In this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss the issue of accessibility for emergency remote teaching and online education. Are we making problems worse for the fall?

Hosts:

* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly

Transcription:

Phil: Hello. Welcome to another episode of COVID Transitions. I’m Phil Hill, and I’m here again with Kevin Kelly and Jeanette Wiseman. This week, what we wanted to talk about is the subject of accessibility. Accessibility for students to online learning environments, particularly given the transition, the remote transition of teaching the spring and leading into the fall and try to tease this out about what’s really happening. Do we have a problem here?

I had mentioned in a previous podcast that there’s a ticking time bomb of accessibility that’s not being addressed. If we go back to early April, there was an article that set a good context. It was at Inside Higher Ed, titled Accessibility Suffers during a Pandemic. It essentially said, quote, “And the quick shift by colleges from in-person to online instruction in response to the coronavirus pandemic. [00:01:00] The needs of students with disabilities can sometimes be overlooked.” It quotes an accessibility coordinator for Iowa State University saying, “Wiley said although some faculty members may have discussed digital accessibility in the past, they may not be aware of the importance of insuring it for all students and may not understand that it goes beyond making special accommodations for individual students that specifically request it.”

It really is talking about another quote or somebody saying what we worry about now is that in the rush to move everything online in light of COVID-19, universities are paying even less attention to whether it’s accessible or not. That’s the point that we wanted to focus on. Are we actually falling backwards in terms of accessibility because it’s always a challenge, but are things getting worse?

If we jump ahead to some of the surveys that we’ve been looking at, we certainly [00:02:00] saw in the Every Learner Everywhere, Time for Class report, where Tyton Partners had put this out. They talked a lot about how we need to ensure accessibility for all students. It’s showing that faculty are saying, we understand this needs to happen, but it’s not necessarily that it is happening. If you jump to the CHLOE report from Quality Matters and Eduventures, they essentially are saying little was spent on accessibility needs.

There was one chart where they were asking schools, when you did investments for the remote teaching, where did you spend that money? Accessibility accommodations across the whole gamut, only five percent of online officers reported that they invested in accessibility due to the increased need [00:03:00] for this subject. That’s really where we are or what the survey data and some of the analysis is telling us is that we have an issue that’s becoming a bigger problem because of this transition to remote learning.

Let’s start out with discussing a little bit more why is this happening. Faculty are saying, hey, we’re aware we need to do accessibility, but there are indications it’s not happening. So why is that?

Kevin: I think you talked about the quote, little attention’s being paid. I think it’s partly because there’s attention deficit disorder going on right now at an organizational level where they cannot focus on so many things at once. We need to think about ways to support institutions,