{"id":6527,"date":"2016-09-27T04:02:34","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T04:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=6527"},"modified":"2016-09-27T04:05:06","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T04:05:06","slug":"ada-attack-on-online-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/09\/ada-attack-on-online-courses\/","title":{"rendered":"The ADA Attack on Online Courses Hurts the Disabled, Too – Article by Alex Tabarrok"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>Alex Tabarrok<\/span>
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The Department of Justice has sent a letter to UC Berkeley<\/a> threatening a lawsuit unless the university modifies all of its free online educational materials\u00a0to meet conditions of accessibility.\u00a0In response the\u00a0Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\u2026we have attempted to maximize the accessibility of free, online content that we have made available to the public. Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities.<\/p>\n

\u2026We look forward to continued dialog with the Department of Justice regarding the requirements of the ADA and options for compliance. Yet we do so with the realization that, due to our current financial constraints, we might not be able to continue to provide free public content under the conditions laid out by the Department of Justice to the extent we have in the past.<\/p>\n

In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In short, the DOJ is saying that unless all have access, none can and UC Berkeley is replying that none will. I sympathize with UC Berkeley\u2019s position. The cost\u00a0of making materials accessible can be high and the cost is extremely high per disabled student. It would likely be much cheaper to help each disabled student on an individual basis than requiring all the material to be rewritten, re-formatted and reprogrammed (\u00e0 la one\u00a0famous example<\/a>).<\/p>\n

An even greater\u00a0absurdity is that online materials are typically much easier to access than classroom materials even when they do not fully meet accessibility rules<\/a>. How many teachers, for example, come with captions? (And in multiple languages?) How about volume control? How easy is it for the blind\u00a0to get to campus? In theory, in-class materials are also subject to the ADA\u00a0but in practice everyone knows that that is basically unworkable. I guarantee, for example, that professors throughout the UC-system routinely show videos or use powerpoints that do not meet accessibility guidelines. Thus, by raising the costs of online education, the most accessible educational format, the ADA may have the unintended consequence of slowing access. Put simply, raising the costs of online education makes\u00a0it more difficult for anyone to\u00a0access educational materials including the disabled<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Addendum:<\/strong> By the way, if you are wondering, all of MRU\u2019s videos for our Principles of Microeconomics<\/a> and Principles of Macroeconomics<\/a>\u00a0courses are captioned in English and most are also professionally captioned in Spanish, Arabic and\u00a0Chinese.<\/p>\n

This post first appeared at Marginal Revolution.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He blogs at Marginal Revolution with Tyler Cowen.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Tabarrok ****************************** The Department of Justice has sent a letter to UC Berkeley threatening a lawsuit unless the university modifies all of its free online educational materials\u00a0to meet conditions of accessibility.\u00a0In response the\u00a0Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education writes: \u2026we have attempted to maximize the accessibility of free, online content that we have made available to the public. Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,177],"tags":[4888,4323,4890,952,953,4891,4892,936,916,4889,2014,25,1505],"class_list":["post-6527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-justice","tag-ada","tag-alex-tabarrok","tag-berkeley","tag-classroom","tag-college","tag-department-of-justice","tag-disabled","tag-egalitarianism","tag-learning","tag-online-courses","tag-students","tag-united-states","tag-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6527"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6531,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6527\/revisions\/6531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}