates), then a week extension will not be reasonable since they won't have that interaction.  Are there multiple sections?  Maybe have the student register for the Monday section, but be allowed to participate in the Friday section if needed?
What have other folks done in asynchronous classes?

[lightning]

That's all fine. We can't force anyone to start one week early by rule, but in the spirit of accommodations, it is there for those that recognize the opportunity to compensate for whatever it is that they have that keeps them from meeting deadlines. The extra week is there whether they want to use it or not. And this upcoming year I will send out an email to the entire class, reminding them that they are free to log in one week early and get a head start and maintain the head start. Again, not that I am forcing them to, but that the option is there, in case they want a more discreet way to be accommodated.

We already require all students with flexible deadline accommodations to finish with everyone else, without accomodations, at the end of the semester, so those that were habitually relying on the extra seven days are screwed at the end of the semester. (Fortunately, admincritters hate dealing with "Incompletes," so they back up faculty when faculty award a bad grade and do not award an Incomplete). Even though the admin critters were not intending it, adding an extra free week to the semester for asynchronous online courses is actually kind of brilliant. That extra week prepended to the beginning of the course is there, IMO, to help students who need more time. If students don't want to take advantage of that free week, and they prefer to get crushed at the end of the semester, then, well, I'll point to the email that I sent before the semester started, which told them about the opportunity to start early.

[jerseyjay]

For the reasons given, I don't think this would fly at my university, either.

That said, I have never had an accommodation request like this. Usually, students ask for extra time for assignments or tests; usually time and a half (or twice, or thrice) for exams, and the ability to take the exam in a distraction-free environment. I used to have to prepare the exams and give them to the disability office.

Now, since Covid, I have been doing all my exams online, as a take-home exam that they post to Blackboard by a certain date. This has made the request for extra time or a certain place to take the exam irrelevant, since the students can take as much time as they want during the time the exam is posted and work wherever they want.

I had planned to return to in-class bluebooks this semester, but the students reacted with fear. I also get an extra class time for lecture, activities, etc., that I used to have to dedicate to exams. Since sitting a bluebook exam is a skill that is not necessary anywhere outside of university, I have for the moment decided to not return to such exams.

For probably obvious reasons students prefer "take home" exams. In my opinion, it is in the students' best interest not to have such exams, since students tend to work much longer on take home exams, and I tend to grade them harder. That said, I have taken to having the students vote on what type of exam they want, and they always vote, usually unanimously, on take-home exams.

[lightning]

I do want to re-iterate, because I did not make myself clear, I would never REQUIRE students to work ahead, because I can't. Duh. But I can ASK them to work ahead, as an option, after explaining the benefit to them. Students can always say no, and proceed to exercise their automatic deadline extensions (and get subsequently crushed at the end of the semester when their assignment deferments catch up to them and the admincritters won't want to entertain Incompletes--whole separate humorous story with that when faculty used to pass on to the admincritters, the headache of dealing with students who can't finish the course because they've been habitually using their extensions until they run out of semester --ha, ha--).

I can't take away any accommodation that the Disabilities office gives them.

BTW, my asynchronous online class is designed in such a way that it is possible to work ahead, and there are always a handful of eager & competitive students (some of whom work ahead because they see a really busy time in their future schedules with other future concurrent commitments) who work ahead, so there will be classmates for early interaction anyway.

It just boggles my mind that anyone who has the 7-day automatic deadline extension, due to disability, would not want to take advantage of our built in extra 7-days before the semester begins, and instead allow themselves to be crushed at the end of the semester instead. Oh, well. It's their choice. But, at least we gave them the choice of an extra avenue to succeed despite their disability and accommodation, and if they choose not to take advantage or my/our gracious opportunity and instead whine and become aggressive about their accommodation, I'll simply point to that extra week where they could have worked ahead.

And if you are wondering where this is all coming from, for the last couple of years, in every online asynchronous class, I've almost always had one student who is always one week behind everyone else, and often they are students with the 7-day accommodation and they use their 7-day extension. Some of them are very aggressive about it, and dare me to non-accommodate. And it almost always ends badly, with them requesting an Incomplete at the end of the semester, when their deferments catch up to them. And, me and the admincritters saying "no" to the incomplete request.

Since the extra week of course availability is already required to be there, I just want to hold out the extra week as an option for these students to recognize and exercise their self-efficacy, when this additional opportunity to help them succeed is held out to them.

Thanks for letting me know that a 7-day automatic extension is unusual at your universities. At my place, it's very commonplace among the very few students who are granted flexible deadlines. Fortunately, they are very few, but those few can be ornery and be difficult to administer, and take attention away from other students.

[Hegemony]

The thing is that ADHD interferes with executive functioning, and one aspect of that is that it interferes with planning ahead. I am not hypothesizing this; it is a standard symptom listed and discussed in all discussions of ADHD. The remedy for this — as I have amply discovered from my own child with ADHD — is not explaining carefully how planning ahead will be advantageous. The remedy is pressing deadlines. However, because their brains are in a scramble, they need more time to respond to the pressing deadlines than a regular student. ADHD also often goes along with "slow processing," which doesn't mean they're stupid, it means it takes longer for them to formulate the answer. So for instance if you ask them a question out loud, there may be a long delay before they answer it.

