STEMFaculty
From PublicWiki
Outline of Talking Points for STEM Faculty Group
DHH Cyber Community Summit June 25-27, 2008
5/20/2008
Please note: this is a preliminary list in progress. Feedback and contributions are greatly appreciated.
The following points focus on mainstream classrooms where majority of students are hearing. The goal of accommodation should be to encourage a 2-way (or many-way) interaction between students and instructor. Many of the same issues arise for accommodating deaf and hard of hearing students and a hearing instructor or accommodating hearing students and a deaf or hard of hearing instructor.
- Problems faced by deaf students in mainstream classrooms
- Visual dispersion
- Students must divide their visual attention between instructor, overhead slides, handouts, interpreter/captioner, other students, and notes.
- Access to appropriate accommodation
- The best interpreter/captioner may not be co-located.
- Barriers to classroom participation
- Language barriers, interpreter delay, feeling excluded
- Barriers to after-class activities
- Examples include group work, study sessions, etc.
- Visual dispersion
- Accessible teaching styles for d/hh students
- Pausing for the interpreter/captioner
- Example: Ensuring hearing students don’t answer questions before interpreter is finished
- Teaching to the “top of the class” versus more inclusive teaching for all.
- Turn-taking and discussion
- Identifying yourself / standing before speaking
- Likely will have positive affect other hearing students as well
- Universal design in teaching
- Example: Having each student take a turn with public class notes
- Large lecture style vs. small group discussion
- The importance of 2-way, N-way communication
- Pausing for the interpreter/captioner
- Accessible use of classroom technology
- Captioned videos
- “Talking while doing” increases potential for missed content
- Students must “follow along” with displayed technology
- PowerPoint can help convey information in a visual manner. This may compliment oral lecture.
- When projection of slides in a classroom, often lights may be dimmed -- negative effect on students who speech-read or rely on an interpreter.
- Copies of slides available for review after class for any material that may be missed during lecture.
- If rich media is included in the slides, then it should be captioned.
- New tools available for recording lectures and posting them for students to see after class. Most use audio recording.
- Research from liberatedlearning.com on speech-recognition for transcribing lectures and archiving lecture material for students to see after class.
- Use of video in the classroom, availability of captioning.
- Particular challenges with the use of YouTube or other online streaming media.
- Training faculty on best use of available interpreting and assistive technology resources:
- Instructions on how to best lecture with an ASL interpreter. (Pausing when appropriate, responding to requests from the interpreter, etc.)
- C-Print or other real-time captioning systems with a professional captioner.
- Providing list of specialized terminology to interpreter/captioner before class.
- How to best coordinate visual presentations with an interpreting setting?
- How to use various audio FM-transmitter/inductive-loop/microphone/hearing-aid technologies.
- How to present multimedia in the classroom with the presence of interpreters, captioners, or students using induction-loop systems.
- Changes in teaching style due to remote accommodation
- Increased delay in feedback loop
- Technology setup (cameras, microphones, laptops). Who is responsible?
- Technology failures and recovery
- Repeating questions from audience (or adjust location of microphone)
- Providing lecture notes or Powerpoint slides to captioner ahead of time so vocabulary can be added to their database
- Issues of finding the right interpreter to match required technical expertise.
- Issues of turn-taking in video-conferencing (see research from Konstantinidis & Fels at Ryerson U.)
- Communication outside the classroom
- Encourage/facilitate/moderate group work
- Email, wiki, pre- and post-class discussion
- “Blended learning” – hybrid distance learning and in-class learning
- Email or instant messaging as important communication channels.
- Standard texting/paging/relay technologies.
- Making texting, TTY/TTD, video-conferencing capabilities available for faculty.
- Informing/training faculty about how to use these technologies.
- Faculty may not have a university/official mobile device with a number that they feel comfortable sharing with students. They should not have to share their personal mobile. Having a qwerty-keyboard mobile divide on loan to a faculty member for the semester while they have a deaf student in the classroom may improve communication.
- Informing faculty about how relaying technologies work so that they know how to take advantage of them.
- Facilitating impromptu interactions after class, around campus, during office hours, etc.
- Techniques for facilitating interaction on group projects. Technologies like wikis or online-collaboration to facilitate group work.
- Interactions with administrative offices and services on campus.
- What to expect from deaf or hard of hearing students
- Deaf students are typically good at self-advocation, whereas hard of hearing students may be less assertive. For example, the accommodation that has worked well for a student in high school may not work well in large lecture classroom or multi-student group discussions. How to encourage and recognize when students need help.
- Request at beginning of semester for notetakers among the class for the deaf/hoh student
- Educational background of students, and how to deal with mixed backgrounds
- Participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in atypical classroom settings:
- Laboratory settings: instructions, safety issues, etc.
- Field trips, service-learning, etc.
- Physical education, artistic/dance studios, acting/drama/theatre classes, music theory/listening courses, etc.
- Standardized testing on campus (some universities have competency exams).
- Participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in social/cultural activities on campus:
- Socializing with other students in typical campus settings.
- Promoting interactions outside of the classroom.
- Student groups, sports teams, on-campus performances and cultural events (often students may need to attend a certain number of events for credit), etc.
- Safety Issues:
- In addition to standard building safety and other issues, campuses may have unique emergency issues.
- Campus violence has prompted the creation of new emergency notification systems -- accessibility of these systems is important.
- Future directions:
- What kinds of technologies can we expect in 20 or 30 years? Where is this headed?
- Better video-conferencing technologies for remote interpreting and viewing of information in multiple formats simultaneously (video, lecture, captioning, interpreting, etc.).
- Improvements in speech-recognition that impact captioning and transcription of lectures.
- English-to-ASL machine translation technologies.
- ASL scripting and generation technologies (allow creation of animations for websites).
Members of the STEM Faculty Group
Facilitators
Richard E. Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/ladner
Caroline Solomon, Associate Professor, Biology Department, Gallaudet University, http://biology.gallaudet.edu/x3708.xml
Members
Catherine Beaton, Associate Professor, Information Technology Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, http://www.it.rit.edu/~cii/
Matt Huenerfauth, Assistant Professor, The City University of New York (CUNY), Department of Computer Science, Queens College, Computer Science Doctoral Program, Graduate Center, http://eniac.cs.qc.cuny.edu/matt/
Joseph Stanislaw, Assistant Professor, Information and Computing Studies, National Technical Institute of the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology
