A joint project by Cornell, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Camden County College in New Jersey aims to create an online support community for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students majoring in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math.

Cornell will test the use of cyberinfrastructure to provide remote support for its DHH students. Like many other schools, Cornell has a staff of interpreters who accompany these students to class and provide real-time captioning on laptop computers. A computer link could allow interpreters to provide this service remotely. Creating an online community for DHH students would also allow for remote tutoring and mentoring, said Michele Fish, associate director of Student Disability Services at Cornell.

"Math and science are the most challenging to interpret," Fish said. "We have one or two interpreters who can do it quite well. One of the goals is to develop a language to do this captioning more effectively." Captioners use special software that allows for abbreviated typing, and this may need to be expanded for technical subjects, she explained.

Supported by a $1.6 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Research in Disability Education program, the project is designed to increase graduation rates for DHH students and to serve as a model that will be shared throughout the country. If it is successful at the college level, the idea could be extended to high schools, organizers said.

There are more than 30,000 DHH students studying at colleges across the country, according to the Center on Access Technology at RIT's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which will administer the project. Currently there are 17 DHH students at Cornell, eight of them in a STEM field, Fish said.

"I hope this program will enable us to recruit more," she said.