A New Approach to Improving Education and Training Services for Tertiary Students with Disabilities - Executive summary

Over the last few years disability services in tertiary institutions in Australia have experienced increasing demands to provide services to students with disabilities and medical conditions. Many institutions are trying to meet these increased demands with little or no increase in disability resources or dedicated service funding. Within this context this project sought to take an alternative view of disability service provision for the educational and learning needs of students in tertiary institutions. In looking at the these issues, this project focused on the issue of flexibility within mainstream, on-campus educational and training programmes and drew a distinction between these and other learning programmes such as distance education and courses that are solely delivered electronically or on-line. The project took an integrated approach which included a review of literature on the learning experiences of students and a survey of the views and attitudes of teaching and disability staff towards the delivery of more flexible and accessible methods. The survey of teaching staff included university and TAFE lecturers from both metropolitan and regional centres in Western Australian. There were 579 completed surveys from teaching staff from tertiary education institutions. The survey of disability services staff also included respondents from the university and TAFE sectors and 35 completed surveys were included in the study.

The Literature Review

• Students with disabilities will generally benefit in the same ways as other students from the advantages offered by more flexible means of delivering educational and training programmes. There are, however, difficulties that some students with specific disabilities, such as vision impairment or blindness, face when course materials or information is presented on-line.
• Students with disabilities prefer courses that are presented in flexible ways, particularly where this means that the content is presented via several different means. For example, students prefer courses that are presented through a combination of face-to-face lectures, lecture notes, and on-line recordings or text to those that are only presented orally.
• There is some evidence that students with disabilities do not want traditional lecture or classroom based teaching to be replaced by electronic delivery of course content, but prefer that lecture-based presentations be supplemented with access to electronic versions of that material.
• The functional impact of a variety of disabilities can result in a number of difficulties that students without disabilities can also occasionally experience in the formal learning situation from. The flexible delivery of programmes has the potential to address these common functional difficulties for students with disabilities and for other students. Flexible Teaching and Learning (FTL) processes and structures also result in reduced reliance on the conventional individualised supports that disability services provide.
• One particular innovative approach to the flexible delivery of programmes, known as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), appears to have the potential to address the diverse learning needs of students with disabilities within a context of quality and better accessibility and service for all students. The literature on UDL strongly suggests that this approach can help all students to select an appropriate form of access and/or learning mode in a particular course of study, thus increasing learners' access to, and control over, their learning environment. However, further investigations will need to be carried out in the Australia tertiary context before these positive findings can be generalized to local settings.

Survey of Teaching Staff

• Most teaching staff would like more opportunity to include FTL methods in their course delivery.
• A lack of resources and the fact that FTL is not always suitable for a particular type of course accounted for the majority of reasons that are preventing staff from introducing greater flexibility in course delivery.
• Teaching staff do not consider the needs of students with disabilities when considering the course design or the utilisation of more innovative and FTL methods.
• Teaching staff are generally unaware of the possible benefits or potential drawbacks that FTL methods hold for students with disabilities. They are also unaware of how their teaching methods impact on the difficulties faced by students with particular functional disabilities such as writing management problems.
• Flexible approaches to teaching and learning, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), are best promoted within the context of quality in teaching and in the benefits that can result from such approaches for all students.
• The main inhibiting factors for the utilization of FTL methods amongst teaching staff are resource factors such as time, lack of necessary equipment/resources, lack of funding to implement strategies, availability of technical support and class size. Respondents are not particularly concerned about the security of academic materials or intellectual property and copyright issues. This indicates that it is not the philosophical or attitudinal factors that inhibit the move to implementing FTL methods but the more pragmatic issues of funding, time and resources.
• Teaching staff recognise that FTL methods can result in a more inclusive learning experience for all students and that they may also provide a more satisfying teaching experience for themselves.
• The issue of loss of intellectual property and copyright is also seen to be an unlikely outcome of FTL approaches by most respondents.
• Almost half of the teaching staff respondents feel that it was likely or highly likely that FTL results in lower attendance levels at lectures and classes; and more than a third feel that adopting FTL methods result in less communication between staff and students, and less student-to-student interaction.
• There are no appreciable differences in the response patterns between university and TAFE sector teachers. The only area of difference is that TAFE lecturers feel the lack of resources to be more of an inhibiting factor in their take up of FTL options.

Survey of Disability Staff

• The most common approach taken by disability officers to address learning needs is the provision of individual supports and individual negotiation with lecturers. The “individual supports” approach includes such things as note-taking, individual transcription, and personal tutoring.
• The least common approach taken to meeting the learning needs of students with disabilities is increasing the flexibility of the method of delivering the course. Slightly less than a third of staff frequently employ this approach. This confirms the literature review finding that the “support model” approach of addressing disability needs is still the dominant model adopted by disability services in tertiary institutions.
• In contrast to the operational approach actually employed by disability staff, the survey found that 84% of respondents agree or agree strongly that students’ learning needs are best met through more flexible delivery of education and training programmes.
• A minority of disability staff feel that the individual targeting of needs is a very cost efficient way to deliver services.
• Almost half of the disability staff surveyed think that students’ learning needs should be met without the need for any type of disclosure.
• Disability staff agree that students with different types of disabilities often have the same support needs and that students with different types of disabilities often require the same types of support services.
• Disability staff feel that many key factors that influence the type of approach taken to provide services do not support systematic ways, such as FTL methods, of addressing students needs. These factors include the tertiary institution’s disability action plan and disability policy, the culture of the disability officers’ professional environment, and the disability officer’s own current method of service provision.
• If additional resources were available, most disability staff would allocate these to staff development on flexible delivery methods and disability. This is an important finding and it gives some idea of the priority that disability services staff place on this topic.

Both teaching and disability staff recognise the potential benefits that FTL holds for meeting the learning needs of students with disabilities. However, teaching staff do not take disability issues into consideration when planning and designing the delivery methods for their programmes. They also feel that there are important factors, such as time, resources and some negative outcomes on student learning, that inhibit their making more use of FTL methods. While disability staff would prefer to operate from a more systemic model of service provision, they do not currently do so. They also do not see their institutions’ Disability Action Plan, Disability Policy, or their professional culture as being supportive of systemic approaches, such as FTL, to meeting the learning needs of students with disabilities.

The consequence of this is that the potential benefits of meeting the learning needs of students with disabilities through such methods as FTL are not being realised in a comprehensive or planned way. Where course are being delivered in a flexible way, the specific needs of some students with disabilities such as vision impairment, blindness or hearing impairment are not being adequately addressed. This study has identified a number of steps which disability staff can take to support the move towards more accessible and flexible delivery of education and training programmes. These include:

• The provision of practical support and resources to teaching staff, course design staff, and Communications and Information Technology (CIT) personnel who are involved in the planning and delivery of new courses.
• Raising awareness among CIT support staff and teachers of the need for on-line materials and teaching resources to be accessible and to at least meet the guiding World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the area.
• The consideration of flexible course delivery and design issues in the review of all disability policies and disability action plans.
• The consideration of programme delivery and design in any teaching, CIT, or course design staff development and training sessions.
• The development of resources to assist teaching staff in their efforts to provide high quality and easily accessible educational and training programmes. These include on-line resources such as those developed in the project, printed promotional materials, as well as the allocation of funds as incentives to staff to provide more flexible learning environments.
• Raising awareness among students with disabilities on the advantages of more systemic ways of addressing their particular learning needs.
• Raising awareness among disability, equity and diversity staff of the advantages for many groups of students of FTL approaches to service and support provision.