Education Tech Can't Leave Disabled Students Behind

The Department of Education estimates 11% of new college freshmen will arrive on campus with some sort of disability. That’s become a huge issue as institutions try to keep pace with technological changes while providing accessibility to all its students, whether they have vision or hearing problems to learning and cognitive disabilities.

State and federal legislators have stepped up with laws and regulations to provide equal access, and the industry is making progress. Blackboard claims its products meet industry standards and must gain approval from people with disabilities through partnerships with organizations such as the National Federation for the Blind before they ever reach the market.

But laws often have no teeth, according to Dianne Hengst, director of disability services at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a recent article that appeared at mysanantonio.com. Not only that, Hengst has also found students with disabilities do not always register with her office.

“(People with disabilities) don’t want to be segregated,” said Marti Hathorn, a blind graduate of UTSA and assistive technology supervisor at the San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. “We don’t want our own computer lab. I didn’t want to be left out of anything or cut corners. I wasn’t (in school) to get by, I wanted to do better than everyone else.”

Assistive technology could be as simple as curbs with handicap ramps and speech recognition software to more controversial ideas such as cochlear implants for children. For Hathorn, it included a screen magnifier, a closed-circuit television, and a scanner for her textbooks.

“When computer usage first took off, accessibility wasn’t even brought to the table,” she said. “Now it is starting to be a priority and is part of the discussion and more people with disabilities are speaking up.”

CourseSmart Integrates with BlackBoard

The Wall Street Journal reports that CourseSmart has developed a new integration platform to work seamlessly with Blackboard.  The single sign-on function allows students and faculty access to CourseSmart's digital course catalog by logging into the Blackboard Learn platform without having to sign into CourseSmart.  This means that faculty who are using Blackboard do not have to leave the platform and instead link required reading assignment, homework problems or other activities that exist in their digital course materials and share that information with their students.

The Blackboard Building Block for CourseSmart is free to higher education institutions, according to the article. Matthew Small, chief business officer at Blackboard says,  "The pilots we are currently running with CourseSmart as part of our signature partnership will continue to fuel this experience as they provide our clients with anytime, anywhere access to their digital course materials from any Web-enabled device, including mobile devices running on the iOS and Android(TM) OS platforms."

Blackboard Allows Sharing of Content

The Chronicle reports that Blackboard will add a “Share” button that will allow faculty to share course materials free and open to nonregistered students.  This is a big win for the Open Education Movement and for schools since they will  not be charged extra for additional viewing.  Blackboard’s “Share” initiative is partnering with Creative Commons where faculty will have the option to attach a Creative Commons license to the content.  Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, says his “goal is to have this kind of option in every commercial learning-management system and also open-source ones,” according to the article.

McGraw-Hill Digital Resource Platform

University Business has a new On-Demand web seminar (free if you sign up) on McGraw-Hill's new digital resource platform. According to the seminar, via the platform McGraw-Hill will give all professors full access to all curricular resources and tools, whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

For professors, getting access to relevant and trusted online instructional resources and tools has been an ad-hoc, hit-or-miss process. This web seminar will demonstrate McGraw-Hill Campus, a new service that provides all faculty members across campus with one-click, unlimited access to McGraw-Hill's entire library of academic e-content and associated tools - directly from within the course management system. There is no fee for the platform, and instructors can use it regardless of whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

This is the same platform which BlackBoard and McGraw-Hill have been piloting on different campuses this year. The McGraw-Hill tools include "an application to help faculty create digital course content and assignments and do automatic grading" and another which "lets faculty compile textbooks that use their own materials as well as content from the company's publishing portfolio." The integration of the tools with BlackBoard can allow students to buy the textbooks via a link on the course site.