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What unforeseen dangers might exist when choosing an open access textbook for a new subject?
I must create a new module (first time to do from scratch). In the past, I've had either existing course descriptions, textbooks, etc. as a base on which to structure a module which is new for me. This time, I have nothing (blank canvas).
My thought is to use an open access textbook and some initial looking makes me believe I can find something either usable as-is or that will allow me to mix-and-match the chapters into something suitable.
I'm concerned about what, if any, dangers might not be obvious to me at this stage but might cause significant problems for the students, myself, or the department later (say, after the semester begins).
After reading this question, I still find myself wondering.
If anyone has designed a course using an open access textbook in the past, what are the key considerations which should be considered for first-timers?

Why do you expect other dangers than if you would use closed-access textbooks?

@Raphael I don't expect anything. I just don't want to be blindsided mid-semester.

It's important to check the license used by the author to make sure that it's compatible with your use of the open access textbook.
Issues to check include:

Does the license allows you to redistribute the book to your students (e.g. by putting it on your course web site) or whether students have to get it from the author's web site.  I would not be willing to use any material that I couldn't distribute to my students, because the author might pull it from the web at any time.
Does the license allow you to modify the work (e.g. fix typos or more broadly edit the work)?  How are you required to describe any modifications?
If there are any restrictions on "commercial use", does your course constitute commercial use?  Some people have argued that for-profit higher educational institutions can't use Creative Commons NC (CC-NC) licensed materials in courses.

Many open access educational resources are licensed under the Creative Commons license with varying options (CC-BY, CC-NC, CC-ND, etc.)  The Creative Commons web site has clear explanations of how those licenses work.  Many other resources have been put up on the web with no specified license.  If there's no license specified you should contact the author and ask for permission to use the material.

And, of course, read through the book to make sure there aren't typos, misstatements, misleading phrases, or anything else that you will need to warn the students about, or that might cause you to select another book. (He says, after having been technical proofreader on a book that he wouldn't subject any student to.)

Determining whether the open educational resource is of adequate quality is very important, but not something that I discussed in my answer.

FWIW, @keshlam's advice applies to any material you make students read. (Yes, also your own. Especially your own.)

@Brian, you said that some people have argued that some institutions shouldn't be able to use works licensed under CC-NC.  Were those arguments compelling?  Is there some class of schools that I might not be considering?

The general issue is that there's no easy dividing line between "commercial" and "non-commercial" use of materials.  There are gradations between public universities, private non-profit universities, and private for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix in the US.  It has certainly been argued by some that the private for-profit schools like University of Phoenix should not be able to use CC-NC materials.  Ultimately, that's something that would have to be decided by the courts.  I am not a lawyer, but it's hard for me to draw a line.

Please remember that it is always possible to negotiate with the author. I think that the doubts that Brian explained are a thing, but asking the author is probably the best thing to do in those cases.

I think Brian's answer is perfect, but let me be a bit more clear: the answer is none.
As others have said better, one crucial quality for material course is quality: if you had an excellent "closed" textbook and a mediocre open access one, you should choose the better one, for the sake of your students.
But in this case I don't think you can actually choose, and this is for the better: you can start off with an open access textbook, and you probably can make it better.
"Openness" of things boils down to their license. They are often (as said) Creative Commons:

CC-BY-SA allows you to do whatever you want with the original material, and create your own derivative works without even asking, provided that you release your material with the same license. For example, Wikipedia articles have this license: everyone builds on the previous version of the page, the license persists, the article (often) gets better.
CC-BY-NC allows you to do everything without even asking, provided that you do not have a commercial purpose. Brian's response hints that this is maybe tricky, but I'll come to that.
CC-BY-ND is rare, but CC-BY-NC-ND is common: it is the strictest version of Creative Commons, and in practice you can use and share the material, but not have commercial purpose and create derivative work without asking.

This is important: you can't do it without asking.
Of course, you can directly ask the author, and I doubt very much you can't negotiate a way to use the material as you want. It is possible you'd have to pay, but this is the norm with closed textbooks.
Creative Commons are licensed used to share our creative works: the open access-open knowledge movement advocates for a more flexible copyright system in which people are allowed to share and build things together.
The only thing you should pay attention, thus, are the different licenses of the different materials involved: if you want to create a new textbook, for example, you should check them and ask/negotiate permission if needed.
Copyright-wise, things can't get worse than with closed-access content.
Hope this clears a little.


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Is there any evidence that students are more likely to watch a video over reading homework?
As background, many of my students fall into the "un-prepared" for university category. This has introduced many challenges. Some challenges are easily handled when a student is sincerely interested in learning (they want to know what to read and I guide them appropriately).
More challenging is that these students are not native-speakers of English yet they are studying in English. Again, those who work hard do well. Those who do not work hard, do poorly.
I am looking for a way to encourage ALL students to spend more time outside of class studying. To this end, I am considering composing some videos (a significant time commitment on my part) which will teach material that I do not cover in class.
This question discusses how to identify the reason students are not doing home work and this questions discusses how to make best use of videos as homework. However, I am asking something different.
I have done some surveying of students and many of them say that they prefer watching videos over reading. What I really want to know is whether anyone has seen or has researched the increased likelihood that a student will actually follow the homework because it is a video as opposed to in a textual format.
I do not want to get into the issues of punishment here. The students generally know that less homework = lower scores but they think they can still pass and that is all they care about. Sadly, I care more about their education than they do.

This is a very interesting question... I don't know the answer, but I do know that a major disadvantage of videos is that they generally have a much lower density of information than texts.  That, however, says nothing about their efficacy in gaining compliance...

You could run a study where you make or find videos about topics that will be covered on a single test.  Compare this with pervious test where video was not used - see if there is s difference :)

Part of this might depend on the length of the videos. Students might be more likely to watch 5- or 10-minute videos than 30- or 40-minute videos, though I'm unaware of a formal study supporting that theory. Also, some research suggests that says humor can be very effective in the online/blended environment. If you inject a little humor in your videos, they'll be more watchable.

@sevensevens Yes, I am thinking of exactly that....but it takes a lot of time to make these videos so I would like to see what has been done before making that kind of investment.

I don't understand the question. Isn't homework something you do? Are you asking whether students should make videos intead of writing?

@JeffE I am playing a bit loose with term "Homework" considering it any work done between class sessions. This includes (but is not limited to) reading/watching/gaining an understanding in some other way. Some of my students simply do not do the assigned reading, which severely limits in-class discussion. So, my question is whether they would be more likely to watch a video since they don't like to read.

@earthling Again, I'm confused, although perhaps this is a difference in fields.  The obvious way to encouraged students to do the assigned reading is to ask them to do something that requires understanding (the material presented in) the assigned reading.  If they can't demonstrate understanding, they shouldn't pass. If they can demonstrate understanding, why do you care if they actually read the material?  And if you never ask them to demonstrate understanding, what incentive do they have to read?

@JeffE You make a very good point. However, there is one class that I teach where assessment is done by someone in another country (so, for that class I'm really a tutor). In that class, I cannot control whether they pass or not but I would still like to find the best way to encourage them to learn.

@JeffE To be clear, I want to facilitate in-class discussions but that requires students to prepare outside of class. There is a single assessment at the end of the semester and students tend to ignore any work until just before the assessment.

There is a single assessment at the end of the semester — So change that. Give them grades, even if they don't "count". Collect statistics. After a few semesters, start showing the strong (?) correlation between your informal grades and the real grades.

It's been a while since I was a student, but I think it's still worth saying this:
I find it easier (as in less effort) to just sit through a video than read a book.
But: If I actually want to learn something or I have a specific task to solve, I find the linear format of videos extremely constraining, and I find them frustratingly slow.  Like most people, I read much faster than normal talking speed. I can also skim texts easily, and find the relevant part, or go back and check a formula again.  This is not possible with videos.  There's a reason for taking notes in class instead of just recording it: a recording is not going to be useful for preparing for the exam.
You mentioned that many of your students are not native speakers of English.  This is a big reason to avoid videos in favour of written material.  I am not a native speaker either, and even though for the past few years English was the language I used the most, I still prefer watching English-speaking films with English subtitles.  When watching videos there will always, always be at least a few words I can't catch or I can only comprehend with a few seconds' delay.  Listening is simply more work for my brain than reading, and makes it just a little bit harder to pay attention to the content.

My personal opinion on the matter (no more than an opinion!) is that some students are indeed more likely to watch videos than read texts.  But that's only because it feels like less effort to them.  In reality videos are going to be less efficient at communicating information.  They will require significantly more time commitment from you and they will require more time commitment from motivated students as well, who would be able to learn faster from written material.  But yes: I do think unmotivated students are more likely to watch a video than to read  a text.
Personally I find it very frustrating when the only material available is a video because it just slows me down and forces me to take notes I wouldn't need to take if I already had written material ...

I should have mentioned that I work in physics which will influence my viewpoint.  I really have no idea about management subjects.

Your answer fits very well with my students. Thanks!

