Accessibility and Ed Tech

Lawsuits work.

Failure to provide accessible technologies for learners with disabilities can have serious consequences for universities. Many institutions have been sued in recent years for noncompliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act, ratcheting up pressure around accessibility issues. As a result, some universities are thinking about how they might work together to test the technology they buy and make sure it is accessible to all.

What would have been nice is if universities had cared about accessibility without being sued. Even nicer if Congress wasn't threatening to take this tool away. 

Free College: Labor and Who is going to Teach?

Matt Reed, a writer at Insider Higher Ed and a community college Dean, wrote a blog post on "Free Community College," asking whether it's worth going free if that means hiring LOTS more adjuncts.

If free college required a dramatically higher adjunct percentage, should we do it?
Yes, that’s a loaded question. It assumes that the meanings of both “free” and “dramatically higher” are transparent. For the sake of argument, let’s say that “free” means “no tuition or fees,” and “dramatically higher” means half again as high as now. (So a college with 50% of its sections taught by adjuncts would move to 75%.) Assume general cuts to administration, just so we don’t get lost in pretending that it would be enough to solve the problem in itself.

I've been disappointed that the conversation around higher education in this presidential election has not faced the fundamental labor issue here. Bernie Sanders' plan for free college included a line that 70% or of all public university faculty would be tenure-track, but I've been told on background that they never figured out what that would mean from a budget perspective. At least Sanders and/or his staff put the line in his proposal. I haven't heard anyone else discussing it.

What good is free college if the education is provided by contingent and impoverished faculty? 

My mantra remains: low cost / high quality - we've got to link these conversations.

My prediction: We're going to get at-best huge swaths of job-training colleges that adequately prepare most Americans for the jobs of yesterday and today. Meanwhile, elites will keep getting liberal arts and science degrees. And it'll be better than students going into vast debts for those jobs, but it will solidify, rather than erode, class barriers.

Because right now, the teachers aren't even in the conversation.

I wrote about it here:

• Obama's "Free community college" proposal - Who teaches? (Chronicle)
• Low Cost AND High Quality - Politics and Free College (CNN)

Autism, Academia, and Why Media Representation Matters

Earlier in the week, Scott Weingart had a brave, essay on being autistic in academic, published in Inside Higher Education.

Admitting mental illness or neurodevelopmental disorder is dangerous, unless you're a middle-class white man diagnosed on the autism spectrum. If you're black and/or a woman, or if you have depression or anxiety, you may be deemed too unstable to work in a modern business or too dangerous to trust as a neighbor. But if you're well-adjusted white dude who scores low on the autism severity spectrum? Have a job at Google!

It's from this acknowledged position of privilege that I choose to come out, under my own name and from a non-tenure-track staff position at a major research university. According to several independent professional diagnoses over the course of my life, I am both autistic and ADHD. (Whether either or both of these actually constitute a “disorder” I leave to the reader.)

It is terrifying to admit this.

I want to highlight one paragraph in particular, under the theme - representation matters. I frequently post about the importance I place in media. Here's Weingart:

My decision to write this essay was precipitated by the CBS TV show Elementary. The show currently features a budding romance between two autism-spectrum characters, and watching it now makes me realize how much I wish I had seen it growing up. Things that have never made much sense might have been easier for me to understand. Maybe if I had seen more familiar faces going through similar difficulties, I would have sought help sooner.
So here I am, presenting my face to the world: I am an autistic academic.

Looking forward to following his work.