e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: YouTube

  • Clarifications On UC Berkeley’s Accessibility Decision To Restrict Video Access

    I had planned earlier to write a post or two on the UC Berkeley video kerfuffle but kept getting sidetracked with more articles in trade press and national media. And there have been quite a few articles, but many if not most seem to focus on the decision as a short-term transaction – DOJ ruling, UC Berkeley decision to remove videos from public – rather than understand the broader implications. Before commenting on these implications, I thought it would be useful to clarify some misconceptions that I have seen.

    The BerkeleyX program (with edX) was a big part of the DOJ ruling

    While most coverage has focused on the removal of YouTube videos created by lecture capture systems – automatically recorded and posted videos without post-production or packaging – the original DOJ ruling was based on two complaints, the first being usage of BerkeleyX MOOCs and second being usage of lecture capture videos. (more…)

  • Miami, Harvard and MIT: Disability discrimination lawsuits focused on schools as content providers

    In the discussions at Google+ based on last week’s post about the Miami University of Ohio disability discrimination lawsuit ((Insert joke here about G+ and its hundreds of active users.)), George Station made two important points that deserve more visibility.

    It’s been a-coming for several years now. Cal State has some pretty strong rules in place for compliance with ADA and state-level disability laws. Still, [Universal Design for Learning] UDL is a little-known acronym on any campus you care to visit, and staff support is probably one person in an office, except for Miami of Ohio as of this week, I guess…

    Add the recent edX settlement with the US Department of Justice, and the whole direction of edtech changes…

    Put another way, it should come as no surprise that the US Department of Justice is ramping up its enforcement of disability discrimination regulations in the education world. Captioning service provider CaptionSync has an excellent summary of the field, written before the DOJ intervention at Miami. (more…)

  • Ed Tech World on Notice: Miami U disability discrimination lawsuit could have major effect

    This week the US Department of Justice, citing Title II of ADA, decided to intervene in a private lawsuit filed against Miami University of Ohio regarding disability discrimination based on ed tech usage. Call this a major escalation and just ask the for-profit industry how big an effect DOJ intervention can be. From the complaint:

    Miami University uses technologies in its curricular and co-curricular programs, services, and activities that are inaccessible to qualified individuals with disabilities, including current and former students who have vision, hearing, or learning disabilities. Miami University has failed to make these technologies accessible to such individuals and has otherwise failed to ensure that individuals with disabilities can interact with Miami University’s websites and access course assignments, textbooks, and other curricular and co-curricular materials on an equal basis with non-disabled students. These failures have deprived current and former students and others with disabilities a full and equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from all of Miami University’s educational opportunities.

    The complaint then calls out the nature of assistive technologies that should be available, including screen readers, Braille display, audio descriptions, captioning, and keyboard navigation. The complaint specifies that Miami U uses many technologies and content that is incompatible with these assistive technologies. (more…)

  • Educational videos now outrank cat videos – my ticket onto NPR

    From NPR this morning:

    With 1 billion unique visitors per month, YouTube offers a glimpse of the online world’s tastes and interests. And this year, one notable trend — for better or worse — is that people are spending more time watching videos about video games. [snip]

    In case this has you thinking, “Oh great, another way that YouTube has given us to waste time (as if cat videos weren’t enough),” here’s the good news: The number of people watching educational videos on YouTube has surpassed cats.

    And with that premise, I found my ticket onto NPR (segment starting at 2:54).

  • Wikis for Teaching and Learning

    I’m enjoying browsing around YouTube’s EDU pages. Lots of good stuff, from the profound to the practical. At the latter end of the spectrum, here’s a good primer for teachers who are curious about using a wiki in their classes but don’t know where to start:

  • Video Literacy

    There’s an old joke among instructional designers. In response to a request for “gratuitous” video in a course, we ask, “What moves?” The implication, of course, is that if you are not showing content that is inherently dynamic and in motion then there is no point to video.

    How last millennium can you be?

    The joke betrays a lack of sophistication–of literacy–regarding the expressive power of the moving image. I think we need to take video more seriously and give it a privileged place right beside the written word in freshman composition classes. Because video can express some of the same concepts we ask students to relate using the written word, only more powerfully, more compactly and…well…just differently. (more…)