I am currently involved in a research project that is associated with the study of the influence of LMS in a blended learning environment. I also use LMS to teach courses.
Every student has a different learning style. Visual learners will prefer video over text. But to engage the other students, you may think of activities that could be performed outside the class, if you are using an LMS. E.g. you could give them 2 minute quizzes they could solve from home, or create educational games.

As a student, I would like to throw in my two cents...
Videos are incredibly useful and I think that more professors would be wise to create/use them.  When studying or working on a project, I often cruise right on over to YouTube and begin searching for videos on the particular topics that I need to know about.  Specifically, I like to use lecture videos. If I have a mid-term coming up and my professor had videos available...my study time would be cut and my retention would be better.  It is a very efficient use of time on our end.
Why are they so great?  Because I can pause at any time I need some time to write something down and I can watch any part or the whole thing as many times as I want to until the information I want really sinks in.
To support this, all I need to do is point to Khan Academy.  Nearly all of my classmates know what Khan Academy is and most of them actively use the site to help them with math.  I've actually watched most of the Khan Academy videos for personal development completely unrelated to anything that I was studying in school.  They're fun to watch and, yes, there is a lot of learning going on for me.
Concerning video vs. text, I have recently taken to learning the Java programming language.  I bought the most recommended books and started to get going.  I've come a long way and I am starting to get the language down.  The booster for this, though, was the innumerable videos on YouTube explaining the Java language for beginners.  The books are great, but I really got my best impact from the videos.  My learning curve was far steeper from the videos than the books.
Videos...very effective teaching tools!!

Videos are incredibly useful and I think that more professors would be wise to create/use them. —  This statement is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me: is it "wise" for a student to study the course material regardless of whether videos are used or not? What is your opinion on that?

In my current position I create mini-LMS (Learning Management Systems) solutions for our large company.  Breaking these up by topics and groups much like SE does.  My systems hold almost anything - videos, pdfs, spreadsheets, elearning, quizzes, games, online content (like SE).
I am also a stat head and track everything that goes on all the way down to the time a person takes to answer a question - and if they are in the same browser what sites they visited during that question.
Some things that may help you:

For long elearnings people generally skipped to the quiz at the end and kept taking quiz until they passed.
People don't watch long videos.  Anything over 15 minutes have super high drop rates.  Those under 7 minutes are generally watched.
People generally don't read through long documents unless they are told to.  We get way more hits on web content then we get people opening up docs.  This flipped about 5-6 years ago and is getting worse.  To the point were we may do away with documents.
If you want people to really look at something there are three keys: fear (that they may get a bad score, not pass, look bad, whatever), entertainment (lack of professionalism and boring stuff), and interaction (have users do something every once in a while other than read/listen).

What learning on my systems do the best.  Unequivocally it is blended web learning.  An example page may contain a few paragraphs of explanation, a video, few more paragraphs, a video, a few more paragraphs, and a couple of questions.  Don't make the questions "homework" questions.  They should be easy to answer if the read the page and watched the videos.  The 2-3 questions should take 30  seconds.
If you don't have a system that can accomplish this I am available for hire.  Just kidding.  Just get your content and video on a page and give them the quiz from somewhere else (a link maybe) or even on paper.  Your goal should be to mix 4-7 minute videos with graphics and information.   Keeping the videos shorter also makes it easier to change things up if something changes whether it be the info in the video or the curriculum.

Thanks for this. It is nice to hear from someone with the data.

I totaly agree, that videos should be short, 5 minutes is a maximum.
It is not possible to keep students involved in the learning process, if videos are longer.
I think that the best is to create a blended learning environment, refering to a text and including activities to reinforce learning. Videos should be part of it.
Moodle or Google Classroom could be used for this. Activities and videos could be then embedded into pages and show/hide when needed. Also, Quizlet is a very good tool to help learning.
An other advantage of using a such environment, is that the learning material is always available, even from student smartphones or tablets...
Hope this helps a bit :o) Phil

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Where to draw the line when giving feedback?
When teaching undergraduates, I find myself trying to balance making them stretch to produce good work and giving them guidance. I must admit in my own undergraduate and graduate studies I rarely if ever asked for feedback (plenty of missed opportunities for me). That might color my judgment on this question.
This question is somewhat related to this other one Drawing Lines when Giving Ideas to Undergraduate Students; however, this question is more focused on when to give feedback and when not to.
I generally do quite a few in-class activities (and am considering automated online no-penalty testing) and I consider those ample chances for students to gain feedback which does not affect their final grade (formative feedback). Most modules in my department are assessed by one written report. While I do have the ability to change how my modules are assessed the question still remains:
Does reviewing drafts and giving advice on how to improve their graded submission (prior to actual submission) maximize student learning?
I am interested in any research in this field as well as expert opinions.
Arguments for giving feedback before submission

Students may genuinely not understand what is expected of them (although I do feel I cover it quite well in dedicated review sessions)
Students may work harder when things are made crystal clear

Arguments against giving feedback before submission

Students may end up looking to the teacher for too much assistance and will, therefore, become more dependent where we want to foster independence
Students may be lazy and simply wait for the teacher to tell them exactly what to write seek excessive hand-holding when deciding what to write.

In student surveys asking for what students would most like to see more of, students primarily choose to have more feedback of their drafts prior to submission. This is unsurprising since (almost) everyone wants a better grade. However, I'm thinking that reviewing of drafts is actually hindering student learning.

Your questions asks "is it a good idea," which sounds like it could lead to lots of people giving their own opinions. Are you looking for research on this subject? Experiences from educators? Please clarify.

@ff524 Thanks for pointing that out. I have edited my question accordingly.

Students may be lazy and simply wait for the teacher to tell them exactly what to write — That's not what "feedback" means.

@JeffE Yes, it was a bit of an exaggeration of me but my point was that the students will seek excessive hand-holding. I've updated the question.

Hand-holding is also not what "feedback" means.

@JeffE I admit I might be under a wrong impression here. Could you please clarify for me (or point me somewhere) explaining what you believe is appropriate and inappropriate feedback? I've always considered showing students what they did wrong and guiding them through detailed examples (for me that is hand-holding) how to correct their mistakes. Perhaps my feedback simply needs to be less deep?

Pointing out errors (or better yet, asking leading questions that expose errors), guiding students through related examples that illustrate general techniques, guiding students through a detailed solution of the actual homework problem after they submit their own solutions, and saying "You need to figure out the details yourself." are all appropriate and useful feedback.  Guiding them through a detailed solution of an assigned problem before the due date is hand-holding.

@JeffE Thank you for this. Are you saying that teachers should not let students know if they have made mistakes (in what they submit) before they submit their work for marking?

At least sometimes, yes, but it's not black and white; you have some freedom in how to point out errors.  Asking "Did you check your answer when x=0?" gives away less than "Your answer is wrong when x=0", which gives gives away less than "You dropped a minus sign in step 4".

My personal experience (both as student and teacher) favors the clear-cut "I'll review one of your drafts" model. Other support notwithstanding, this gives control to the student: at which point do I want feedback on my whole work? What amount of effort do I put in before or after? How much time do I give myself to incorporate feedback? How much work won't be reviewed (because I do it after the review)? For the teacher, the amount of work is both predictable and manageable. The review should be detailed enough for the student to predict their grade roughly (say, A-B vs C-D vs fail).

A first point is to ask what is the purpose of the activity to be graded? Is it to test student's knowledge, or is it to provide a learning activity? If it is the former, then feedback before grading seems counter-productive. If it is the latter then the feedback is necessary to provide the sought effect.
I am experiencing this problem with student theses. In the system where I work, the thesis is considered an individual work and grading it should take into consideration qualities such as originality and independence and yet the student has a supervisor who should provide input. The task is caught in the middle between examination of a task and a learning experience; and each supervisor has their own take on where the limits are. So why is this such a mess?
The key lies in failing to define what is a learning experience and what is a test of knowledge or understanding. Hence it is necessary to try to define these points so that the division becomes clear to all concerned. The key lies in deciding the balance between the two. Feedback provided after grading is, in my opinion a lost cause since students have moved on to other activities and very few probably run through the comments. Better is then to, for example, build in the feedback into the grading. This can be done by setting a preliminary grade and stating that successfully working through (not just any work-through) comments to improve the task will provide additional points or step up to a higher grade. This may be incentive enough for most to do the extra work and for those who do not want to, well that will be their decision.
So a key ingredient will be to build in the feedback--improvement into the grading of the task. exactly how to do this will of course vary depending on the task at hand.

This is related to another issue I am dealing with (for which there are already other questions on this site): Should the teacher allow the student to increase their grade after submission (through re-submission)? From your answer, it seems you believe yes. However, I do see many students who will do the minimum of work on original submission simply waiting for greater detail during feedback to see how they should change their assignment. I really want them to work to submit their best on the first submission so I do not allow greater than the minimum passing grade on resubmit.

If it is the latter then the feedback is necessary to provide the sought effect. — I don't think it's so black and white.  Every test of knowledge is also a learning experience.  And often what we want students learn is how to solve problems without expert guidance.

