Faculty Resources and Tips

Approximately 21.5% of students in the 2023-2024 academic year reported a documented disability that required an academic accommodation for the classroom. There are many more students who have not reported to the office. We therefore encourage you to use Universal Design whenever possible to increase access for all students. Many things used for accommodations, like captioning of films, can help more than just disabled students. Turning on closed captioning can help students with slightly weak hearing, sitting by a loud vent or window, or who have attention issues. Making these shifts an automatic action rather than waiting for it to be requested is a practice of Universal Design for Learning.

Universal Design for Learning

Students with letters of accommodation have met with the Coordinator of Disability Services and provided adequate documentation. Based on the documentation provided, the Coordinator of Disability Services determines reasonable accommodations.

Each accommodation correlates to an identified barrier to access that must be addressed. In other words, the student’s experience of their disability intersects with an aspect of the design of the course to create a barrier to their learning that would not be present for a student without a disability. Accommodations therefore do not give some students an unfair advantage over other students. They simply level the playing field so the student has full access to lectures, books and to sharing what they have learned. We call this access.

Legal standards to keep in mind for accommodations

  • All academic accommodations, except those listed under “Additional Information,” must be provided to the student if they request to use them. If you are at all concerned about fulfilling an accommodation, contact the Coordinator of Disability Services.
  • All materials uploaded to Moodle must be accessible to a screen reader. This is particularly important for scanned PDF documents. You can check to see if a document is accessible by uploading it to NaturalReader.

  • You are not permitted to ask about a student’s diagnosis or the nature of their disability at any point in time. The only information that you are entitled to receive is the academic accommodations listed on their official letter. If a student confides their diagnosis to you, you must keep their confidence and not disclose their diagnosis to anyone else.

  •  Instructors must maintain a policy of strict confidentiality about the identity of a student with a disability, the nature of their disability (if the student chooses to disclose that information), and the disability–related accommodations they require.

Before your course begins

  • Is the statement regarding disabilities on my syllabus, and is it correct

    "Cornell College makes reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. Students should notify the Coordinator of Disability Services and their course instructor of any disability related accommodations within the first three days of the term for which the accommodations are required. For more information on the documentation required to establish the need for accommodations and the process of requesting the accommodations, see Disability Services on the Cornell website."

  • Are all articles scanned and posted on Moodle in OCR pdf format? If not, contact the Coordinator of Disability Studies for information on training or assistance with difficult documents.
  • Are chosen textbooks available in digital format from the publisher? If you have a choice between two textbooks, please ask the publisher if it is available in PDF and choose the one that is. This saves time and expense for the college.
  • Are all videos or films to be used in the class captioned? If not, work with Academic Technology Studio to get them captioned or look for an alternative that is captioned.

During your class

  • Disability Services will send letters of accommodation via email on the Wednesday before classes start. This email will include a document that lists instructions for the most common academic accommodations. 
  • Students should then have an implementation meeting with you within the first three days of the block. This conversation should just involve the logistics around how each accommodation will be fulfilled.
  • We tell students that they should initiate this conversation. If a student does not talk to you about their letter, it would be kind of you to reach out to them to prompt them, but it is not required.
  • Accommodations cannot be retroactively applied, so if a student’s accommodation letter is updated after the start of the block, any updated accommodations only apply from that point forward.

Questions?

Contact the Coordinator of Disability Services at disability_services@cornellcollege.edu, call 319.895.4207 or stop by the Student Life Office in Thomas Commons Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.