Reading Time: 7 minutes
My first discussion about equitable access at my current role happened during my interview. I was talking with some students, one of whom had hustled for the interview from work and frequently used the law library after their full-time job. Evenings are a time at which the law library is lightly or unstaffed. We had a good discussion about some challenges they faced and how a library could adapt their services to lessen them. I’ve been able to start to implement some small changes, one in the library and some in my teaching, to improve access.
Most of my career has been spent worrying about information access. There can be a default assumption that online access is the equitable but that assumes an internet connection and a internet-connected device. It can also obscure the attending need for someone—a reference librarian or court navigator or duty counsel—to provide guidance on using the information or explaining what it means. We keep print because it can mean equitable access for those who are not positioned for success using online content.
After Hours Services
Every law library I have worked in except a law firm had a challenge of not providing enough staffed hours. The cost of staffing is the largest, or perhaps second largest in some institutions with extremely large collections, expense in a law library operation. Each hour the law library is open requires someone to be present.
Not everyone agrees with that need for presence. I’ve been curious about the cost-saving measures Buckinghamshire Council is expecting by implementing its Library Flex plan. It proposes using video surveillance of unstaffed libraries in order to extend hours (and eliminate librarian staff positions equivalent to 25%-30% of the staff budget). Just over 40% of respondents to a survey about the plan said they’d be unlikely to use a library during these unstaffed hours.
It is funny to me that they landed on SOL as the acronym they wanted to go with (Self Operated Libraries). I think most of their patrons would agree they are S.O.L. if they are there after hours and there is an issue—a fire, an assault—and the eye in the sky surveillance in the library doesn’t respond or the panic button installed in the library fails to result in prompt assistance. When you are talking about library-as-space, part of that discussion involves safety. I don’t think you can outsource that.
Our library is staffed during core hours during the week. When our staff go home, there are a few hours afterwards as well as a few before we’re back, where there are no staff in the library. Security guards continue to patrol until the building closes but we do not have staffed service.
The challenge the student had mentioned had to do with checking out materials. If you need to check out a book at 9pm or even at 7am, there will not be someone to assist you. In reality, you could walk out of our library without checking out the book because most of our floors empty out onto elevators that go down to the lobby. But we have a circulation policy and people, perhaps especially in a law school library, try to comply with policies.
I actually picked up the idea at the MAALL conference last October. Some folks talked about how they used a mobile app to connect to their ILS and I was curious about that. But I heard another library talk about how they allowed self checkout with just a photograph and that struck me as the best option. A person might have a mobile device and still not be able to configure an app and a new login. Even if they technically could, it’s a lot of extra friction.
A picture, though. That could be managed on any relatively recent phone. A photo could capture the bar code (which we could scan from the image) and the person’s ID card, which allows us to attach it to the right account. The picture could then be emailed to our staff address, where we could manage the checkout when we arrive at our desks. At least in our case, we were confident that anyone who was allowed to checkout materials had an email account, but I could see where you could even get it down to text in a more public or less constrained context.
I talked it over with the circulation staff and librarians to assess its viability. There didn’t seem to be any reason it wouldn’t work. Additionally, book lending is not as heavy as it once was and so it wouldn’t mean a sudden swamping of the staff inbox to manage these in the morning.
This is not something I would have thought of on my own. It was great having the student express this need and to have the time to roll it around in my head. I’ve explored creating a focus group of students to try to unearth these sorts of challenges in the future. We’re not there yet but as we start to think about making changes to our furniture and space, it’ll be a key first step.
In the Classroom
One thing that is very different for me in the classroom is supporting student accommodations. This is not something I was aware of when I was in law school nor alerted to when I taught previously. It arose when we started to think about the larger assessments. This is a bar writing class and the assessments are timed. As I thought about it, though, I realized that we were doing timed essay writing in advance of the midterm as well and, while they were not graded as such, they probably required accommodation as well.
The one accommodation I was concerned about supporting was related to time. Students who have access to additional time would need, in most cases, to operate outside the normal course time frame and content structure. If we completed a timed activity and moved on to additional content, they would be negatively impacted if they remained in the classroom on the first activity and had a lecture going on. It sounded like this was the normal approach, with each accommodated student sourcing their own room and process to work alongside the scheduled course.
The law school administration let me know which students were impacted. I wanted to devise an approach that would be replicable for the class sessions as well as act as a dry run for the midterm and final. So I emailed the group (bcc) and asked them for input about my plan for the day, what would work for them, and what wouldn’t.