Should the teacher allow the student to increase their grade after submission (through re-submission)? — The instructors I know who allow resubmission do so with a penalty.  Most of them average the scores of both submissions.  One will change the grade to 100% if the resubmission is absolutely perfect, which (among other things) means no arithmetic mistakes, no off-by-one errors, no sign errors, no spelling or grammar mistakes, no typos, and no missing commas.

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Failed at all meetings
I am a postdoc researcher in mathematics and finished my Ph.D. some month ago. I wrote three papers during my Ph.D., and I am the only author for two of them.
The day when I started my postdoc position, my mentor asked me "let's work", but I was not ready, so I made a lot of mistakes. My mentor works some area that is not close to me. We tried to work together, but I couldn't follow what they were working on it.
Monday, we had a meeting with her college about a project that I was working on. I gave a conjecture that I wanted to reach it, and then he gave a contradiction example for it and then left the meeting. I felt so bad.
Moreover, they don't treat me as same as when I came here. I feel they think I cheated them or I am weak or stupid because sometimes I feel they ignore me and they don't answer my emails as either. I asked them to write a recommendation letter for some job, but they didn't do it.
These problems made me think about whether I am a mathematician or a lucky guy that I wrote some papers. You can look at my previous questions and see that I had this problem in my Ph.D., but surprisingly I finished it.
I have had several meetings here, also some online meetings, that all were terrible. Now, I lost my self-confidence and am scared that I am losing my reputation due to the above problems and it will spread in the club soon or later that I am a stupid mathematician.
I wanted to quit academia for industry because of the above problems, but as you know, finding a job is very difficult now due to COVID-19, so I'm just looking for a postdoc position, which is very difficult.
To be honest, I don't have anyone to talk to about my problem (my Ph.D. supervisor doesn't listen to me) which is why I wrote here almost everything. What should I do to break all the failing and walk in the right direction?

Does this answer your question? How to effectively deal with Imposter Syndrome and feelings of inadequacy: "I've somehow convinced everyone that I'm actually good at this"

I moved the comments about imposter syndrome and answers in comments to chat.

First of all, OP, take a deep breath.
There are two well-used tropes on SE, one is 'get mental health support' and 'impostor syndrome'. Both have their place. And if you really feel it is a mental health issue, go for it.
However: I do not think your case is either. You have an objective (I do not say real, you will soon see why) reason to feel down. You have been just shoved to the side by an insensitive PI.
Of course your question is, were you just lucky in your PhD?
Yes, you may have been lucky that you had a good PhD topic. You may have been lucky that you just needed to scratch its surface and results would gush out. Yes. That's luck. That's researcher's luck, it's the luck of the one who can harvest it; the expert in the field. It may be luck or not, but it's still yours and deservedly so.
Others, say, equally talented to you, may have spent their whole PhD on some miserly results to be scraped together in some work paper, who knows? They were less lucky. Was it their fault? Not necessarily. They were good researchers, just picked the wrong topic.
Almost unavoidably, you will run into bad luck periods, but, on the long run, good research comes from honing your instinct on where good luck can be more regularly found to loiter around.
Let's move to the second one. Collaboration. Comes this guy spewing stuff at you and you are lost. You do not get them. Note: "them", not the "math". They confuse these two. They think you don't get the math, but that's not what happened - they simply didn't explain it properly.
Sometimes, you find people, where conversation flows naturally, as if you always had worked together. There is a natural intersection of ideas, even where you do not understand them, you fill it with insights and interpolations from your own experience, quite naturally. It is exhilarating to work in such conditions, and rare. But it happens. And it's the most fun science can be.
You got the opposite. You got some - perhaps famous - guy as mentor that you simply couldn't tango with. It's not your fault.
Or perhaps it is? Your PhD supervisor does not listen to you - well, perhaps your choice of mentors is what needs to be improved?
So, your mentor found a counterexample to your conjecture and left the room. What does he want to prove? That's simple to see one? That if you have not such superior vision into the field, you are not worth to discuss with? How did you get to this guy? Ask yourself this question.
Whether the counterexample may have been obvious, it may be not, I cannot judge. A famous chess master made once a complete beginner's blunder in the opening moves of a game. It happens. It's not nice, but it's not an excuse for a put-down.
If he is that dismissive of your work, cut your losses, and get a different mentor. Find colleagues, mentors etc. who you have a common language of mathematics, where you understand what they say when they say it (I do not say that you need to understand their math fully, only you understand what they communicate). Find a place where you intertwine into the scientific discussion. You do not have to be a Gauss, Galois or Grothendieck to be a good mathematician. Having luck is fair game if you put in your part of the effort (note: I say effort not talent - if you can do a PhD in math, that's a given).
TL;DR

You feel down for an objective reason, not for some mental health problem. You have been treated badly.

You are entitled to luck in the choice of your research topics. You were lucky in your PhD thesis. Expect also some bad luck in your career, but develop the scent for the good places.

Collaboration requires effort from both sides, not dropping packages and expecting someone to pick them up, which is what your mentor did. Perhaps that's the way to test you, but it's not a way to treat people. Get a different mentor.

As with luck, the right collaboration partner can make results come out easy. It will feel effortless and not because the partner does everything. Like luck, find where these people loiter around.

So, perhaps the one thing where you are really not yet good at is finding the right people to work with. Your supervisor, as well as your mentor are both not exactly the most ideal of colleagues. Maybe, however, you are just in a difficult location. Clearly that's something you should work on changing.

It's not your fault. You are entitled to researcher's luck. You are entitled to a proper explanation of fresh concepts, or else direction where to read them up before "wasting" the precious mentor's time. First and Foremost, you are entitled to be treated as a human.
Get out of there and either a mentor or position or even just visit to a group who are interested in your stuff and who you can communicate with.
Good luck. If it comes, it's yours.

Thank you very much for your answer. It seems you know my problem very well. Your answer makes me a bit better. I read your answer 3 times. Thanks again.

Postdoc hosts can sometimes be a bit insensitive to their new hires. I've seen it before - they tend to expect more of them than they do of their own grad students, and expect someone who's fully on board with their research agenda. What I tell my postdocs is that I don't expect any progress for at least 4 months from the day they start the job. This is the minimum it takes to read up on literature and be up to speed on how I work on problems.
Small comments can also have a really big impact, more than the advisor thinks. I would imagine that your host is not out to humiliate or demoralize you - what's the point of hiring you to begin with if that's the case? They probably made an offhand remark that rubbed you the wrong way. I remember that I suggested to my postdoc advisor that I start exploring a new topic X, and they just gave me this look like I was daft; I haven't touched that topic to this day.
Following the other answer given here, your postdoc host might not be aware of the issues you had during your PhD, so they're not being as sensitive as they can be.
What should you do:

Communicate with your postdoc host to set goals, expectations (so - study topic X, advise a grad student and publish one paper) and a work dynamic (weekly meetings? biweekly meetings?).

Don't be hard on yourself - you did successfully graduate, there's no reason to believe that you'll do badly in your postdoc.

If you feel that this is affecting you in a deeper way, talk to friends or loved ones, consult a professional on how to better handle your emotional state. There's absolutely no reason for you to suffer through things alone.

Good luck!

Thank you very much for your comment. 1) We had a regular meeting, but I couldn't follow what they are doing it and they told me since my postdoc is a year, I should do whatever I want because there is no time for learning. 2)I need to ask my university whether there is a mental health professional at our university.

Also from reading your question history here, it sounds as if you should talk to the mental health support on your campus as soon as you can. There may or may not be deficiencies in your ability as a mathematician that you also have been asking about, but just from reading what you share on academia SE you appear isolated, socially and otherwise, and troubled. I’m sure those around you want you to succeed (they just hired you!), but you could benefit from a professional trained to support people in your situation, helping you to put what you see and experience into perspective.

You're putting a lot of faith in "mental health care support" at OP's campus. I wonder if it is really that reliant. I mean, it's a good suggestion to try them, but...

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How can I politely tell a student that I already support him several times and that is enough?
I have a student who sends me emails twice a week showing me his updated dissertation. At first I supported him a lot. But he literally does what I say word by word and never goes beyond what I tell him in doing further research. I have been clear to him that his limits are the sky. But when he adds a small detail he sends me an email again asking me if that was okay or not.
I think he assumes that he will take a very high mark if I did not tell him exactly what he needs to do for his dissertation. I am a bit worried about how to reply to this student. As I am trying to be polite and nice and I do not want him to fail, but at the same time I need to be genuine.
Please give me advice on how to reply to such kind of students so that I do not offend them. I want to convey that I encourage them to do further research and it is okay to say something I disagree with as long as they support it with proofs and evidence.

What dissertation is this? PhD? Masters?

But when he adds a small detail he sends me an email again asking me if that was okay or not. - Do you mean this is twice a week?  Or he sends emails 10 times/day in addition to these biweekly updates?

Is your impression that this is a problem of ability or caution? What if you gave him some more open-ended questions to work on, i.e. don't fill in as many of the details - so that if he did exactly what you told him to ("prove the Riemann hypothesis") it would make a great thesis?

