Faculty Attitudes Toward Online Graduate Students with Disabilities and the Accommodations Needed by Those Students
Faculty Attitudes Toward Online Graduate Students with Disabilities and the Accommodations Needed by Those Students
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Issue Date
2025-07
Authors
Murphy, Zoann
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Abstract
Guided by the critical disability theory framework, this dissertation explores the attitudes of faculty members towards online graduate students with disabilities, the appropriateness of accommodations for those students, and faculty members’ personal approach to providing or withholding support. A review of the literature found that graduate students with disabilities may not receive appropriate support to complete their online degree programs because they often have to deal with faculty members who have negative attitudes towards them, accommodations provided by the university which may not be appropriate, and faculty members being unaware of accommodations or not being trained in best practices to support their students. These factors may have a negative impact on their ability to complete their online graduate degree programs. Archival data from a survey done at an online university in the United States in response to a literature review which called for additional studies on faculty perceptions of working with graduate students in the online environment. Using a secondary data source gives the researcher the opportunity to gain a more in-depth understanding of the data in ways which are different from the original study. Using manual coding methods to perform qualitative content analysis on the 130 responses to the original survey questions, the researcher discovered faculty attitudes towards working with their students were generally positive. But when it came to the faculty attitudes towards providing accommodations, the prevalent academic culture of resistance and skepticism towards students with disabilities belonging in higher education was corroborated. Noting that faculty believed there was more that the institution should be doing to support both students with disabilities and the faculty working with them, the researcher also discovered faculty members who not only were transforming the way they interacted with their online graduate students with disabilities but who also desired changes to the university policies and procedures to increase graduation rates for those students.
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Keywords
Online faculty , graduate students with disabilities , online accommodations