My initial plan for the class was pretty straightforward:
- Open the class and take attendance
- Provide some introductory content about the essays
- Run the timed essays
- Provide additional content (lecture or in-class work) for the remainder of the period
The first, most obvious challenge was attendance. If you have used your accommodation and are not in the classroom, how do you let the instructor know? More importantly to me, how do you let them know in the same manner as people who are in the classroom? I didn’t want to create a parallel process, I wanted to use the same process.
I have started to use Microsoft Forms for class attendance. It allows me to create a QR code to put on a PowerPoint slide, as well as have a direct URL. If I wanted to have all students have the same experience, I would stick with this approach.
The question then became, how do I extend this approach to everyone?
We use Panopto to record all classes for later use by students. This means that, when I teach, I am expected to stand in front of a lectern that has a PC with microphone and camera. If I move away from the PC, I will leave the Panopto video. Anything that is on the computer screen is recorded during the scheduled course time.
I decided to use Zoom to extend the class out to wherever the students are. We have Zoom integrated into the Blackboard LMS, so I can create a meeting within the application and students can join from within Blackboard. I had already started to create these meetings, and running them through the main PC, to provide alternative access for students who were absent but available. For example, we have had students with COVID or who were delayed because flights didn’t take off due to weather. They were able to attend a class but couldn’t physically be present. They are still considered absent but they do not need to wait for the class to end to see a recording. Also, with Zoom, they can ask questions in real time rather than having to engage in follow up.
The drawback to Zoom in this environment is that it exposes the privacy of students who have accommodations. If I load Zoom onto the Panopto’d PC, their attendance will be recorded as they join the call. Their questions will be recorded in chat. So I needed a slightly different approach.
In the end, I brought my work laptop to the room and ran the Zoom call on it. This meant that I could project and record on the PC and nothing about the Zoom call would be captured. Students who joined via Zoom could be instructed to send chat messages only to me. Zoom’s Focus mode allows me to lock each individual so they can only see me, while I can see everyone.
This approach worked pretty well. The only drawback was that I had to move any PowerPoint slide content forward on both machines, and I forgot on the first few slides on my laptop. I will need to work on that. But students on Zoom were able to listen to what I was saying and see the slide deck, which I shared on my laptop. I was able to field questions from students or see them let me know they’d finished and were logging off.
As you can see in the image above, my laptop is on a standing desk. That’s my comfortable height. The lectern is immovable and is not comfortable to work on. Ideally, I would run the course from my laptop with Windows extended screens. This would allow me to work from one PC and still preserve privacy with the Zoom call. The challenge with that is the fixed camera and Panopto’d PC.
Since I could share the PowerPoint via Zoom, it meant that students who were working outside the classroom could see the same attendance slide, as well as other content. They could check-in at the same time and in the same manner as anyone in the classroom. They also saw the same content and heard the same presentation information. It was as hybrid an environment as I could create.
There are apparently add-ins that allow you to move a present and a remote PowerPoint slide deck at the same time, without doing a screen share. This would be ideal. One thing I’m contemplating is using PowerPoint in the cloud. If I load the slides in a web browser on my laptop, and load the same presentation on the Panopto’d PC, can I move the slide deck forward so that both PCs show the same slide?
There were two other components. One was class materials. I handed out paper essay questions in the classroom. They were in piles at the classroom door, so a student who was going to work elsewhere could stop by and get a copy. But I didn’t see the point of that, so they were also available on Blackboard. Students who could print the page could do so wherever it was convenient for them. Normally, if a physical document wasn’t required (we recommend to the students that they practice with paper because they’ll have paper at the bar exam), having digital copies would be enough.
The other was an issue where the students gave me very specific feedback. This was the plan to end the course with new, additional content. To be clear, none of them complained that they would have to view the Panopto’d class afterwards. This appears to be something the students are accustomed to doing. But the feedback was that the new content may be too much and could it be pushed to the following class period?
I was talking about this with my family. What did they think about having the accommodated students having to look at video after class. “How is that even equitable if they have to do more work to access the same information,” one of our kids offered. Exactly. If the words “they can catch up” are ever uttered, suggesting that some students have to mitigate and some don’t, it’s not equitable to me.
I had been leaning that way too and the student feedback confirmed my own feelings. The benefit of moving the residual content to the next class was that the class schedule was now a complete alignment for those in the classroom and those working elsewhere. Intro, prep, essays, done. The fact that the timed essays might take more time and even extend past the class period was the only difference. Once everyone completed their essay, no matter how much time it took, everyone was done.
In this case, there wasn’t going to be much time used at the end anyway. If it had been a larger amount, I could have still moved the timed portion to be the final portion. That’s the key. The goal for me was for everyone to have the same experience.
I think it worked out pretty well. The feedback I got back from the students was positive. I also feel more confident that, when the exams come, there’ll be a defensible way to deliver them so that everyone has an equitable experience.