Berkeley Will Delete Online Content

https://www.insidehighered.com/news...delete-publicly-available-educational-content

The University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts in response to a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the educational content accessible to people with disabilities.

Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university’s webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them.

The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to listeners or viewers with disabilities.

Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the announcement in a March 1 statement.

“This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available,” Koshland said. “Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit without consent.”

The Justice Department, following an investigation, in August determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.

Stacy Nowak, one of the complainants, referred comments to the Justice Department and the National Association of the Deaf. The NAD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The department ordered the university to make the content accessible to people with disabilities. Berkeley, however, publicly floated an alternative: removing everything from public view.

“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,” Koshland wrote in a Sept. 20 statement. “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.”

Now the university has settled on that option.

Koshland said that Berkeley has since 2015 piloted requiring university credentials to access recorded lecture content. That system has so far proved more effective at helping the university accommodate students and others at Berkeley with disabilities.

The Justice Department’s investigation did not look at how Berkeley serves students with disabilities, only the accessibility of content it offers to the public.

 

[Vitriol]

us news but not politics.

 

[Literally Hitler]

So the university can either spend a ton of money adding subtitles to everything, or they can face a Gigantic Fine for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. So restricting everything is the best action the University can take.

I'm Surprised the Justice department didn't see this coming.

Here's a comment that perfectly sums up my thoughts on this.

I realize there's some nuance going on, but I can't help but think that when an accessibility law results in pulling massive amounts of free to the public content that you're doing it wrong..

 

[melty]

Is this going to lead to that thing sjws do, where they describe every picture for blind people with descriptions like "person of unclear gender identity, wearing a purple hijab with a checkered pattern, smiles directly at the camera. In the background there is a forest. The trees are mostly oak and it seems to be fall" etc

 

[DuskEngine]

Just crowdsource the accessibility compliance stuff. There are tons of nerds who do this shit for free.

All the content's going to be scraped anyway so idk how they hope to prevent piracy with this.

 

[Some JERK]

Is their pool of Postgraduate slave labor busy on another project or something?

 

[millais]

Is their pool of Postgraduate slave labor busy on another project or something?

i know right? at my uni, students could earn a few dollars by transcribing audio recordings of various faculty meetings and seminars. It was a pretty good system for getting all that material into text form without breaking the budget.

 

[AnOminous]

Is this going to lead to that thing sjws do, where they describe every picture for blind people with descriptions like "person of unclear gender identity, wearing a purple hijab with a checkered pattern, smiles directly at the camera. In the background there is a forest. The trees are mostly oak and it seems to be fall" etc

Soon they'll just make STEM education illegal because retards can't into science.

 

[melty]

Soon they'll just make STEM education illegal because exceptional individuals can't into science.

GOOD. then people who want to learn useful stuff can go to a different school where they won't have their time wasted by lunatics.

I went to a primarily STEM university. Take a wild guess how much of this crap went on there.

I guess Berkeley is supposed like that but it's Berkeley

 

[Zarkov]

I remember a time when we laughed heartily at Kylie Brooks for his ridiculous demands of captioning every fucking picture out of "respect" for the visually or mentally-challenged.

Now there are actual, non-retarded people that are seriously legislating on that shit.

 

[AnOminous]

GOOD. then people who want to learn useful stuff can go to a different school where they won't have their time wasted by lunatics.

I went to a primarily STEM university. Take a wild guess how much of this crap went on there.

I guess Berkeley is supposed like that but it's Berkeley

This wasn't Berkeley's fault. This was the federal Department of Justice that did this stupid shit.

 

[DuskEngine]

This wasn't Berkeley's fault. This was the federal Department of Justice that did this stupid shit.

Berkeley are still the ones who decided to take the content offline rather than explore all the free or cheap alternatives available.

The fact that removing free content is a necessary alternative to making said content accessible is clearly some bullshit with the ADA, though.

 

[AnOminous]

Berkeley are still the ones who decided to take the content offline rather than explore all the free or cheap alternatives available.

The fact that removing free content is a necessary alternative to making said content accessible is clearly some bullshit with the ADA, though.

There aren't cheap alternatives when the only way to make it accessible is put captions on everything. Even a software solution to that is going to be expensive. The DoJ basically forced them to remove it because that is somehow better than some useless fuck like Kylie Brooks not being able to use it, which he wouldn't have anyway.

 

[Bob's Fries]

Not surprised by the deletion. Berkeley administration has always been literal shills. We have a meme page of the school that used to meme about our Chancellor misusing public funds.

 

[DuskEngine]

There aren't cheap alternatives when the only way to make it accessible is put captions on everything.

They could have selected a small selection of the videos from each subject to caption and paywalled the rest until they had enough funds to work through it.

They could have tried appealing the DoJ order, pointing out that they don't have the funds to make them all accessible right now.

They could have approached the community and been like 'We don't want to take these down, but unless we can get them captioned, we will be forced to.' and tried to crowdsource at least a chunk of them.

The DoJ basically forced them to remove it because that is somehow better than some useless fuck like Kylie Brooks not being able to use it, which he wouldn't have anyway.

The DoJ forced them to make it accessible, and Berkeley are the ones who decided to restrict it instead.

Honestly it looks to me like Berkeley took an opportunity to paywall free content and shift the blame for it. They even acknowledge that stopping other people from using it for personal profit is one of the reasons.

EDIT: And to be extra classy about it, they went about it in a way that puts the blame on cripples and retards for having the temerity to want to learn shit instead of just admitting that they're Jews.

 

[CWCchange]

Wait, a Silicon Valley school doesn't use an LMS for online classes?

 

[AnOminous]

They could have selected a small selection of the videos from each subject to caption and paywalled the rest until they had enough funds to work through it.

They could have tried appealing the DoJ order, pointing out that they don't have the funds to make them all accessible right now.

They could have approached the community and been like 'We don't want to take these down, but unless we can get them captioned, we will be forced to.' and tried to crowdsource at least a chunk of them.

They only had them available for free in the first place as a byproduct of the paid education they're already doing. Anything that taxes that makes it of negative value for them, and then no matter how efficient you make paying that tax, the cost/benefit analysis just says dump it. They weren't getting anything for it and there's no reason to believe they would have.

 

[DuskEngine]

They only had them available for free in the first place as a byproduct of the paid education they're already doing. Anything that taxes that makes it of negative value for them, and then no matter how efficient you make paying that tax, the cost/benefit analysis just says dump it. They weren't getting anything for it and there's no reason to believe they would have.

It was already a negative value for them when they had it up, considering that other people were profiting off their work, supposedly. Which leads me to believe this was going to happen anyway, sooner or later.

Anyway, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable to expect a major educational institution to make its publicly available content accessible to the disabled tbh

 

[AnOminous]

It was already a negative value for them when they had it up, considering that other people were profiting off their work, supposedly. Which leads me to believe this was going to happen anyway, sooner or later.

Anyway, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable to expect a major educational institution to make its publicly available content accessible to the disabled tbh

"Publicly available content" hasn't even been a thing until recently. Anything that disrupts that and essentially destroys it because it's less than perfect is terrible.