@CaptainEmacs It is a Master student dissertation but also I get the same from Students who are doing a coursework question that is graded.

@Kimball twice a week

@BenBolker I think it is that he does not want to work further to push his boundaries he is reliant on what I say because I will mark his dissertation. So he wants to feel that he is safe in terms of getting high marks for minimal work.

You could limit the slots he can get feedback on. Is the student capable of carrying out your instructions? You may then want to gradually increase the scope of their task.

Does he know that he is judged on his work and not your work?  You might want to make this clear.  Another idea is to give him less precise instructions and maybe set boundaries for how often you'll look at his thesis.  While I think it's reasonable to meet once a week to discuss progress, I'm not sure I'd read a thesis once a week.

Why is the student so insecure about his/her work? what is the root cause?

@Kimball I think this is the crux of it. In my undergrad, we had one lecturer who said "If you write down exactly what I've told you & repeat it back to me verbatim, you'll get 39%. You may have done at excellent job at it, but I will still fail you. School may have been about learning by rote and repeating it back, but university is about forming your own arguments, backed by evidence."

Is it actual helplessness (it sounds like it from the description)? Or fear of authority?

I strongly suggest to listen to @Kimball 's first sentence. I have been on the other end of this situation during my master's. I struggled hard, so I needed and received frequent help from my very patient advisor. In the end I was disappointed by my grade because "I did everything exactly as my advisor told me, so why is he not happy?" I wish he made clear that he expected me to do more than expand on his advice. (Yes, this should be obvious and yes, this is no answer to your question. This just emphasizes that expectations should be made clear.)

I'll assume you already have language that indicates your support. Don't give up on that.
But, ask him for two things. First, that he only asks for feedback once a week (or whatever you are comfortable with) and add a report on changes and why they were made.
Second, ask him to specify in the report things he is unsure about and to detail why he is unsure.
The goal is to get him to think more deeply about why he is doing things and to separate the simpler from the deeper things.

+1 Socratic method, aka the Tom Sawyer turnaround.  Make them work for the help.

I think the key here is your insistence on “trying to be polite and nice” and telling the student “politely”. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing your desire to be polite is getting in the way of clear communication. I’ve seen this happen with people who are so afraid of upsetting others that a lot of the time when they want to communicate something it comes out all muddled because of the insistence on passing everything through a kind of “politeness encoder”. Usually the way this happens is the person who does this tends to think that the listener knows all about this encoding scheme and can decipher the message easily by applying the inverse “politeness decoder”. But this is simply not true, and the message is lost.
Be polite if you want, but first of all be clear. Have a frank talk with the student, explain the problem as you perceive it (with the politeness encoder dialed down to a minimum or turned off altogether), and brainstorm with the student some plan to get past this obstacle in his approach. Once the student understands what the problem is, he will be well-positioned to address it.

(+1) passing everything through a kind of “politeness encoder” --- This often happens when my wife wants me to do something, but it's phrased in such a manner that to me it comes across as "only do this if you really want to". I've mostly learned over the last 30 years which things I need to filter out the words "only" and "if you really want to". I'm also reminded of this book, which we saw at a bookstore and bought, and then read, shortly after it appeared.

@DaveLRenfro Reminds me of the short video "It's Not About the Nail" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

Could be a culture issue, too. German feedback may sound rude to an American and vague to a Russian.

@henning--reinstateMonica true. Reminds me of this discussion.

I want to convey that I encourage them to do further research and it
is okay to say something I disagree with as long as they support it
with proofs and evidence.

Then that is what you should say! Precisely that.
Dear X
I appreciate your desire to get things right but always relying on others may be counterproductive. I encourage you to do further research. It is okay to say something I disagree with as long as you support it with proofs and evidence.

I usually set weekly or so meeting to discuss progress of my students. They are free to contact me in between if something important/urgent comes up.
I'd handle a situation like the above with a short answer, if needed, or just "take another look, we'll talk about it next time".

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
What should I do when a coauthor suggests I fluff up a manuscript?
I have worked on a project almost entirely on my own with some input from my main advisor.
Now I've drafted a manuscript, and I have received comments from my secondary advisor, who is also a coauthor, along the lines of: extend the abstract to include things similar to "why AI is important to humanity", move the derivation in the appendix to the main text to make it seem longer, cite his previous papers, etc.
I don't like the idea of adding unnecessary content to the paper, but I also don't want to tell him that directly. My main advisor wants me to revise based on the secondary advisor's comments before reviewing the paper. What should I do?

If you add the fluff that the secondary adviser wants, be sure to keep a copy of today's version, in case your primary adviser tells you to remove the fluff.

@DanielHatton It's related to electric vehicles.

@DanielHatton The paper is on a control algorithm intended for people already working on EV control. I started off the paper with "Machine learning is the traditional way of doing this, we are proposing another approach because it offers improvements xyz". The suggestion my coadvisor gave is along the lines of adding "We are shifting to EV and it is important that we do". Hope that makes a little more sense.

I commend you on not wanting to add fluff.  Fluff detracts from the real content.

Others have noted that you should talk to your advisor, but I would first suggest talking to your secondary advisor and ask them to clarify their comments (especially if they were provided in text form). Explain your concern to them, and I suspect they will be able to defend their suggestions. I highly doubt that they see their comments as "fluff". For example, they want you to revise the intro in a way that you don't think is necessary - if you ask them about it you can get a better sense of why they want the intro revised, which means your revision will better address their concern

It's hard to answer this in the abstract. What you view as "fluff", others might view as "writing a good introduction" or "writing a more comprehensive literature review." The best advice is to talk to your advisor, who has already said you should revise based on what the secondary advisor says. If the secondary advisor has successfully published a lot of papers, I would say that's an argument in favor of taking their advice seriously. It seems likely to me that your advisors have useful tips for how to get a paper published.

I should add that my main supervisor hasn't seen the comments yet, he just wants to review the final version after everyone else has reviewed. I agree I may be biased here, I see lots of my coadvisor's work as incremental & "fluff" because of the way he approaches it, but you and everyone else is right that he probably knows more than me anyways. I will edit and try to get explicit feedback from my main advisor.

+1 for the main first few sentences, but I’d disagree with “If the secondary advisor has successfully published a lot of papers, I would say that's an argument in favor of taking their advice seriously.”  Too many researchers thrive on hot air, buzzwords, and salami-slicing, publishing a lot of papers with relatively little serious content — the current academic ecosystem incentivises this, and is the worse for it.  OP may be underestimating the genuine value of the suggestions, or may be quite right that this is fluff — and the co-author’s prolificness is compatible with both cases.

I cannot agree more. On my second publishable paper (law), I cut an entire section dealing with a review of other law view journal articles addressing similar topics because I decided it was unnecessary. The one reviewer comment was that I needed that very section. I was able to respond very fast since I could just add it back in from an earlier draft, but the point is that what I (then very inexperienced) thought was unnecessary padding they thought was essential. It got published after that was re-added.

SHORT ANSWER
Do add the "fluffy stuff", but mark it so that to clearly identify it for your primary advisor. One way to mark it would be to put it in italics, I describe below a more specific way to do so if you are using LaTeX.
LONGER ANSWER
If you use LaTeX, use the commands \markversion{LONG} or \includeversion{LONG}  from the LaTeX package versions (which is distinct from version) to create the environment \begin{LONG}\end{LONG}, and put the "fluffy stuff" in such environments (or any other name than "LONG" that you might fancy).
If you need to adjust the length of your report, you can replace the command \markversion{LONG} by \excludeversion{LONG} in the header and see all such blocks disappear without any further effort.
Some personal notes:

I found useful to write quite "fluffy" articles, which I shorten at the time of the submission to a conference, using "LONG" and "VLONG" environments, so that to balance how much space and details I dedicate to each topic (especially in the background). This strategy might work for you too!
I (and the students I advised) found also useful to use a "TODO" environment for parts that I would like to expand later, in such a way that if I do not find the time or energy to do so, I can just use \excludeversion{TODO} to make all such indication disappear from the draft at the moment of sharing or submitting a draft.

I hope it helps!

The half-baked solution for this is "mark the added fluff in a visible way" when using a WYSIWYG editor like LibreOffice or MS Word that doesn't have a facility for the versioning you use in LaTeX.

Tell your advisor what you told us. Ask him to read the paper without the changes wished by your second advisor and with your concerns in mind. Point out that you are unsure and want explicit feedback regarding what you perceive as fluff. Ensure that if he agrees with the second advisor, you make the changes.
Hopefully your advisor understands that you are not reluctant to make the changes but are unsure, want a second opinion, and are willing to learn.

extend the abstract to include things similar to "why AI is important to humanity", move the derivation in the appendix to the main text to make it seem longer, cite his previous papers, etc.

These don't seem too bad. You would just be adding one sentence to the abstract, and I am sure you can write something more substantial than literally "AI is important to humanity". Moving the derivation does not add any fluff. Citing his previous papers only adds a handful of papers that might be unnecessary but might be helpful to the reader.

