Abstract
Only 8.8% of faculty have reported receiving formal training for develop-ing ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant online courses (Gould & Harris, 2019), yet in any given semester, faculty may be required by federal law to make their course accessible for a student that has enrolled with a disability. Linguis-tics faculty face many of the same challenges (namely time and resources) as other disciplines with implementing ADA federal guidelines. However, there are further obstacles with linguistic specific topics (such as dialect illustrations, phonology, morphology) that require special attention when devising accessible material for those that are either visually or hearing impaired. Through the exploration of an un-dergraduate linguistics course (LING 2050: Language of Now), this paper reflects on best practices, suggested modifications, barriers in developing an ADA compliant online linguistics course, and presents a resource developed by the author aggregat-ing resources that facilitate making a course ADA compliant.
Highlights
Undergraduate and graduate linguistics courses have increasingly moved to online delivery as universities aim to provide a flexible classroom experience for students
An aspect of online teaching that has regularly been overlooked is that of accessibility
Accessibility in this paper refers to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
Summary
Undergraduate and graduate linguistics courses have increasingly moved to online delivery as universities aim to provide a flexible classroom experience for students. As part of its application to higher education, the ADA (Section 508) requires all electronic and information technology used in higher education teaching be accessible and inclusive for students with disabilities enrolled in the courses. I sought to implement ADA best practices into an online undergraduate linguistics course. For this project, I used an undergraduate linguistics course called LING 2050: The Language of Now. LING 2050 is offered online every semester as a core curriculum course, students in this course come from many different majors. LING 2050 is offered online every semester as a core curriculum course, students in this course come from many different majors This course serves as a simplified introduction to linguistics, with a focus on sociolinguistic analysis and theories.
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