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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

#271

Post by binarysolo »

hga wrote: post #245
cwbrandsma wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.

And ongoing costs for a new ADA compliance office, and the red tape everyone in the community will have to wade through with that office to publish an officially vetted video. This will have a severe chilling effect on such productions, above and beyond the not trivial costs of getting high quality captions, which for technical material---which includes plenty of specialized humanities stuff, not just math, physics,…

In the grand scheme of things I'd probably liken it to disability ramps, braille on room signage, etc. It'll probably add a few points to the total cost, but in the grand scheme we're talking about 3-5%, not 30-50% in additional costs. What'll probably happen is that each prof will need to assign a TA to basically deal with it. (Remember, these specialized technical costs are particularly cheap for universities.)

I unfortunately don't have a lot of insight on the case itself, but I surmise the reason why these activist lawyers are going after Harvard and MIT is because they have plenty of resources to solve these issues. Part of being a leading academic institution is to "do the right thing", and at this juncture it's up to highly specialized legal people to figure out what that means.

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

#272

Post by sp332 »

hga wrote: post #270
sp332 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can only do a little bit of good, you should do it for the underprivileged position and not for people who are already privileged.

With that attitude, MIT would never exist in the first place!!! Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace. MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have…

If MIT is all about giving more privilege to the privileged, why did they start the OCW project in the first place? I submit that MIT actually wants these videos to be as accessible as possible, including captions. This is supported by the fast the many of the videos already have captions.

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

#273

Post by hga »

hullo wrote: post #263
hga wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you deny my statement that " the vast majority of " MIT's endowment is earmarked, so it cannot arbitrarily reprogram that money to this purpose? From the insider's viewpoint, MIT has not been "wealthy" since the end Cold War and got hard hit by the Great Recession, although I haven't checked details as of the last few years. This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the remedies of…

The hallmark of a successful development program is to simultaneously convince you of two things (1) the school is of the highest quality and (2) it is drastically underfunded. Yes endowment funds are earmarked, but in most cases they're going to fund things that would need to be funded anyway (scholarships, professorships, center & department expenses). One of the strengths of a large endowment is that it increases…

As I said, inside viewpoint. I don't look at anything the development program produces besides the occasional headline. Instead, I actually worked at MIT job in 1980, and a job in the end of the '80s (IT). I keep up with contacts and friends from those jobs, plus I just plain hung around the campus for a dozen year period including those jobs, and I know how it is at "the sharp end of the spear".

Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the Great Recession.

But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the videos that will go dark and stay dark.

Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also certainly have to initially remove all its videos after an adverse outcome. Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?

Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on the web. If you're successful, that'll end.

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

#274

Post by hga »

DanBC wrote: post #257
netheril96 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AB testing is for business and for earning money, and the caption thing is about free content that you get nothing in return?

So why bother putting out that free content in the first place? In the scheme of things adding captions costs very little and provides benefits to many people, not just those with a hearing impairment. The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions.

"The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions."

So should Google be added to the lawsuit, since they're the ones hosting the called out badly auto-captioned videos, unless of course they're charging Harvard and MIT for the whole service?

I also strongly challenge your contention that noways initial costs of production are so high. Hosting, I don't know, but isn't it getting steadily cheaper?

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

#275

Post by balls187 »

jes wrote: post #225
balls187 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?" Yes. To prevent this exact line of thinking, laws exist. Not just to protect the majority, but to protect EVERYONE as equals, under the rule of law.

I think your comment is thoughtful and well-intentioned, but I find myself wondering about the seemingly egalitarian nature of it. May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person? In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they sho…

> May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?

In your scenario, you only have fixed set of resources and wanted to do as much good as you can.

I would imagine in that situation, to make things "fair" you would have some set of criteria in which a poor person could qualify for assistance.

As long as those criteria were objective (geographic, income based, etc) I would support your organization.

If you only wanted to help poor whites, or poor men, or otherwise discriminated against protected classes, then I wouldn't be okay with that.