Add this all together and you get an inability to work ahead, and a need for pressing deadlines to get them to focus at all. That's why the students with such accommodations won't be starting the work ahead of the class. I know, it seems like "they should," right? It would be in their best interest, right? But their brains are not constructed that way. (They wish their brains were too.)

[lightning]

The thing is that ADHD interferes with executive functioning, and one aspect of that is that it interferes with planning ahead. I am not hypothesizing this; it is a standard symptom listed and discussed in all discussions of ADHD. The remedy for this — as I have amply discovered from my own child with ADHD — is not explaining carefully how planning ahead will be advantageous. The remedy is pressing deadlines. However, because their brains are in a scramble, they need more time to respond to the pressing deadlines than a regular student. ADHD also often goes along with "slow processing," which doesn't mean they're stupid, it means it takes longer for them to formulate the answer. So for instance if you ask them a question out loud, there may be a long delay before they answer it.

Add this all together and you get an inability to work ahead, and a need for pressing deadlines to get them to focus at all. That's why the students with such accommodations won't be starting the work ahead of the class. I know, it seems like "they should," right? It would be in their best interest, right? But their brains are not constructed that way. (They wish their brains were too.)

Then, yes, the students can avail themselves of the option to get crushed at the end of the semester, with no judgement.

[mamselle]

I'm bothered by what seems like a deliberate assumption that students with accommodations are being mulish and unreasonable in expecting to be able to make full, fair use of those accommodations they are allowed, as if they were somehow taking advantage of the system.

One can negotiate a limited incomplete in a course--say, two weeks after the deadline or so--to prevent the incomplete droning on forever: I've done that.

I have 2 ongoing private music students with varied forms of ADHD and management processing issues: they tell me what they need, I listen and we work out strategies to make those things possible,  and they work brilliantly and responsibly within those structures. No issues.

I had a French student in a university level course who actually resisted getting the accommodations he truly needed, because he'd been made to feel ashamed about them, and wanted to believe he'd"outgrown" them (he hadn't).

I walked over with him to the ADA office, made a quick intro to his potential counselor, was given permission to join them for that meeting, and we sorted it out. All he needed was slower repetitions of aural quizzes because of his delayed hearing issues in class, and the chance to take the quiz with headphones on...easy to have them set up, and I just did a quick .wav file of the aural part of the quiz for him.

I see no need (or possibly, even, "right,") for you (OP) or your admin folks to gleefully punish a student who has accommodations by banging them up against a due date at the end of the term when I bet, if you actually talked to those dreadful bleeding hearts in the ADA office, you could probably figure out a more humane resolution.

The attitude I'm getting is just so faintly sadistic about this, and I wouldn't want to believe that to be true.

M.

[lightning]

I'm bothered by what seems like a deliberate assumption that students with accommodations are being mulish and unreasonable in expecting to be able to make full, fair use of those accommodations they are allowed, as if they were somehow taking advantage of the system.

One can negotiate a limited incomplete in a course--say, two weeks after the deadline or so--to prevent the incomplete droning on forever: I've done that.

I have 2 ongoing private music students with varied forms of ADHD and management processing issues: they tell me what they need, I listen and we work out strategies to make those things possible,  and they work brilliantly and responsibly within those structures. No issues.

I had a French student in a university level course who actually resisted getting the accommodations he truly needed, because he'd been made to feel ashamed about them, and wanted to believe he'd"outgrown" them (he hadn't).

I walked over with him to the ADA office, made a quick intro to his potential counselor, was given permission to join them for that meeting, and we sorted it out. All he needed was slower repetitions of aural quizzes because of his delayed hearing issues in class, and the chance to take the quiz with headphones on...easy to have them set up, and I just did a quick .wav file of the aural part of the quiz for him.

I see no need (or possibly, even, "right,") for you (OP) or your admin folks to gleefully punish a student who has accommodations by banging them up against a due date at the end of the term when I bet, if you actually talked to those dreadful bleeding hearts in the ADA office, you could probably figure out a more humane resolution.

The attitude I'm getting is just so faintly sadistic about this, and I wouldn't want to believe that to be true.

M.

Don't worry.

[onthefringe]

Flexible deadlines are now the second most common accommodations I see, affecting 10-15% of my students each semester. In my experience, about 50% use them as intended (they have one or maybe 2 flares over the course of the semester, contact me as soon as practical, catch up on the work, and do fine.) The other 50% spend the entire semester 3 or so days behind, frequently waiting multiple days to inform me they need a new version of the weekly assignment and want the three day extension to start after that, etc. With large classes it becomes a nightmare of keeping track of who turned what in when and writing additional versions of assignments because it's not fair to withhold keys from the rest of the class while their colleagues catch up.