One potentially diplomatic approach is to make the changes that the co-author suggests, then tag your advisor for review on the places you don't like with something akin to "Not sure I like how I wrote this, thoughts advisor on how to improve?". This can make it seem like the advice itself was good but you doubt your ability to implement it.


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What should PhD students do if they submit a paper to two journals and a reviewer notices concurrent submission?
I am in a desperate situation. I made a mistake and committed academic misconduct.
I have submitted my article to two journals in parallel, let's say in j1 and j2. Once I received acceptance from journal j1 I wrote a withdraw email to j2.
However, after the article came online it was found by the reviewer of j2 that the withdrawal article was actually a parallel submission.
I am 3rd year PhD student and my professor was unaware of this act. How can I handle this situation?
Should I write an apology email to j2? If j2 accept the apology, will j1 keep the article or still it will be retracted?
What is the best way to come out of the situation?
*I am reviewer of both journals as well.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

If you are a seasoned reviewer you should know the rules, so falling back on being an inexperienced graduate student probably won't hold water. So clearly this was less a 'mistake' and more of a 'gamble'.  You should pull the article from both venues and state -unequivocally- that your advisor had no knowledge.
You didn't mention if your advisor was a co-author on the submission, but if he/she was, the infraction is even worse, because not only have you submitted without consent, you risked damaging their reputation with the journals as well.
The best path forward is to own your mistake wholly and apologize. On the positive side, it's not like you committed the mortal sin of fabricating data or plagiarizing - you violated a rule (and likely the terms and conditions of the journal). Probably not grounds for dismissal but you might be on a leash for a while.
Don't do it again!  The rule is in place for several reasons, not the least of which is respecting reviewers' time and effort (reviewers' time is precious and usually pro-bono. We can't have every journal reviewing the same work).

The odd thing is that it was never a very good gamble. j1 and j2 have enough subject overlap to share reviewers and receive similar papers. The paper is in their overlap area. The probability that nobody involved in reviewing it for j2 would also read it in j1 must be close to zero.

I think your recommendation is far too severe; don't you think that the matter could be settled amicably without a retraction?

"You should pull the article from both venues and state -unequivocally- that your advisor had no knowledge." @Kumar I just want to jump in here to say that I don't think that this warrants withdrawal of an accepted paper. Just apologise to the j2 reviewer, and don't do it again. If he pursues it further you have a problem, but he may not You don't say exactly what the reviewer said/did. Ahd who did he communicate with regarding this?

@FaheemMitha I wouldn't go so far as to retract from both journals, but I do think both journals deserve an apology and the opportunity to decide for themselves if they are going to reject the paper. Only apologizing to j2 will get you in very hot water once j1 gets wind of it.

Gamble? Submiting to a journal is always a gamble. Breaking the rules just means disrespecting the disastrous and aged system of academic journals.

@innisfree Retraction might not be absolutely required, but telling both journals definitely is - you likely violated their submission rules. Most reputable journals will be very miffed at you for simultaneous submission and may even pull the paper post-acceptance because of it. You messed up your reputation, and if you don't want to damage it further, you need to be honestly contrite about it. This involves honestly apologizing to all parties about the error, and offering to pull the paper (i.e. removing any benefit from your deceit) is part of that.

@Džuris And the people working for them for free that you rely on to get published.

This is a faux pas, but retracting the article is unnecessary and wrong from a scientific standpoint. If the article were retracted it would suggest that something was wrong with the research, not that the author broke some arbitrary rules about not submitting your articles to competing journals. Yes we all understand why they are there, but the research literature shouldn't suffer as a consequence.

Can the published article really be pulled at this stage? It's gone online already, people have read it... you can't remove it from the community's mind. Not to mention the fact that the PDF has been cached in a dozen places.

I am not a PHD student. Why exactly is this bad?

@terdon Gow is it not disrespectful to the reviewers? If I have spent many hours reviewing a paper and then when I am about done notice that paper published in another journal, that was a complete waste of my time. And this is a very likely outcome of double submission.

Your best course is to write your professor, both journals, explain your reason sincerely, and let them handle the situation as they see fit.
Everyone make mistakes, and sometimes they are bad mistakes. In my opinion, trying to hide these mistakes or covering up would cost you more than the mistake itself in terms of academic reputation.

I would not advise writing at once to both the advisor and both journals. I'd go talk to my advisor - and my coauthors - first, immediately and face-to-face if possible; and this will definitely affect how I write the letter to the journal publishers.

The action can be altered, but main idea is to keep all the parties up-to-date.

TL;DR: Come clean with your advisor and coauthors first and hope that they help you.
Concurrent submission is a big no-no, because it means you are wasting the time of the reviewers and editors by creating twice as much work as is necessary and you are effectively queue-jumping by doubling your chances of acceptance, which is unfair to other authors. Unless you have a good excuse, people will be very unhappy about this.
You will need to talk to your advisor and coauthors before taking further action. They will find out sooner or later and it is best if they hear it from you first. You must explain what you did, why you did it, that it was a terrible mistake, and that you sincerely regret it. Hopefully they will decide to help you resolve the situation.
Your advisor and coauthors will need to help you apologize to the journals.
Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is that you must rectify them as soon as possible. If you appropriately apologize, then hopefully it can be forgiven and you can move on having learned an important lesson.
Concurrent submission is nowhere near as serious as, say, falsifying data. I hope that you are able to learn a lesson from this and that your reputation can be recovered. Good luck!

+1 for letting your coauthors know first. As a coauthor, I'd want to know what happened and I'd want to proofread your apologies to the journals, because it'd be my reputation on the line as well.

I can't speak for how these journals will react,  but i can say that as a conference program chair the course of action was to reject from both venues.  My expectation would be for j2 to contact j1 and for j1 to rescind the acceptance.

Thanks for the answer. What if j2 somehow accept the apology, bearing in mind I served j2 as a reviewer and reviewed 10s of articles. Still j1 will cancel the acceptance of article?

I don't think serving as reviewer has any bearing.

As for the apology... that's up to them,  and how seriously they treat the infraction will dictate what they do about it.

The question is: if you are that experienced as a reviewer - what was the reason for making the mistake? State that reason and apologise, perhaps they will give you the benefit of the doubt. However, I really do not hope your reason was "hedging", because that would be really not a good one to have.

If the answer was something other than hedging, I'd expect that to have come out in the question.  My money is on hedging, and I agree, OP should have known better, and most submission systems explicitly ask this. If they did here, for either j1 or j2, it is inexcusable.

@FredDouglis: The article was already published; what would a rescension (sp?) mean, other than an official loss of credit? The file's floating on-line, too, and I bet the printed copies have gone out. Nobody's going to go rip the pages out of those...

I'm a bit confused about how Kumar posed the question and @einpoklum is making statements about how it is already published.  Anyway, yeah, if it has already been formally published, it is much less likely that j1 will rescind it, but I really don't know all the details about how such ethical lapses are handled.  If they wanted to, they could probably purge their online presence of the article, though printed copies would survive.  But I imagine it's considered archival and immutable.

I think you have already got proper answers; however, the outcome of your apology depends on several factors.
1- if both journals belongs to same publisher I will expect a warning letter and maybe no further action will be taken.
2- If journals belongs to different publisher than you are in tricky situation. First you need to apologise to j2 and inform your apology to j1. If j2 rejects your apology I will expect strong action from j1; at least retraction of article and possible ban. However, if j2 shows flexibility and just issue a warning than there is a high possibility that j1 will endorse the warning issued by j2 and matter will solved.
My recommendation to is don't hide or don't try to play smart. Apologise and you should mention about your services to journal. Might be Editor will show little flexible behaviour based on your voulenteer work.
Finally, never repeat such mistake.

I actually have the opposite reaction.  If they are the same publisher, I would think they are more likely to be bothered by the overlap, and more likely for the two EICs to communicate, meaning that it is IMHO more likely that j2 is peeved and gets j1 to rescind.  If they are independent, j2 has no sway with j1.

If they viewed it all along as simultaneous bites with the intention to withdraw one, they wouldn't think copyright would ever come into it. Only a waste of time and breach of ethics.  That being said, I have met Ph.D.s who have never been informed these rules apply. That's why it matters whether either submission system explicitly reminded the authors of this, as so many now do. If so, the apology rings hollow.

Downvoted; whether the journals have the same publisher or not has no bearing whatsoever on the issue.  Parallel submission isn't frowned on because it creates legal issues for the pulbisher(s); it's an issue of professional ethics.

JeffE two different publishers adds difficulty to deal with two different set of rules. why its hard to understand :)

Like it was stated in the other answers, your co-authors should be aware of the current state of this situation and the fact of parallel submission itself.
In terms of informing journals j1 and j2, as I see it: you may write a brief message to j1 (editor?) just informing that the (accepted) article has been also submitted to j2 due to your neglect but it is withdrawn from there, and write an apology letter to j2 (it would be good if you specifically indicate that it happened due to your mistake, neglect, etc.). By writing to j2 (reviewer) you 'pass a ball' to j2. So, then it is up to j2 whether to accept your apologies, escalate it to the next level (e.g. by contacting j1 and asking them to withdraw your manuscript) or do something else.

