Teaching online and inclusion

 I’ve been teaching a completely online class this semester. I’ve done partly online classes, and practically live online anyway, so I thought this would be a fairly simple thing for me to do.

It has not. It has been a real eye-opener for thinking about student needs.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve been working with is making the class compliant with the rules for students with disabilities. The rules are that whether there are students in the class who have declared disabilities or not, you must make every item in the class as readily available and accessible as if there were students with disabilities.

This means video lectures need closed captioning. There is voice recognition software that does closed captioning automatically, which is great, but it never does it perfectly. Every time I say, “Doctor Zen,” the software puts in, “doctors in.” This means you have to go in, listen to the entire lecture, and proofread the captioning for entire lecture.

Similarly, every image needs a description so that someone who is blind or otherwise visually impaired can understand the material. And many scientific diagrams are complex and challenging. Today, I was forced with trying to write a complete description of this:

Here’s what I came up with for the concept map above:

Human genome influences traits. Human genome has 2 copies in every cell. 1 copy is made of 3 billion base pairs. Cell makes up tissue. In cell, genome divided into nuclear genome and mitochondrial genome. Cells manifest traits. Tissues make up organs. Tissues manifest traits. Organs make up body. Body manifests traits. Traits leads back to Lesson 1. Mitochondrial genome has 1 circular chromosome. Mitochondrial genome is many per cell. Circular chromosome is many per cell. Circular chromosome made of nucleic acid and histone proteins. Nuclear genome is one per cell. Nuclear genome is 23 pairs of linear chromosomes. 23 pairs of linear chromosomes has 22 pairs called autosomes. 23 pairs of linear chromosomes has 1 pair called sex chromosomes. Sex chromosomes are XX for female. Sex chromosomes are XY for male. 23 pairs of linear chromosomes are made of nucleic acid and histone proteins. Nucleic acid wraps around histone proteins. Nucleic acid has two types, DNA and RNA. RNA leads to lesson 3. DNA is composed on deoxynucleotides. DNA is double stranded. DNA composed of deoxynucleotides. Double stranded leads to helical shape. Double stranded by base pairs. Deoxynucleotides are 4 types of nitrogenous bases. Nitrogenous bases can form base pairs. Nitrogenous base connects to A, T, C, G. A base pairs with T and vice versa. G base pairs with C and vice versa.

Writing that description... took time.

Anyone who think that online teaching is going to be some sort of big time saver that will allow instructors to reach a lot more students has never prepared an online class. It’s long. It’s hard. It’s often bordering on tortuous (hence the “No Mr. Bond” gag at the top of the post).

These things take time, but I don’t begrudge the time spent. It’s the right thing to do. It’s forced me to think more deeply about how I can provide more resources that are more helpful to more students. It’s not just deaf students who can benefit from closed captions, for instance. Someone who can hear could benefit from seeing words spelled out, or maybe use them when they are listening in a noisy environment, or one where sound would be distracting.

And I keep thinking that if I think it takes a lot of work to put these it, it’s nothing compared to students who need these materials who have to navigate through courses every day.

External links

Flowcharts and concept maps

“It makes no sense!” versus history

There’s no channel 1 on televisions in North America.

It makes no sense.

That is, it makes no sense from the point of view of an engineer that had to design a channel system today, starting from scratch.

It makes sense from the point of view of a historian examining how broadcasting developed in North America.

Sometimes, discussions about academic systems of various sorts feel like people complaining mightily about how stupid it is that there is no channel 1, and proposing fix after fix after fix to correct it. And they do so in an environment where lots of people aren’t bothered by the lack of channel 1. And they do so even if the proposed fixes will mean some people’s televisions won’t work any more.

“Sure, but they’ll be better televisions!” Maybe, but it misses that a consistent channel numbering system is not what most people want out of a television.

The NSF GRFP problem continues

This morning, a fine scientist congratulated two undergraduates in her lab about winning National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards. I thought, “Huh. They’re out? And two seems like a lot from one lab.”

A few years ago, Terry McGlynn wrote an important blog post about how tilted the playing field is for the NSF GRFP awards. He compared awards to Harvard students (with about 7,000 undergraduates) to the more than 20 campuses in the California State University system (over 400,000, according to a check of Wikipedia).

The NSF is good about making it easy to find a list of all 2,000 awards in this program. I went looking for the same comparison of one Ivy League university to an entire state’s system. Embarrassingly, I screwed up the calculation on the first pass, not realizing that several California State universities don’t say “California State” in their name, unlike the University of Texas institutions.

Harvard got 43, and all of California State get 50 (thanks to Terry for counting here and here).

Cal Poly Pomona 4
Cal Poly SLO 5
CSUCI 1
CSUDH 1
CSU Fresno 1
CSU Fullerton 8
CSULB 2
CSULA 1
Sac State 1
CSUSB 1
CSUN 5
CSUSM 3
SDSU 6
SFSU 6
SJSU 3
Humboldt State 2

So one lab in Harvard alone equaled the entire combined output of eight different California State universities (separately, not combined).

If this sort of pattern intrigues you, you must for to Natalie Telis’s post where she digs down into the numbers. Not just this year’s, but over 28,000 awardees worth of data, from 2011 to 2017. It’s bloody brilliant. One of her first points is, “The most expensive undergraduate schools have an extreme excess of (NSF GRFP) recipients.” She also makes some comments on Twitter about this.

I can’t wait to see what she finds for 2018 data.

Matt Cover did some similar things the previous year, and found no relationship between institutional enrollment and number of grants.

Update, 2 August 2019: Here’s the second half of Natalie Tellis’s analysis of GRFP awards.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
The price of a GRFP, part 1
Matt Cover thread from 2017