The national Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities (COLSD) recently released their 2015 annual publication Equity Matters: Digital and Online Learning for Students with DisabilitiesWhile the PDF does not currently have an Executive Summary, I'm hoping they will produce on soon The 150 pages include some very interesting information,which some COLSD staff have analyzed and hopefully will be included in the Executive Summary. Almost half of the publication includes State and Territory Scans that look at policy questions related to online learning activities and students with disabilities.
(I'm a member of the COLSD Technical Working Group but we had nothing to do with the publication.)
7 comments:
Ray, wondering what you think of the publication? In this entry you've just described it, as opposed to commenting on it...
I was introduced to the publication at a meeting, and was able to hear about how the data collected for the states was interpreted. Unfortunately that, which I thought was the most valuable element of the report, was not included. Note I suggested an executive summary which would include that information. And, while it would be possible for others to go through the data and come up with summary and interpretation, the folks that collected the data and are most familiar with it, should be the ones to do the summary and interpretation.
The excuse was time -- saying they needed to get it out to meet OSEP deadlines. So much could be said about that. I did request that they create the Executive Summary and put it up on the website. Still waiting.
As you know, the COLSD folks have an article in that special issue of Online Learning that Anissa and I guest edited. I'm still disappointed in the level and amount of research that has been produced by this group given how much funding that they received.
I agree with you about the lack of research produced. Though I don't know, I speculate that in part OSEP has some responsibility there, and you'll note that pretty much the entire leadership team that started the Center is no longer there. I do think there's a reason for that, I just don't know the details. I do know that the initial team knew almost nothing about online and didn't take advantage of the TWG to get up to speed. At the end of the first year they were saying they'd discovered things Matt and I could easily have explained, and tried to, but of course, they had the Ph.D.s so what could we know.
What do you mean that the OSEP has some responsibility?
I mean I do hold them responsible on many fronts. For example, the fix was in for this competition from the beginning. About a half dozen institutions submitted to the RFP. One institution read the RFP wrong and screwed up their proposal. Magically, the competition was re-opened and all those who submitted were asked to revise their proposals along the lines of the proposal submitted by the institution that screwed up with a two to three week time frame to turn the revisions around, with no additional pages to work with. Unsurprisingly, the institution that screwed up their first RFP submission was the one that was selected.
I didn't see any indication at the start of the award that the OSEP program officers had any better understanding of online education or of the issues with students with disabilities in online learning. If they had, I'm sure the initial projects would have either not been allowed or there would have been changes. And, had they known more, they might have made a different award.
That may explain why the fix was in on who was awarded the center in the first place. OSEP were all special education people, so they wanted the center to go to more special education people. I know for a fact that all or almost all of the other submissions were folks that had a much better grounding in online learning in general or K-12 online learning specifically.
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