You came here to ask an advice on how to handle this issue. But actually, you have no option.
Let your supervisor know, and he/she will tell you what you should do and how to handle it.
For me, your university has a bigger responsibility than you. Your university should educate you regarding the scientific community before it allows you to submit a paper in a scientific journal, and not by giving you just a booklet with some info of Do and Dont. However, I am not removing your responsibility. Your supervisor and both journals are the real victims of all this situation.

It might not help you much right now...
But a more tactical approach is to send two versions, differing by as much as you are comfortable in explaining the differences if this happens. Obvious obligatory differences:

different titles
different focus on results
explaining your method differently, example: many fields today are a mixture so researchers have literally each toe in a different field. Each field have their own journals and expect you to write things which are readable by their audience.
different comparisons to previous work done by others.

Voila and you have almost a whole new paper. Yes some extra work required, but not nearly as much and probably not nearly as stressful work as risking being pointed out as a cheater.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

I tend to disagree with everyone here. One fellow noticed you submitted in parallel. So? That's not a problem yet.
Were you allowed to do that? Probably not. Should you have done it? Absoulutely.
Currently journals gamble with us. They take your article, hold it up for months and reject it in the end. Why shouldn't we do the same?
You can apply dor several jobs or schools at once just as schools and employers can consider a lot of options at once. The same should be true and acceptable for journals. The fact that it currently isn't is not your fault but the fault of journals displaying their power.

Couldn't disagree more. If you don't like the system - fine, don't use it. Or work to reform it. But abusing the system will make the situation worse, not better.

Additionally, it is terrible advice to give: people following it will be hurt badly. Don't confuse your dislike of the current rules with the proper way to handle them.

Once a paper is submitted, no action on the part of the author is required for the paper to be published. The reason why concurrent submissions are forbidden is to prevent double publishing, which is auto-plagiarizing.

"Were you allowed to do that? Probably not. Should you have done it? Absoulutely." Ah yes, the classic way to get respect and help your career in every field.  If there are rules about something, generally there is a reason.  Breaking those rules is an invitation for punishment.  Regardless of if you agree with those rules, this is not good advice.  It doesn't address the potential repercussions of choosing to ignore rules and regulations.  If you want to publish in other peoples journals, it's best advised to follow their rules.

To some extent I do agree with you there are flaws in the current peer review system. One of my article went got rejected after 14 months and that after minor revision. But you should follow the established norms and strive for change. I will like to hear from you what alternate practical solution and system will you suggest and how can you implement.

This doesn't answer the question. The question was not "Was I allowed to do that?" or "Should I have done that?", but "What should I do now?". I assume that your implied answer is "You should take no immediate action, keep making multiple submissions, and ignore any negative consequences of doing this.", but it would be helpful if you could make that explicit.

@MBK the alternatives are already there. Some have even become eligible for the Millenium prize while ignoring the journals.

It sounds like you have never been on the reviewer/editor side of the publishing process. It's a lot of work and authors should respect that by not spamming journals with concurrent submissions.

"Currently journals gamble with us. They take your article, hold it up for months and reject it in the end. Why shouldn't we do the same?" There certainly are inefficiencies, but usually "hold it up for many months" means that someone is slogging through your paper and verifying every line of it for months, taking time away from teaching and research, pro bono. It's not like your paper stays in a cupboard for six months and then you magically get a decision.

I wonder if there is some sort of academic version of Godwin's law where inevitably someone will involve Perelman as an example.

@Džuris How is ignoring the journals and trying to use them while lying to them and breaking their rules the same thing?

@Dzuris - how motivated would you be to provide a thoughtful review if you thought 30 other people were simultaneously reviewing the paper, and the author has hedged his/her bets with enough journals that even if you recommended reject, the author will probably get it in elsewhere?  It dilutes your contribution to the process.

I like your advice, in the real world, I hope that the authors have more rights.

As many problems as there are with the way academic publishing works, this isn't helping anything.  The process takes as long as it does because reviewing papers takes time and there are a lot of them.  If people submitted everything multiple times, that'd just slow the process down even more while making extra work for the unpaid volunteers (i.e. us).

I partially agree with the point you're making - but not with your concrete advice. You're bringing up an issue which merits at least serious discussion. The thing is, OP's situation is not a good context to hold that discussion.

@HEITZ: You're presenting an extreme. What about if some submissions you check had a note saying "I have submitted this paper on Foo Bars both to the Journal of Foo Research and to Bar Studies Quarterly". Would that really bother you?

@Roland I see the problem in the fact that reviewers aren't respected (paid appropriately) either.


text:
Students with physical disabilities - blindness, deafness, etc
Update: There isn't any disabilities office. Not US...
I'd like to expand on a comment I just made down there: I'm not trying to find a silver bullet. I just want a reasonable starting point.

It is a pretty straightforward question:

As a teacher, what can I do to make sure the course is accessible to people with physical disabilities?

I have limited experience with these issues; a student lost some of his eyesight midway through the course. It wasn't that big of an issue; the only change we made was to print the exams using a bigger font.
I'm thinking specifically blindness and deafness, but then again, my lack of experience in this matter might lead me to forget important stuff :)
Therefore I'm aiming my question to anyone with some experience at this, from both sides of the table. What changes did you make to the material? Classes? Exams, etc., etc., etc.?
Official guidelines are helpful too. I'll try to find the guidelines at my university and add it here, if relevant.

Rather than edit it, I'll append a more detailed version:

What are the best practices to prepare material when dealing with students with blindness or deafness?

I know the question is quite general. That is because I'm trying to be proactive. I'm aware that these issues should be dealt in a case-by-case manner, but I'm looking for general good practices/experience to reduce the work needed to perform these adaptations, on both sides.
A few examples following jakebeal's answer:

There are a few file formats that don't play nice with accessibility software (screen readers and protected PDF files).
What multimedia material would you prepare? A subtitled video can be useful to deaf students, for instance.

I do not think that this question is a good fit for this site in its present form. There is no correct answer (it is rather a poll) and even despite this, it is very broad (by being not about a specific disability). A suitable question for this site would be how to address specific problems with a specific disability or about general best practices of dealing with disabilities.

I agree in general with most what's been said here.  But I think one of the most important things you can do is just let the students know you're available to help without calling attention to specific problems.  I will usually say something on the first day like "If there's anything you need me to consider, if I speak too quickly or you can't read my handwriting, feel free to come up to me after class or shoot me an e-mail."  And the few times students have taken me up on that I've reached out to whatever student services department is best qualified to handle the issue.

Good book on Universal Design http://www.cehd.umn.edu/passit/docs/pass-it-book.pdf

I had a deaf classmate in University who would follow lectures by lip reading. One of our professors had a large, bushy mustache and my friend had trouble understanding him. He therefore spoke to the professor and asked if he could try and enunciate more clearly to make it easier for him to understand. The next day, the professor had shaved off his mustache, earning the respect of all of us. I just mention this as an example of what people can do to help.

The part of the question about how you can amend your teaching to make it inclusive for disabilities does not seem to have been addressed so far.
Although you may not be in an institution that has a disability office, or in a territory that has anti-discrimination  legislation, many readers of the question may be. Thus answers that suggest consulting someone centrally that can advise on institutional policy and practice is a sensible generic response.
The observation that complete blindness or deafness is so uncommon in normal university teaching that one should not specifically amend teaching practices to accommodate is a statistically valid observation.
However, teachers still need to know what to do. Further, vision impairment and hearing impairment are spectrum disorders and it will be certain that not all students in a class can hear everything that is said and see everything that is shown to them. I suspect many of us have been to presentations when we could not hear every word or see every image with sufficient clarity.
I advise my colleagues in similar situations, and this answer is based on the advice that I give.
Almost every institution has a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) of some sort. Sometimes it is a simple primitive set of web pages and sometimes it is more capable. Before we had VLEs we had class handout sheets, notice boards and so forth. Whatever level of information technology you are equipped with, you should use it to improve and enhance the mechanisms of information distribution to the class.
Ensure, therefore, that critical information points are communicated in more than one medium. If you verbalise something important, ensure it is also written down somewhere, whether than is in a handout, on the VLE or in the textbook, it doesn't matter. If you show something, such as writing on the board, try and verbalise it also (it does not need to be verbatim); just enough that those who can't quite see know what you have done. Sometimes, with diagrams and illustrations shown on the screen this can be more difficult, but with practice you will find that it improves your teaching for everyone.
Machine readable copies of material on the VLE become accessible to students with impairment by the use of technology. I suggest to my colleagues that copies of the notes or slides are put up on the VLE just in advance of the class. Then some students can follow along by using magnification software on their tablet, laptop or smartphone rather than looking at the screen or board.
By being more inclusive in this way, you enable the material to those with other conditions also, such as dyslexia, Irlens syndrome and a wider variety of SpLDs (Specific Learning Differences). One then moves away from Disability being a problem and an issue to an appreciation of social model where we are all differently enabled.
References:
[1] Tompsett, B.C, 2007,
Experiences of Teaching Disabled Students of Computing at UK Universities

Outstandingly fantastic answer. I agree with every single thing you said, I like your general guidelines and you provided links. I'm accepting this answer (sorry Mediocrateez). But if you are reading this, please consider Mediocrateez's answer as well.

