Posted on 03/11/2017 11:33:23 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
Berkeley previously housed an online library consisting of more than 20,000 videos of lectures. These videos were free and accessible to the public. But they are free no longer: next week, administrators will withdraw access to anyone who isn't a Berkeley student or professor.
Two employees of Gallaudet University—a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.—filed a complaint with DOJ alleging that Berkeley's online content was inaccessible to the hearing-disabled community. After looking into the matter, DOJ determined that Berkeley had indeed violated the Americans with Disabilities Act
Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the videos, or remove them from public view. Cost-conscious administrators chose the latter option.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
“Professors at small colleges are threatened by the existence of free video lectures by world-class professors.”
I graduated from UC Berzerkley in 1965. Back then the only “world-class professor” there was Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. And he was probably the only one of the “so-called world-class professors” who actually taught students, something that the rest of them daned to do at all because of their “research grants!” It got so bad that the University had to make teaching some classes mandatory as a condition of continued employment.
Better get rid of the Berkeley football program. Handicapped students can’t play.
I had watched several online courses from Berkeley, MIT, Yale and others. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were a great innovation, and seen as a possible way to reform college education. But now the SJWs have shut Berkeley down and I know that MIT and others in the past year have also reconsidered them because of the threat of lawsuits based on the ADA and deaf students not being able to understand the videos. Liberals ruin everything that they touch.
This is insanity.
They could also get contributors to kick in for transcription or subtitles or sign language interpreters, but they won't do that either.
No, not deaf,
But I still think it is wrong to throw your problem at everyone else and make it their problem. It sounds like you want people to suffer right along with those at the college.
If you can’t enjoy it, nobody else can either?
That was and is Satan’s problem. If he couldn’t have heaven, no one else will either.
I know people who have real cases of PTSD (getting their bell rung by too many IED’s), yet there are a lot of fake cases of PTSD, lately by snowflakes who can not handle Trump as president.
Much like ADHD. Real cases are verified by PET scans, yet there are a lot of fakes, mostly diagnosed by marginal teachers.
The ADA is too open to people who are gaming the system.
Was there anything in the lectures that the university wanted removed from the internet?
Call me skeptical, but...
It would not take “a FORTUNE” to close-caption videos — people do it every day; some as public services.
To be entirely funded would just take a reasonable and easily-obtained government grant.
Heck, even conservatives would approve such a grant.
All this happened in the waning days of the Obama administration?
What was in those lectures?
BUt that’s why I protest. Subtitles and transcripts help if I didn’t hear the lecture. I would say that a bigger argument could be made over copyright or that they shouldn’t be free. If anything, the MIT ones are the most basic courses. They aren’t enough to cover all the classes for a degree, pretty much just the 100s and maybe some 200s.
I don’t know whether ADA is reasonable, but it should not be hard for Berkley to comply. I’ve gone through the process of creating captions to a video. It’s not too terribly difficult. And professional services charge about $1 per minute.
Assuming each of the 20,000 lectures is an hour long, that’s $1.2 million, not a small sum for something that you’re giving away free.
Bush sr, in combo with the Harkin brothers, Deaf and Dungheap.
“Assuming each of the 20,000 lectures is an hour long, that’s $1.2 million, not a small sum for something that you’re giving away free.”
I’d do it for half that. :-)
Really, as a society we should not need laws to force us to help those who are disadvantaged in ways such as this.
But conservatives also stand for personal responsibility.
I suggest that they seek volunteers to do the work, and open source it. Or make contributing to the closed captioning process the cost of admission for the “free” access.
Then caption it. Problem solved.
ADA is just as bad as the LGBTWHATEVER, ACLU and eviro-nuts. Can’t be happy no matter what. Just because a handful were left out, then hundreds of thousands couldn’t have access to an education.
Guess they’ll be going after all of youtube next. Half the shows on tv don’t have CC so might as well shut down all broadcasting. What about movies at the theater? The silver lining would be to shut down “Hamilton”!
“How nice for these academic liberal a-holes to get such a nice object lesson in this, I doubt they will grasp its meaning.”
They were probably behind the lawsuit ... They can’t be happy with people getting to view their self-deceived amazing intellect for free you know ... They probably could have hired a couple of students to transcribe lectures and CC them ... Or, better yet, use speech recognition to provide a close match and have students clean them up.
Only a university would make such a project into a multimillion endeavor.
Yes, it would be different if these lectures were HARMING deaf people, or if Gallaudet had some agreement to have accessible courses delivered to them.
Having an IQ under 70 is surely a disability, do we just need to shut down all university lectures now because they are over some peoples’ heads?
So, this happened under Obama, and even before the elections, but the University publicizes it now -- implying Trump-Sessions did it.
Sign up date - 2/1/17.
Super duper extra privileged pushing an agenda from a very small percent onto the majority.
BTW, yes, I do have CC turned on my tv.
Better get rid of Berkeley’s wymyn’s studies, too. Where’s the real he-men studies?
Yeah, I know about the blind guy who “climbed” Everest but he ADA is a COS. It is bad and sad that people are disabled but penalizing the rest of us for it accomplishes nothing good.
Stupid since it began. Cost and unused ramps and junk all over the country brought to us at great wast of resources.
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