I'm additionally frustrated because I have built a lot of universal design elements into my classes where students get to drop a fraction of assignments and have built in alternative ways to earn back points, but our disability folks insist that accommodations need to be over and above what is available to everyone in the class. Frequently students would be much better off taking advantage of a free drop and focusing on the work the class is actually doing instead of being continuously half a week behind.

I am at a very large university, and have been pushing for someone to do some data analysis to see how often these accommodations actually support student success vs pushing the inevitable off, but no takers thus far.

[Hegemony]

As I mentioned above, my son has ADHD, and his executive functioning is pretty minimal. He is in despair about it, but good intentions avail not at all.

He got F's most of the way through high school because the teachers were rigid about deadlines. Yes, he had accommodations — don't get me started on how many of the teachers disbelieved the accommodations and refused to honor them. At one point it was clear it was going to take a lawsuit to make things different. Anyway, that's another story. My point is that he actually did all of these assignments. He finished them and he did them pretty well. I saw them finished, and I sent him in with them with every kind of reminder to turn them in: colored rubber bands around his wrist, checklists, texts, etc. Most of the time he forgot or he had lost them before it was time to turn them in. When he found them, days or weeks later, he did turn them in. He did every assignment, he eventually turned in every assignment. But simply because of the inflexibility of the teachers, he got F's for many of these courses. Really he was not being graded on how well he knew the subject matter, or on having done the assignments. He was being graded solely on whether he turned them in by the deadline.

In the end, the pandemic happened and they just passed everyone willy-nilly, which is the only reason he has a high school diploma. Then he went to community college and they were flexible about deadlines and he has a 4.02 average (several A+s in addition to the A's.)

So I think about that when students ask to turn things in late. I always say yes.

[Caracal]

The thing is that ADHD interferes with executive functioning, and one aspect of that is that it interferes with planning ahead. I am not hypothesizing this; it is a standard symptom listed and discussed in all discussions of ADHD. The remedy for this — as I have amply discovered from my own child with ADHD — is not explaining carefully how planning ahead will be advantageous. The remedy is pressing deadlines. However, because their brains are in a scramble, they need more time to respond to the pressing deadlines than a regular student. ADHD also often goes along with "slow processing," which doesn't mean they're stupid, it means it takes longer for them to formulate the answer. So for instance if you ask them a question out loud, there may be a long delay before they answer it.

Add this all together and you get an inability to work ahead, and a need for pressing deadlines to get them to focus at all. That's why the students with such accommodations won't be starting the work ahead of the class. I know, it seems like "they should," right? It would be in their best interest, right? But their brains are not constructed that way. (They wish their brains were too.)

My very strong impression as someone who has ADHD is that, like most diagnoses, it describes a cluster of things that vary in severity and manifest in really different ways depending on the person. I didn't struggle as much as it sounds like your son did in high school, but I also became a much better student in college. It did help that I could often get extensions when I had procrastinated and gotten started on something too late. The thing that helped me the most, though, was just that I had a lot more time and space to manage my crummy executive functioning. Trying to do the math homework in high school in the ten minutes between classes was a bad plan. Doing the reading for an early afternoon class in the two free hours I had after my morning class in college was actually a reasonable and efficient use of my time.

The deadlines and pressure became a helpful way of organizing myself. That kind of strategy won't work with everything, and I eventually had to find artificial ways to get myself to do things like write papers ahead of time so I could have time to fix the draft, but the point is that I agree that blanket extensions are really misguided and unhelpful.

[Caracal]

Flexible deadlines are now the second most common accommodations I see, affecting 10-15% of my students each semester. In my experience, about 50% use them as intended (they have one or maybe 2 flares over the course of the semester, contact me as soon as practical, catch up on the work, and do fine.) The other 50% spend the entire semester 3 or so days behind, frequently waiting multiple days to inform me they need a new version of the weekly assignment and want the three day extension to start after that, etc. With large classes it becomes a nightmare of keeping track of who turned what in when and writing additional versions of assignments because it's not fair to withhold keys from the rest of the class while their colleagues catch up.

I'm additionally frustrated because I have built a lot of universal design elements into my classes where students get to drop a fraction of assignments and have built in alternative ways to earn back points, but our disability folks insist that accommodations need to be over and above what is available to everyone in the class. Frequently students would be much better off taking advantage of a free drop and focusing on the work the class is actually doing instead of being continuously half a week behind.

I am at a very large university, and have been pushing for someone to do some data analysis to see how often these accommodations actually support student success vs pushing the inevitable off, but no takers thus far.

This is just such terrible interoperation and implementation of accommodations. It doesn't provide for "flexible deadlines." It just mandates different inflexible deadlines and it won't help the students at all. I'm quite flexible about extensions, but there are times when they don't work with the pedagogical purpose of the assignment. There's no point allowing extensions on reading quizzes, and the like, because the whole point is to have students do the work that gets them ready for class. I do the same thing you do, just drop a few of them.

The whole thing just seems like a really bizarre attempt to have a set of codified rules for something that doesn't work that way. Flexible deadlines are something that needs to be worked out between the instructor and the student in the context of the course, it isn't like 50 percent extra time on exams.