I would like to echo the other answers and enhance by focusing specifically on the breadth of ability challenges that may be faced by various students.  There are many different types of physical challenges that students may face, and even for a given challenge the answers may be different.  For example, did you know that most blind people can actually see, just so poorly that it cannot be effectively corrected, and that "blindness" actually covers a wide range of different conditions?
The key approach to any student with physical impairments that need accommodation is:

Do not assume that you should be handling it alone, or that you have the necessary knowledge to make an appropriate accommodation for that individual.
Ask the student.  They are the world's foremost expert on their condition and needs.  You'll generally do much better if you begin by just treating them like any other capable adult.
Get the university's experts involved, who will help you work out an appropriate plan tailored to an individual student.

I understand that each individual has specific needs (disabilities or not), but as a whole, is there common practices? For instance, there are versions of pdf (protected, etc) in which screen readers won't work. Should I use .html or .txt files for my material? If I record videos of the lecture, should I also add subtitles? These preparations can help tailor the content to specific needs as well..

@FábioDias Subtitles will help pretty much every student, if you have time to add them, since your diction and recording quality will be imperfect and some students may not be native speakers.  As for the others: that's a rapidly moving target as technology changes on both sides, and you should consult the experts at your university for current best practices.

+1 for "ask the student". Any student with a disability pobably has had it for quite a while, has developed way to cope with it, and can tell you exactly what they need (either directly or through the university's disability office).

@fkraiem on the context of the question, "ask the student" doesn't really help. While you are preparing the material for the course, there is no student involved... with disabilities or otherwise...

@FábioDias It is impossible to predict what any given student will need, just be prepared to make adjustments as the need arises.

@fkraiem I'm not trying to predict something that will work for every and all students..... I'm trying to find a reasonable baseline. I'd like to prepare all my courses in english for instance, but I know that not all brazilian students understand english, so I can't do that. Or better, I can, but then I'll have to translate again...

@FábioDias The I recommend your read resources on "universal design," such those supplied by AHEAD, or this collection of accommodation resources suggested by the University of Washington DO-IT program.

+1 for "Get the university's experts involved" My college has a Disability Services Program. Each disabled student goes to a disability counselor, who then fills out an accommodations form, copies of which are given to the student's professors. OP, see if your college/uni offers a similar program. If so, you should instruct disabled students to utilize that program. In fact, you may wish to mention the existence of such a program in your syllabus and/or on the first day of class.

Please note that there is (at least a possibility) of legal contention in cases like the ones you are describing, so this is largely a matter of university policy, and not for individual instructors to decide. That being said, universities generally set up some office of disability services, which offer customized advice, on individual case-by-case basis. For example, here is this office for Boston University, and here for Harvard. Other universities also follow suite, as far as I know.
Thus, a general answer to this question is not possible, this is really something that these offices are going to answer for you, and that advice will be legally binding.

To be honest, legal contention was not in my original list of concerns. Rather, my line of though is more like: regardless of what you are supposed to do, what should you do?

As noted by The Dark Side universities typically have offices to arrange proper solutions for students with disabilities.
In the past, I had a visually impaired student (partially blind), and the university paid a student assistant to help him taking notes during the lessons.
For the exam, I printed the exam sheet with a much larger font and gave him a bit of extra time. He agreed that this was sufficient for him.

Exactly what we did to my student, but since the university did not have a specialized office for that, other students shared notes with him. We offered more time for the tests, he didn't need it and had the top grade of the class... Which concerns me, because he barely needed anyone anyway, he's very bright and competent. A student that needs more resources to learn with such disabilities would pose a more difficult challenge...

FWIW, the extra time thing happens "up the chain" at my (German) university; it's not a decision every teacher gets to (or has to) make.

First off, I'd recommend reading Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the regulations that implemented those statutes at 34 C.F.R. Part 104 and 28 C.F.R Part 35.  That will give you information about the legal portion.  Know that the US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) does enforce these regulations for higher education.  Your local DSS department can help you with specifics.
TL;DR: check here for examples:
http://webaim.org/standards/508/checklist and here
https://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/universal-design/
Since there are no strict "Do this, then do this" rules to HOW you're to implement this, many Universities and Colleges have differing standards and implementations.  However, most all of them follow a certain set of loose guidelines.  I'm not sure if you're asking about all formats, handouts, web pages, videos, etc.  There's a TON of information out there, but no centralized spot to find it all.
I've found lots of stuff by searching for things like Accessibility, accessible documents, and section 504.
If you want to send me a DM, I can send you some more specific information, and guidelines that we use.

I have accepted this answer because, despite the unrelated US legal part, the provided links have useful resources regarding document accessibility.

my apologies.  I didn't see the "not US" part until just now.

My fault. I moved that part to the top now.

I think deafness and blindness are so rare that preparing beforehand is a waste of resources. Dealing with such cases when they occur should be sufficient, in particular because you are probably not able to completely accomodate them without external expert assistance.
What you can and arguable should consider are issues that occur more frequently, such as color-blindness. Statistics suggest that every sizable course has at least a handful of afflicted students, so you can be sure your effor pays off. Plus, color blindness is usually quite easy to work around by using suitable color palettes and/or using markings besides color. As a nice bonus, such scripts/slides also print better, so you incidentally help every student.
I'm sure there are more disadvantages that frequently appear; I'll not try to give a complete list. Browse some resources on physical, mental and social issues that have high incidence (meaning that they are likely to occur in every 100-student-classroom), that may impede learning in your course as it is, and that you can actually accomodate to some extent given your skills and resources.
Tl;dr: Accept that you won't be able to prepare for all eventualities. Pick your battles; spend your resources effectively.

It's amazing how many plotting tools pick green and red as the first two default colors.

At my university, there is an entire Services for Students with Disabilities office that handles these kinds of issues. Students with health issues that require accommodations are referred, usually by their teachers or doctors, to the office. At the office, they are screened for which types of accommodations will truly help them while being fair to other students given the circumstances. Then, the students can go to their professors with official forms indicating what kinds of accommodations they can receive.
This system allows professors to give very specific and reasonable accommodations. There's no risk that they'll make decisions that are too generous or restrictive, make the situation worse, are taken in by a student who is lying or refuse to believe a student who really has an issue, or fall for any of the other very serious risks associated with trying to decide what to do on their own.
I strongly suspect that your university has a similar department. You should do some research and see whether that's the case.

It doesn't. As stated in the question. Not United States. And considering that I specifically asked about general guidelines, explicitly saying that I'm aware of the 'case-by-case' approach, mostly irrelevant/repetition of other answer. Thanks for your opinion tho.


text:
Is there any reason to not make course details public?
While attending a course sometime back, I recall an instructor saying, "I need to warn (other instructor's name)...their course syllabus is available to anyone!"
I do not have access to an LMS for my classroom-based course, so I just post my course details to a regular Web hosting service. On the Web site, students, or anyone else, can easily locate:

the syllabus
exam study guide
homework instructions

I cannot think of any reason why this would be a problem, but recall the comment, so wonder if there might be some issue I have overlooked. Is there any reason why any of this information should not be open to the public?

Basically, I would answer no! There are, however, several issues that may prevent people from publishing material openly. One is if it contains copyrighted material, another is if the material contains hints that can help students gain an unfair advantage. In your list, the only possible issue could be with the third if those in any way could lead to an unfair advantage (not that I can think of how). That said, many publish homework questions, lecture materials etc on web sites that can be found by a search. I have benefited from finding such materials when developing my own courses and I am very grateful for that. Returning to your three points, I think they provide a good basis for students to decide what they can expect from the course and hopefully will attract the right students to it.

Let me put it this way, if I know of a published book that explains the topic of the course very nicely, do I have an advantage compared to my fellow classmates? One could think that. It is unfair? Not really, anyone could have done the same research as me and find the same book.
Some universities actually encourage professors to publish their class notes. It is a good way of getting prestige, as other professors can base their course plan on yours, or students may find the notes useful. In both cases, it is a very good publicity for the university, and very cheap.
Copyright issues are probably the only possible limitation, but they depend greatly on the subject: for modern English literature, you will need to comment on extracts of copyrighted books, and perhaps you want to avoid any legal fuzz regarding whether you are under fair use or not; but in mathematics there are hardly any copyrights in theorems.
Another reason not to have things public is if you are going to publish them as a book. But that is another ethics debate for another time.

