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student caucus
Welcome to your single-use education
JEFF MITCHELL
Contributor
“Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of
butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit.
Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people
I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving
friends.” – Fight Club (1999)
Why should our classroom experience be single-use? Why are many of us restricted from
accessing course content? Why can’t we have
the double-double and a tub of butter classroom experience?
The Audio Recording Policy (ARP) has been
a heated issue at Osgoode long before our
arrival at the law school. I’ll spare you the
history of the policy because it doesn’t really
matter – what does matter is how the
ARP cheapens your academic
experience today.
Simply put, for the purpose
of the ARP, each student
is either in or out. To be
part of the in crowd you
must pass O sgoode’s
administrative system
that vets the legitimacy of accommodation requests. Students
with a requirement for
accommodation seek
to formalize their status
under the ARP by demonstrating their needs under
one of the enumerated grounds
making out accommodated status. If you
don’t fall within one of the accepted inclusions,
you’re not going to get access to the video
and audio recordings made through the class
desktop recording system, or access to notes
made by your peers under the Dean’s Scribe
program.
Here is a list of some circumstances that will
generally not permit students to access recordings:
• Absence of two days for serious medical
or compassionate situation
• Attending trial for an approved OPIR
activity
• Attending an industry-related conference
• Exchange students taking classes on pass/
fail system
tuesday - october 15 - 2013
• Professional development activities
Some of the arguments I’ve heard from administrators and faculty over the past 2 years
include: the system is too expensive; the
recording hardware fails, or the software is
too hard to use. Other arguments are based
on concerns over intellectual property rights,
opposition to recording because class attendance will decrease, or, my personal favorite: “we didn’t have it back in our day so why
should you.”
Just this past academic year, a new argument emerged from the Office of the Associate Dean in a memo to Faculty C o u n c i l
School does not warrant that it will be successful in making lecture recordings or that
any recordings made will be of good quality. As a result, the main thrust of the policy
is that - based on past experience - the Law
School expressly cautions accommodated students against relying on its recordings and
encourages accommodated students to make
their own recordings using their own equipment.”
So, just how badly is the ARP failing accommodated students at Osgoode?
Together, cancellations and recordings with
no sound account for 29% of all failures. This
means that because a recorder battery ran
out or the professor didn’t follow the desktop
recording process, students were left without
an adequate recording.
It is not overly challenging to cut back on
the human and technological error. A wireless
microphone system and battery can be purchased for
under $25. Osgoode could
use part of a Professional
Development day to train
professors on the desktop
recording system.
in response to Student Caucus’
push to ensure the survival of the
audio recording program:
“we are failing to provide [students] with the
accommodation to which they are legally entitled about 35 percent of the time. Permitting
this situation to persist would risk breaching
our obligations under the Human Rights Code,
R.S.O. 1990, c. H.19.”
Certainly Osgoode wants to accommodate its
students; it also wants to avoid being named in
a lawsuit because a student wasn’t being meaningfully accommodated under the current
ARP. The Associate Dean sent out the following as part of his email to the student body in
early September:
“Although the Law School continues to make
its best efforts to record lectures using its
own equipment and to make those recordings
available to accommodated students, the Law
With a few simple fixes the
rate of failure could be substantially reduced, producing a
higher rate of successful recordings for accommodated students.
This leads us to two major impediments for
the rate of recording failures: professors failing to engage the system, and unavailability of
required technology at the beginning of class.
The tech issue is solved by ensuring Osgoode
IT has the proper procedures in place to
ensure that recording hardware is in the
room and operational. The bigger issue is the
unwillingness of a few professors to make a
true effort to record their lecture. It only takes
a few unwilling professors to drastically raise
the number of failed class recordings. I believe
that it only takes one willing administration to
require that those professors who consistently
fail to record classes improve their performance. To do so requires a clear message from
Osgoode that the audio and visual recording
system has a greater value than notes alone. If
that were to happen, we would see the success
of the ARP rise to a level where it couldn’t
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the obiter dicta
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