How Disability Awareness Can Support Course Design Conversations

As the conversations about Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) increase as faculty start designing courses and assessments for the fall I have noticed lately a reoccuring theme in a lot of the posts - the need for flexibility. Many of the posts speak to how difficult it is to design when the technology seems to be changing daily. And this is where we are at now, and upon reflection I realized that half of this conversation would be a lot easier if folk had engaged with the dynamic and episodic nature of disability before everyone started caring about LLMs because it really would help the conversation.

I am finding, and again I don't have an n=X number to give you because this is just observational at this point, but that the faculty who are having a bit of an easier time thinking about what course design and assessment design would look like in their classes, are the faculty who have already thought about how to design courses for things like dynamic disabilities or episodic disabilities, regardless of class size. I have talked a lot on my podcast and in this blog about how higher education systems are set up to only see disability as static. For example, accommodation conversations around things like occasional course absences often centre around the question "but how many absences?" as though there is a singular answer that applies to every situation and every student. And the thing is there absolutely isn't, because depending on the person and their disability the number of absences a semester can be zero or 10.

Academe is not set up for that kind of flux and flexibility. Courses are rarely designed with an awareness of the need for that flexibility. I have this conversation a lot with people around scaffolded assessment when I ask, "okay but what happens if a student breaks a leg and has to miss class for two weeks?" Often folk haven't thought of what could happen, or how to chunk elements of the scaffold together so that learners don't fall too far behind. But all of this is because there is some sort of intense linearity to the systems we work in, and that linearity assumes that everyone will come to every class, will do every assignment, and will work in the same way.

Of course we know that is not true, and the discourse around design conversations in relation to Generative AI, LLMs, and now this week with more discussions around agentic use of models assumes this need for the same. Part of this is of course due to different kinds of pressures, class sizes growing, teaching teams and support services shrinking. But the point I am trying to make is if we approached assessment in GenAI times design conversations more in the way that makes context and flexibility real, like the conversations we have when we emphasize that disabled students exist and are not all the same, and even if they have the same accommodation how that accommodation supports them will not be the same for each student. The sameness that the system is expecting of everyone, and the sameness in the design through process, is what is making design conversations in 2025 so difficult.

This knowledge of the limits of system and the need for sameness is why this week has seen a lot more sky is falling posts about how the agents can go in to the Learning Management System (LMS) identify all the assignments the students has to do and then completes them. It is also why we are seeing more posts that say well did you know the agents can also go into the LMS and then grade those assignments for you in some sort of zero sum game, that you know the robot vendors are going to absolutely market to the institutions. The amount of times I have heard "what are we doing here?" from folk this month in different spaces and corners of the world is not a small number.

If we took some time to reflect on the need to flexibility and choice and scaffolding in the way we design courses, and simultaneously say to whomever will listen to us that a linear way of understanding how we "do" higher education is not going to cut it anymore, these conversations would become more productive. As I (and many others) have said often, maybe you should be listening to disabled folk and design with us in mind, because we have been advocating for meaningful learning opportunities and spaces for a long time and this historical/educational technology/socio-political moment would be a great time to listen.