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A statement on online course content and accessibility

news.berkeley.edu

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#11
post #4

Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? I hate to say but "this is why we can't have nice things". We are trying to move into an age of more digital education, but if there are a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to even attempt it, won't the barrier to trying be too high for some institutions?

> Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company?

No. University of California, Berkeley is a part of the University of California system, not a private company.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#12
Are any of these courses paid?

Do any of these courses or the means through which they are made available advertise paid options, paid alternatives, or other paid courses?

If both of those are 'no' then this is disgraceful. If either is 'yes' then it is completely justified.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#14

U.C. Berkeley has some fantastic classes online. It would truly be a shame to lose them. Many were clearly produced on shoestring budgets. The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help? Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least th…

Would it be legal to have community created transcripts for all courses? Would not mind to spend some time doing so in lieu of free content.

Would you want to be legally liable for content someone else may or may not produce when the best of intentions inevitably rub up against real-world time constraints?

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#15
post #7

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra…

_ Scenario C: spend $X-(.75$Y) to release the courses and .75$Y as a settlement

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#16
post #7

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra…

And yet libraries have to meet disability access requirements.

If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system, and this is especially bad when it applies to learning — which disabled people can benefit disproportionately from.

Using the legal system to achieve these ends appears to be the American Way so I won't comment on that.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#18

"...the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities..." Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all. IANAL, but I believe…

> Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all.

To be fair, the whole point of the ADA is to harm millions of people for the benefit of very few people.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#19
post #7

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra…

While I understand your sentiment and agree with it to some extent, the other side of the argument is that by releasing a free course, you disadvantage someone who would create this content, for a fee, and use that money to make it accessible to all. In effect, they are giving a free advantage to those without disabilities, making it even harder for those with disabilities to compete. Is that fair?

An analogy appropriate to this site is a free app that does an adequate, but not great job for a given need, that prevents others from creating (or maintaining) a polished app for money. That is, we might get 80% of a great app with the last 20%, the hard part, never being achieved. It is what it is in a free market, but the government has a bit of a mandate to try to take the larger perspective and create pathways to cover that last 20%, at least in the case of accessibility.

Having said that, I feel a better approach would be to provide grants or services to support making such content accessible. There is something odd about having to tell people that not only do they need to be an expert in a subject but also in how to convey that in a way that is useful and good to the people who are blind, deaf, or manually impaired.

By this I mean, for example, why is it clear that a simple transcript on a video is suitable? Surely it would be better to design courses to take advantage of the abilities of those using it and compensating for the lack of certain abilities. It is not clear to me that simply captioning a video is the best outcome for providing materials to deaf people. It would be far better to encourage and fund people expert in teaching deaf people or blind people to create materials directly, perhaps based on these other free materials.

As a creator of an online math course, one in which heavy use is made of graphs, it is not clear to me how I could even begin teaching graphing to blind people. I simply do not have the knowledge or experience to do so.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#20
post #7

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra…

What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/legislation/policies explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation.

The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible.

Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating.

Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.

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