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Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

nytimes.com

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Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#131

Post by hga »

Sanddancer wrote: post #127
hga wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted by Harvard students. (I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and if those are the best examples they can come up with for a national campaign....) Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.

You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can d…

Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment:

“Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.”

Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube).

"The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is..."

If so, it's entirely unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy.

This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all over this.

When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be severely curtailed due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best.

One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously piss off....

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#132

Post by markdown »

dethstar wrote: post #119
fennecfoxen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purposes of armchair moralizing, who cares about the law as written? Pretend we're making the law, instead of deferring to the law as written. Should we in fact tell them "it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"

Take your stand to other disabilities. Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"? I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.

Do you know a disabled parent who says their non-disabled child shouldn't be provided an education unless they themselves also have access?

All those countless millions living in near poverty in Africa and Asia and in that dingy corner of your city you never drive through... do you deprive them of a leg up in life just because you don't get closed captions?

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#134

Post by eli »

jdreaver wrote: post #44
6stringmerc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to individual works, I don't see how this would have any bearing on your product. You're not beholden to the ADA in your creative works, from what I understand. Double the exemption for making something for free. It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these pro…

I understand that the law may not strictly apply to me. I am making a statement on the principle of the situation. I don't think MIT or Harvard should be forced to provide captions for their videos either.

So lobby to change the law?

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#135

Post by Crito »

jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #112
hga wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you're getting down voted because of who's pocket you want this "access" to come out of? Perhaps because you can't conceive that one inevitable result of this is that whole lot less material with audio is going to be published by US institutions going forward? Especially if a legal regime has to be set up to vet everything posted in any formal way by a member of these communities? In the case of MIT students,…

My single and only point is that access is good. I'm not talking about costs, because it doesn't NEED to cost ANY money - and even when it does, the below-sweatshop rate card of $1/minute is hardly going to break the bank. I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them. Adding captions substantially increases the number of people who can, and…

> "I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them."

Consider how many people can't even be arsed to write a README for projects that they throw up on github.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#136

Post by tn13 »

I really like how people quickly develop a sense of entitlement for things that did not exist a while back. There were no online courses few years back, but now you think you are entitled to some captions.

Just like there was no Uber few years back but when they are you suddenly think you are entitled for lower prices and other blah.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#137

Post by stolio »

dethstar wrote: post #119
fennecfoxen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purposes of armchair moralizing, who cares about the law as written? Pretend we're making the law, instead of deferring to the law as written. Should we in fact tell them "it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"

Take your stand to other disabilities. Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"? I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.

Sidewalks are infrastructure. Free online courses from MIT are not. They're a luxury.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#138

Post by jff »

blfr wrote: post #133

Isn't every lecture, on-line or off, unavailable to deaf students? How does it work in legacy education? Is there a sign language interpreter in every hall?

At my school, they did indeed put an interpreter in any class with deaf kids (we had a lot of deaf students). The school would also pay hearing students for their course notes for distribution to deaf students, so if you were deaf and felt like sleeping in, no worries you'll get the notes anyway.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#139

Post by coldtea »

dethstar wrote: post #119
fennecfoxen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purposes of armchair moralizing, who cares about the law as written? Pretend we're making the law, instead of deferring to the law as written. Should we in fact tell them "it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"

Take your stand to other disabilities. Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"? I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.

>Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"?

If it makes it easier to have a sidewalk that would still benefit the vast majority built, sure.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#140

Post by aldordeah »

morgante wrote: post #78

This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content. That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your free videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we'll see videos taken down entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can't have something no…

Please explain to me how it is fair that, by studying a free online uncaptioned lecture, someone gets even more of an advantage over me just because they weren't born deaf.
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