To put this back to MIT and Harvard: They made learning accessible to everyone except for people who are deaf and those without internet access. The law protects the first group, and not the second.

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

#276

Post by hga »

sp332 wrote: post #272
hga wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that attitude, MIT would never exist in the first place!!! Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace. MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have…

If MIT is all about giving more privilege to the privileged, why did they start the OCW project in the first place? I submit that MIT actually wants these videos to be as accessible as possible, including captions. This is supported by the fast the many of the videos already have captions.

Indeed, and one of its initial and still strong missions is to bring the benefits of rapidly developing science and engineering to the world. As far as I know, the single biggest boost to health and material well being in the US occurred in the post-Civil War period, not much later when we got "modern medicine" as in antibiotics (although what they could often pull off with antiseptics and infection control was amazing, read a history of the Mayo brothers if you're interested).

But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.

I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.

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

#277

Post by hullo »

hga wrote: post #273
hullo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hallmark of a successful development program is to simultaneously convince you of two things (1) the school is of the highest quality and (2) it is drastically underfunded. Yes endowment funds are earmarked, but in most cases they're going to fund things that would need to be funded anyway (scholarships, professorships, center & department expenses). One of the strengths of a large endowment is that it increases…

As I said, inside viewpoint. I don't look at anything the development program produces besides the occasional headline. Instead, I actually worked at MIT job in 1980, and a job in the end of the '80s (IT). I keep up with contacts and friends from those jobs, plus I just plain hung around the campus for a dozen year period including those jobs, and I know how it is at "the sharp end of the spear". Like helping to allo…

Luckily, folks who care about making things accessible for those with disabilities have already won (god forbid something like the ADA getting passed today), so I don't actually need to fight this battle. These videos will be captioned, MIT will not go broke (or stop putting up new things). Set up a tickle file, one year from today, see how it all looks.

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

#278

Post by wyager »

handojin wrote: post #214
wyager wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are preparing a video for something online, you should be planning it and writing a script, which you can easily turn into a transcript. Please don't presume to tell content providers how they should produce content, or presume to tell them that a part of the process is easy. That's not up to you to decide for anyone but yourself. >These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly. Nice; insult the aweso…

You seem angry and you are constructing a false dichotomy. No one is arguing that content should not be released, just that content, produced in institutions which are recipients of federal grants, should be made available to the widest possible audience. What is the standard by which we define 'widest possible audience'? Reasonable accommodation. Your argument reduces to a statement that it is better for Harvard and…

>No one is arguing that content should not be released, just that content, produced in institutions which are recipients of federal grants, should be made available to the widest possible audience.

Take a step back and look at the potential side effects of what the plaintiff is asking. If a university, with all their money already earmarked, is told that if they want to keep distributing free educational materials then they must pay to transcribe them, what are they going to do? A very likely outcome is that they're going to scrap their free educational materials program. It doesn't take a lot of foresight to see this.

Also, how do you define "widest possible audience"? Should the universities be legally compelled to translate all videos into Chinese as well? There are a lot more Chinese speakers than deaf people.

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

#279

Post by Kalium »

DanBC wrote: post #257
netheril96 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AB testing is for business and for earning money, and the caption thing is about free content that you get nothing in return?

So why bother putting out that free content in the first place? In the scheme of things adding captions costs very little and provides benefits to many people, not just those with a hearing impairment. The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions.

It's more work and more cost for a small gain. Why take on extra cost and work without a business impetus?

And no, production and hosting costs are not nearly as high as they used to be. It's now possible to produce content for minimal marginal cost.

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

#280

Post by totony »

sp332 wrote: post #261
jes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment is thoughtful and well-intentioned, but I find myself wondering about the seemingly egalitarian nature of it. May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person? In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they sho…

If you can only do a little bit of good, you should do it for the underprivileged position and not for people who are already privileged.

So, do good, but only to those whom I approve, or else don't do it?
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