Research seminars on access to higher education by disabled students-revised

Research seminar no.1: access to e-learning by disabled students

Konur, O. (2002) Access to e-learning in higher education by disabled
students: current public policy issues, Paper to be presented at the Third
International Conference on Networked Learning (a research based conference
on e-learning in Higher Education and Lifelong Learning), 26 March- 28 March
2001, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

Abstract
The emerging public policy issues regarding access to networked learning in
higher education by disabled students are presented to disseminate research
based on a four-year long self-funded research project at City University.
The networked learning has formed a main ingredient of the curriculum in the
UK universities in recent years. Unsurprisingly, a substantial body of
research emerged in this issue. In the meantime, disabled students continued
to be under-represented with a participation ratio of 4.5 % with a
differential rate of participation among inter-disability groups. The access
to networked learning would be regulated by the Disability Discrimination
Act (1995) as amended by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act
(2001) starting from September 2002. This paper disseminates research on the
related public policy issues from an interdisciplinary research and policy
perspective. It is argued that both network learning and disability law is
still young and it should be remembered that both of them need to work
within the established higher education law where student-university legal
and institutional relationship is not one of equals but unequals as
evidenced by the substantial body of case law. Furthermore the rules of the
game by the amended Part IV of the DDA may have not been devised to achieve
its stated aims to end discrimination against disabled students in higher
education as evidenced by the substantial body of case law within the
employment context. Therefore it would be helpful to base practices and
policy making processes on access to networked learning by disabled students
on an evidence-based model rather than 'good practice' model as currently
deployed within the higher education sector at large. Perhaps based on such
evidence-based practice and policies, it would be possible to devise the
rules of the game to achieve the stated purposes of such rules in the long
run.

Key words
Disabled students, higher education, networked learning, Disability
Discrimination Act (1995), Internet, interdisciplinary research,
evidence-based policy, good practice culture, higher education law.

Availability: The conference paper would be published in the Conference
proceedings, which can be purchased for £30. (it may be available through
the interlibrary loan scheme of the British Library later the year)
Additionally, an electronic copy of the paper would be available for
educational and accessibility purposes at
http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~cx639/nlc.htm from 2 April 2002.

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Research seminar no. 2: access to academic assessment by disabled students

Konur, O. (2002) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and assessment of
disabled students in higher education. Paper to be presented at Second UK &
US Conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), 23-24 May
2002, London, UK.

Abstract:
High-stake assessment of students in higher education has emerged as an
important public policy issue in recent years as evidenced both by the
substantial body of research, the presence of two specialist journals
(Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education and Assessment in Education)
and the substantial body of the case law in the UK courts (Coggeran, 2000).
This trend has been matched equally in the US.  The access to higher
education by disabled students has also emerged as an important public
policy issue in parallel in both countries.  This access would be regulated
by the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) as amended by the Special
Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001) in the UK starting from
September 2002 (Konur, 2000, 2002).  However, the Americans with
Disabilities Act (1990) and the Rehabilitation Act (1973) have regulated
such access in the US since the mid-1970s. Furthermore, unlike, the UK, a
substantial body of case law and research has emerged in the US on the
assessment of disabled students (Bartlett, 2001, Harvard Law Review, 1998,
Hunsicker, 2000, Phillips, 1994). Therefore it is not surprising that there
has been a new interest in researching assessment of disabled students in
higher education in the UK in recent years (Earle and Sharp, 2000; McCarthy
and Hurst, 2001, Konur, 2001). For example Earle and Sharp (2000, pp. 544)
asked whether reasonable adjustments should be made in the high-stake
assessment of disabled students in higher education and answering this
question negatively wrote that: "compensating disabled students by offering
them less onerous forms of assessment is an unhelpful, potentially
discriminatory and generally undermining practice".  Therefore the exclusion
of disabled students from higher education and professions "will be as a
justifiable consequence of the person's physical and mental limitations".
Similarly, McCarthy and Hurst (2001) do not deal with the issues raised by
Sharp and Earle (2000) as well as Macfarlane (2001) in assuring academic
staff and administrators in universities that making reasonable adjustments
and academic standards may not be incompatible and the lack of reasonable
adjustments for disabled students in high-stake assessments would prevent
them to reap benefits of having access to higher education at all since they
would be 'less favourably treated' as regard to their peers.  This paper
disseminates the research on the assessment of disabled students in higher
education carried out at City University as a part of self-funded four-year
long project using an interdisciplinary research framework (Konur, 2001).
The key research and case law in this area is presented within the wider
policy contexts both in the UK and UK.

Key words: Disabled students, assessment, higher education, Disability
Discrimination Act (1995), Americans with Disabilities Act (1990),
reasonable adjustments, professional ethics, scholarship of teaching and
learning, public policy, professional ethics

Availability: An electronic copy of the conference presentation slides would
be available at http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~cx639/sotl2.htm from 1 June
2002. The underlying paper [Konur, O. (2002) Assessment of disabled students
in Higher Education: Current public policy issues, Assessment and Evaluation
in Higher Education, 27(2), pp. 131-152] would be published by 30 March 2002
and would be available in paper and in electronic form from mid April 2002.
The paper may also be ordered through the interlibrary loan scheme of the
British Library for the members of universities and colleges who do not have
a subscription for this journal.


________________________________
Ozcan KONUR
Postal address: Rehabilitation Resource Centre (Walmsley Building Room
W223), City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB, The United
Kingdom.
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Research project URL: http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~cx639/index.htm
Phone: 020 7040 0271









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