[blindlgbtpride] Fw: [leadership] Online learning and technology

[Don Brown]

FYI:
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "RL Bartlett" <rlb19 at hal-pc.org>
To: <leadership at acb.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 1:37 PM
Subject: [leadership] Online learning and technology



Blinding Technology of Online Learning August 23,
2010 Steve Kolowich Inside Higher Ed Online
learning is often heralded as a way to make college an option
for people who would not otherwise have the money
or mobility to access it. But for blind students,
online learning can present more obstacles than opportunities
- especially as e--learning materials become more
technologically sophisticated. â?oWhen faculty or
course developers hear about a new tool being introduced
at a distance education conference, they want to
bring it home and try it out,� says Kelly
Hermann, chair of the Online Education Special Interest Group
at the Association on Higher Education and
Disability, or AHEAD. â?oBut what they fail to
recognize is where that new tool might create barriers to accessibility.�
That new types of course content being developed
for online learning might create accessibility
problems is not a new revelation. But the courts have made
little progress toward defining and enforcing
accessibility standards for online education in
the last decade, even as online degree programs have proliferated
and been adopted into mainstream higher
education. Only in the last few months has the
federal government hinted that online education, and technological
innovations associated with it, might soon face
legal scrutiny. In the meantime, advocates for
the blind are worried that it is becoming harder for the
assistive technology used by blind students to
keep pace with advances in educational
technology. â?oDynamicâ? e-learning content - e.g., graphics that
change as a user rolls over or clicks on
different parts - could present huge challenges
to blind students, sayys Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the
National Federation for the Blind, or NFB.
Figuring out how translate static tables and
diagrams for blind students was trouble enough, he says; it is
not yet clear how to deal with newer, more
interactive e-learning objects that may soon
pervade online education. â?oAssistive technology does the best
it can to keep up with changes in [educational]
technology, but a lot of times you have a
university that is using the latest, cutting-edge Web technology.
screeen-reader technology tries to keep up, but
more often than not it's behind,� says
Danielsen. For example, screen-readers rely on a screen having
to reload every time new content appears on a
page - a step dynamic content  eliminates.
Advocacy groups do not believe online classrooms should deploy
such materials until they can be made accessible
to blind students. The news is not all bad. The
NFB last week gave Blackboard - the e-learning inddustry
leader whose learning-management platform is used
by many online programs - a pat on the back for
settingg a new standard for accessibility with its the
latest version of its online learning portal.
Moodle, the open-source learning-management
platform that has been making modest gains against Blackboard
for several years, allows individual campuses to
customize their portals such that they are
accessible to blind students. The accessibility of learning-management
systems is especially germane to the
accessibility of online courses, since in online
learning the learning-management platform is not just a supplement
to the classroom - it is the classroom.
Unfoortunately, making the learning-management
system accessible is only part of the battle to make online education
accessible. â?oEven though Moodle itself is
accessible, courses and imported content might
not be,� says Brad Schleicher, a spokesperson for Moodlerooms,
the company that provides support to users of the
Moodle platform. Imported content is becoming as
much a part of online course delivery as the discussion
forums and other features governed by the
accessibility practices of the
learning-management system. At Blackboardâ?Ts user conference in July, 
Michael
Chasen, the company's CEO, demonstrated how the
company was creating more dynamic, seamless ways
to integrate outside content into course pages. In the
latest version of the platform, â?oweâ?Tve taken
steps to ensure that content from third-party
sources like YouTube and others is fully accessible once
it is brought into the course, but as a platform
solution, there are infinite types of content
that could be used within the system,� says Stephanie
Cupp, a senior director of user experience at
Blackboard. (It should also be noted that less
than a third of Blackboard clients have upgraded to the more
accessible version, which the company released in
April.) â?oThird-party content is a problem,â?
says Anne Taylor, director of access technology at the
National Federation for the Blind. As
learning-management systems have made it easier
to do so, some professors have drawn increasingly from disparate
sources - online video sitees, blogs, other
nonacademic websites - for course materrial. The
more professors â?odo their own thing,â? drawing from nontraditional
sources, the less likely it is that everything
students need to succeed in an online course is
accessible, says Pratik Patel, chair of the information
access committee at the American Council of the
Blind. Legal Recourse None of the advocacy groups
contacted by Inside Higher Ed could pinpoint the exact
number of blind students currently enrolled in
U.S. colleges, but Hermann, of AHEAD, says the
proportion is very, very small. Only three to five percent
of college students report having any disability
at all, Hermann says, and that includes learning
and mental disorders. Blindness is, she says, a â?olow-incidence
disability.� This means that advocates for the
blind often need to use federal
anti-discrimination laws to keep from being left
in the dust on new technologies.
Last summer, the NFB and the American Council of
the Blind sued Arizona State University under the
Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws, forcing
it to end a pilot program designed to assess the
educational uses of Amazonâ?Ts Kindle DX, which
had an inaccessible menu feature. The U.S. Justice Department
subsequently forced three other institutions to
shut down their Kindle pilots. So if online
education presents so many obstacles to accessibility, why
has no one filed a similar lawsuit against any of
the institutions that offer it? â?oItâ?Ts a good
question,â? says Hermann. "Itâ?Ts the collegesâ?T obligation
under [federal law] to make every program of
their institution accessible.â? â?oObviously,
weâ?Tre cautious about talking about our legal strategies,â?
says Danielsen, the NFB spokesman. However, the
spokesman did note that litigation is an
â?oexpensive, time consuming process, and outcomes are by no means
guaranteed.� In other words, you do not sue
unless you know you can win. â?oFrom our
perspective, itâ?Ts a last resort,â? Danielsen says. Eric Bridges,
the government affairs director at the American
Council of the Blind, noted that advocacy groups
have had little success with litigation dealing with a
similar topic: the accessibility of college
websites. â?oSome of the litigation thatâ?Ts been
done over website access has not always been the greatest
as far as settlements and outcomes, so I think
some organizations have been hesitant,� he
says. The chances of a successful lawsuit might become clearer
sometime in the next year or two. The Department
of Justice has suggested that it might soon
articulate exactly what kind of legal recourse blind and otherwise
disabled students have with respect to the
accessibility of online courses. Last month, the
department issued several notices, saying it is collecting
public comment on a number of topics related to
accessibility and the Web in preparation to lay
out the specific obligations of various institutions under
federal law. While online education is not
explicitly mentioned, Bridges says his group is
planning to lobby that it be included on the rulemaking agenda.
â?oWhat theyâ?Tre doing is putting out
feelers,â? he says. â?oThey want to see. how the
industry feels about  even broaching this subject.� The department
will probably release a more specific agenda
within a year or so, Bridges says, adding that he
would be surprised if online learning does not make the
cut. In June, the Justice Department and the
Education Department jointly released a "dear
colleague" letter to colleges, warning them that the government
plans to crack down on institutions that require
disabled students to use emerging technology that
does not comply with federal accessibility laws. This,
again, did not explicitly mention online
education, but Bridges says it was a shot across
the bow. John Wodatch, chief of the disability rights section
of the Justice Department, did not respond to
repeated requests for comment. However, at a June
meeting of the National Association of College and University
Attorneys, Wodatch urged college officials to
think about the accessibility of their online
courses to blind students and those with limited manual dexterity,
indicating that the government may indeed be
preparing to address the issue. Until then, the
innovators will presumably continue to populate online learning
environments with new tools, while assistive
technology providers and their blind students try to keep up. Link:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/23/accessibility
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