If I was hired by Baruch College, I would make two improvements. First, I would expand Baruch's online course offerings. Baruch has 18,000 students, and for many classes, the class size is very large with 50+ students. More than three quarters of the students are business majors. As an accounting student, I often have difficulty enrolling into my required courses because they frequently reach the class limit. Therefore, creating additional online sections for these popular courses, with lectures delivered via Blackboard as the learning management system, could be the solution. In many cases, online learning is very effective, can be self-paced, and can be very interactive with discussion boards, etc. Online homework can provide immediate feedback. To protect academic integrity, exams can be taken in-person, or professors can use an online proctoring service such as ProctorU to remotely proctor students during an exam.
Another improvement I would suggest is to make the College’s website more accessible for disabled individuals. As pointed out in a recent New York Times article, providing appropriate accommodations to disabled students has become increasingly important, as some would argue that the online education are subject to the same accommodation guidelines provided by the ADA. While Baruch’s Homepage has a “Make This Website Talk” button to accommodate vision-impaired students, many internal pages, including CUNYFirst and Blackboard do not have this accessibility. I would use technology to help disabled student learn and access the same information that ordinary students can. This could include closed captioning on lecture videos, text-to-speech technology, and creating a version of the website with larger fonts with higher contrast. All these elements are important to create an online learning environment that’s inclusive of all individuals.
Another improvement I would suggest is to make the College’s website more accessible for disabled individuals. As pointed out in a recent New York Times article, providing appropriate accommodations to disabled students has become increasingly important, as some would argue that the online education are subject to the same accommodation guidelines provided by the ADA. While Baruch’s Homepage has a “Make This Website Talk” button to accommodate vision-impaired students, many internal pages, including CUNYFirst and Blackboard do not have this accessibility. I would use technology to help disabled student learn and access the same information that ordinary students can. This could include closed captioning on lecture videos, text-to-speech technology, and creating a version of the website with larger fonts with higher contrast. All these elements are important to create an online learning environment that’s inclusive of all individuals.
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