As @PeterJansson explains putting material online has many advantages for the students. But I believe that there are two small conditions for this.
First, that the author keeps control of the material. By this I mean that is not just posted somewhere on the internet where the author cannot modify it. This is because usually the material created and typesetted by a single person has not gone through a publishing process and usually has many errors an typos that the author should be able to correct anytime. This is the reason why I believe any uploaded material should always explain the way to contact the author (at least an email address). We all have found note on the web plagued with error that the author either can't correct or doesn't even know they exist.
Second, that the existence of the material and the way to access the last version of  it is explained to all the student attending the course. The problem is that we cannot control what happens whith the files once we upload them but at least we can tell students where to get the right version of them.
This is the way to avoid the only way to prevent the only form of unfair advantage I can think of which is some students having a more recent version of the notes or some students not knowing that the notes exist.


text:
Must one find references to fit knowledge already known from education or experience?
Recently I wrote a course paper on a subject connecting my major to my current major. In the background section, I listed quite a bit of essential information I think is information that is readily available, and which I can confirm through many years of life and work experience, but which my instructor knows nothing about. The instructor has accused me of not providing references for this information.
Do I need to fill my paper with citations to people who wrote books saying the same thing? How do I know where to draw the line between what gets a reference and what does not?

Here is the general principle for citations: anything that is not considered "elementary knowledge" to the community reading the paper must have a citation.
This means that different communities need citations for different things.
For example, when I write for a biology community, I often end up including citations to basic computer science textbooks, to give a grounding for things that are simple undergraduate information in my background, but that would be highly unintuitive to an experimental biologist.  The reverse applies as well, for a biologist writing to a computer science audience.
Something that you know through experience definitely needs to be backed up with citation.  One of the critical values of the scientific method is that it lets us separate statements supportable by facts from myths based on cognitive biases.  We humans are very, very bad at learning from experience, in the sense that we draw many conclusions that are simply not true.  Folklore is full of these types of experience-grounded myths, some of which turn out to be true (willow bark does help with pain: that's the basis for aspirin), and some of which turn out to be false (mercury turns out to be terrible as a medicine).
If you can find things backing up your experience in reliable literature, you can cite them.  If not, perhaps you have a good subject for study, if you can figure out how to design an appropriate experiment...

The standard rule of thumb in this situation is not whether the information is readily available, but whether it is common knowledge. If the majority of people on the street (or beginners in your field) will know the information, then you probably don't need to cite a source for that information. However, if it is information specific to your subspecialty, you do need to cite a source, even when this is 'common knowledge' to you and others in your sub-specialty. The rest of the world--and in this case, your instructor--do not simply know this information, and thus you need to provide them a way to evaluate the validity of your claims.
Where this really gets tricky is when you are writing for a specialty audience. You do not need to provide a source for background information that your audience already knows and has known since beginning their studies. For example, I would not expect to need to provide a definition of, or citation for, third spacing to an audience of healthcare professionals, but if my audience may include other disciplines then I need to address this because third spacing can mean more than one thing.

"you need to provide them a way to evaluate the validity of your claims" - does this imply that claims without source are invalid by definition? That is to say that no "new" claims can be made by the author of the derivative paper, as they can not back them up. Wouldn't that constrain research greatly?

@aevitas A citation is one way to back up a claim.  Others include experimental data, simulations, mathematical analysis, and the rest of the "meat" of scientific papers.

@aevitas - welcome to Academia, where referencing has become more important than validity, research or original thought.

@JonStory if you base a valid argument on false premises, the outcome is likely to be wrong. That is why you need to back up your claims, be it by experiment, citation, or others.


text:
Is it okay for the author field to contain names of research labs?
I find most articles through EBSCO and similar search tools, then export the BibTeX details to my own bibliography.bib file. Recently, I found some BibTeX files with a strange author field, containing not just the name of a person, but also of a research lab or a college. E.g.:

Author = {White, R. R. and West College Child Development Laboratory}

When compiled in APA format, it looks very odd:

White, R. R. and Laboratory, W. C. C. D.

Are there situations in which it is correct to place such lab or school details directly in the author field? If not, where do I need to relocate this information to?

I have seen labs signing papers in cases of very big collaborations. If that is how it is cited in the journal, you should adjust your bib file like so (thanks to Federico Poloni for the fix):
Author = "White, R. R. and {West College Child Development Laboratory}"

I think that the correct format should be Author = "White, R. R. and {West College Child Development Laboratory}", so that the first author gets formatted according to the bibtex style.

@FedericoPoloni You are correct, fixed.

What does the article itself look like if you pull it up from the journal itself? You should probably adjust your record of it to match whatever the article actually says. This could be a problem with the machine parsing of the original document, or the journal may have accepted the "authorship" of the lab as a convention in that field.


text:
Is it necessary to obtain permissions for copying figures from published articles in your proposal/dissertation?
I am currently writing a proposal for my research topic and I want to copy figures from published articles into my proposal document. To put it in perspective, almost all the copied figures are to go in the “Literature review” section of the document.
Is it necessary to send an email to each and every author requesting permissions to copy the figures, even though complete citations and references are included? I referred to the following link:
MITLibraries: Reuse of content in thesis.
From what it says, copying images in thesis (with correct citations) seems to be valid under US copyright law.

For figures from your own papers, it would depend on the copyright transfer agreement you (or the corresponding author) signed upon publication. However, all copyright agreements I know explicitly authorize reuse of content for academic theses.
As an example: the American Chemical Society, which does not leave the authors too many rights, includes this wording:

Authors may reuse all or part of the Submitted, Accepted or Published Work in a thesis or dissertation that the Author writes and is required to submit to satisfy the criteria of degree-granting institutions. Such reuse is permitted subject to the ACS’ “Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research"

For figures from others’ papers, a thesis is not very different from any other publication (see the related question about blogging). Unless your institution has a specific agreement with publishers (as MIT seems to have), you have to either:

ask for permission; these days, it's all done online and once you have located the appropriate form for a publisher, you can make your requests and get all the answers the next day
rely on fair use in the US, or similar law in other countries; around me, most people actually do that, either knowingly or just out of ignorance :)

Copyright laws vary by country, so this answer may be UK specific.
To be safe rather than sorry, it probably is a good idea to copyright clear third party works, especially if your dissertation will eventually be uploaded to an online depository, which is becoming more common. Imperial College London, as an example, specify that proof of permission to include third party works needs to be included in the electronic copy of the thesis and this may be a policy at other universities too. In addition, the source needs to be carefully referenced in a note to the figure. Not doing this can cause unwanted delays in depositing the thesis in the archive.
In my case, I found it rapid and free to include single figures from published journal articles in the thesis. Just as F'x says, requesting permissions can be done in a day, although it's probably best not to leave it to the last minute. I was sent through to Copyright Clearance Center's Rightslink from the published journal articles each time I requested permission and the process was straightforward.

I created an account on copyright.com and using the same I was able to get permissions for more than half of the figures for which I needed to do so. This way is particularly useful for students in the United States as there's now one place where most of the requesting and granting can take place. The experience is like shopping from an online website (they literally have a shopping cart) and in general the process was more convenient than I had thought what it would be.
For a subset of the remaining papers, where the publisher was the copyright holder, I emailed the publisher and I was able to get a response in less than a couple of working days. This was true for a few papers from Europe and the UK. For the papers where the holder was the author, I emailed the author. For all figures for which I didn't get a reply or I got a reply which quoted a significant cost for reusing the figures, I simply removed the figures from my literature review.


text:
Where to define nomenclature in a proposal or dissertation?
I am writing my proposal and I am borrowing heavily from one of my publications. The published paper has a Nomenclature section at the very beginning (just after the abstract).
What is the appropriate place for a nomenclature in a proposal/thesis? Or is it more advisable to explain the terms near the place where they are used (considering that if Nomenclature is published on a distant page it would be too much of an effort on the reader's part to scroll down and up again)?

I prefer to group definitions of notation and symbols with the typical "List of ..." elements. You probably already have "List of figures" and "List of tables", so simple add something like "List of symbols" or "List of abbreviations" after the other lists.

I personally think the biggest consideration is how often the term or symbol is used. If it's used a lot, then a clear definition at the start is probably the best. The reader then knows where to look if they're unsure of the meaning rather than having to find the first place it's used, and it would be ridiculous to keep defining it every time you use it.
For things that are just used once, it may be more readable to define it at the point of use. The definition is only relevant for that little portion, so splitting the definition and use makes things, as you say, too much of an effort for the reader.
The question then is where to draw the line; at what point does a rarely used term become common enough to warrant being included in the nomenclature section? This is, I think, becomes a matter of preference. Personally, if a term were used in more than one section, I'd define it at the start. Though, if it really is only used twice, perhaps an in-place definition and a "recall that we define..." kind of sentence would read more smoothly.

But where should I add it? Before Introduction? In an Appendix?

Personally, I would put it at the front, but after the introduction. Then people can read it "in-line" or skip it as they prefer. As an appendix always requires page flipping. However, matters of style and field always intervene. I'm in CS, we tend to put it at the start, similar to larger mathematics documents. In the arts, a glossary as an appendix is often common, but in that case it's often expected that most of the definitions are already known to the reader (not special to that particular publication) and thus are only occasionally referenced.