George Brown College (GBC) President Anne Sado has issued a response to MPP Jessica Bell and MPP Joel Harden, confirming that the college will continue with the Note Taking Express service despite voiced concerns.
On March 25, provincial politicians sent a letter expressing concern for the accessibility of students with disabilities and loss of decently paid labour for contracted workers, amid George Brown College (GBC)’s decision to replace computerized note takers with a new software application called Note Taking Express.
In her response, issued on April 21, Sado says that “providing high quality services for students with disabilities is of utmost importance to George Brown College,” and that “feedback from students thus far indicates that they have been very pleased with this approach.”
Students at the college who were asked their opinions of the service, however, said differently.
“I personally felt in automated captioning – it didn’t completely work, like it would mispronounce or it would lag by at least ten seconds, by which the professor would already be on the next topic or line,” says Anisra Sri Raksha, a student at GBC.
“However, in the case of in-person notetaking, the person would be as dedicated as me.”
When post-secondary education moved online in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, this marked the advancement of something students with disabilities have been requesting for years: more accommodations and support. Although remote learning has brought greater ease in the sense that students can now learn from the comfort of their surroundings, this isn’t to say that proper resources should not continue to be provided from the college.
A variety of concerns have been raised in regards to the quality of the notes provided by Note Taking Express for those who require these services. Andrew Lehrer, a previous notetaker at GBC, says that even if it is simply a matter of students receiving their notes two days later with Note Taking Express, they would still miss out on the synchronous note-taking that GBC’s computerized note takers are able to provide for the students.
Lehrer also says that there has been a substantial level of complaints about the service at colleges outside GBC, so much so that in February 2021, Seneca College and Humber College reverted more than three dozen classes back to other services that didn’t involve live text-to-speech or the note-taking app.
“Truly, having a software which doesn’t understand my disability and doesn’t learn from my preferences which I provide is basically useless to me,” says Jeffrey Pledger, a student at Seneca College regarding the Note Taking Express application.
Pledger says he has experienced an array of technical difficulties when using the app, including changes in tone or voice not recognizing speech into text, voice speed changes due to internet buffering, errors in word selection and grammar usage, and being asked the same questions repetitively by the app.
“It can clearly be extrapolated by not providing a fair and equitable learning environment, we’re going backwards on the promise of the internet leveling the playing field for people with disabilities! Remember this isn’t the 24th century and we just haven’t created artificial intelligence which is self-aware, sapient, sentient as a real person is” says Pledger.
Along with this, members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union / Le Syndicat des employés de la fonction publique de l’Ontario (OPSEU/SEFPO) Local 557 at GBC have also called on the institution to bring back notetakers and renew their contracts, arguing that “they provide a value added service that is superior to the app”.
“From what I’ve heard from the staff, the students are saying it’s not the same and it isn’t up to the same level as it was before,” says Local 557 president Megan Carter. “I don’t think it can [be replaced], because I think you’re missing an important piece which is the human factor and I don’t think you can replace these roles within a computer. I don’t think that’s addressing the needs of the students to the fullest extent.”
