How to Use the Instructor Portal

The Instructor Portal of McBurney Connect provides online access for instructors to review and manage student disability-related accommodations.

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About the Instructor Portal

As soon as a student requests to use accommodations in your course, a Student Accommodation Letter describing the request will appear in the Instructor Portal. You will also receive email notification of requests about two weeks before the start of the semester. While students are encouraged to request accommodations as soon as possible after registering for a course, you may receive requests at any time during the semester.

Students generate accommodation letters on a section-by-section basis rather than by course. This means that instructors teaching different components of a course may get different letters with slightly different accommodations. For example, the letter that goes to the instructor teaching the lecture section of a course may be different from the letter that the teaching assistant receives for the discussion and lab sections of that same course. For more information on Student Accommodation Letters:

As the semester begins, you can use the Instructor Portal to learn how many of your students have requested accommodations and they types of accommodations they are requesting. As the semester progresses, you can use the portal to review new requests and access information to coordinate ongoing accommodations, such as accommodated testing.

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What’s in the portal

  • A list of students who have generated Student Accommodation Letters for each class section
  • The Student Accommodation Letter for each student
  • An indication of which students in a class section have limited flexibility as an accommodation and the ability to create/manage Limited Flexibility Plans. For more information on this accommodation, please visit Implementing the Limited Flexibility Accommodation
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How to View and Export a Spreadsheet of Student Requests

This feature is particularly helpful for instructors with large class sizes. The exported spreadsheet can be sorted by accommodation type to assist in implementing and communicating about accommodations, such as testing accommodations or advance access to slides, for groups of students. (If emailing groups of students about accommodations, put student addresses in the Bcc: line to maintain confidentiality.)

  1. Log in to the Instructor Portal with your NetID.
  2. From the “Overview” page, click “Export Data: Students,” to expand this section, and then click the [Export Student Accommodation Requests] button to create an Excel spreadsheet file.
  3. Save the Excel file in a secure location to protect student privacy.
  4. To keep the file up-to-date with students and their requested accommodations as the semester progresses, periodically repeat this process.
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Instructor Portal FAQs

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Access is provided to any instructor assigned in the Student Information System (SIS) to a course section in which a student is using accommodations.This may include faculty, teaching assistants, lab instructors, and other instructional staff. It also includes instructors who are marked as hidden (“Print” is unchecked in SIS). Academic advisors do not have access.

Course coordinators will have access to Student Accommodation Letters for any section on which they are listed as an instructor, including if they are listed in a supervisory or auxiliary role, or if they are listed as an instructor who is not displayed. Otherwise, course coordinators will not have access.

This typically means that at the present time, no students have generated an accommodation letter for your class. However, it is possible that later in the semester, a student may generate a letter. You will receive an email if this happens.

This may happen for one of the following reasons:

  • The student has updated the accommodations they want to use in the course. You will receive an updated letter by email.
  • The student is using accommodations in multiple sections of the same class (for example, in the lecture section and in the discussion section) and you are listed as the instructor for both. You will receive a Student Accommodation Letter for each section via email.
  • The instructor’s information (such as email address) has changed. The Student Accommodation Letters for that section will be resent via email to the instructor whose info has changed.

The Instructor Portal will have the most recent version of the letter.

Please contact the student’s Access Consultant at the McBurney Center, who will be listed at the top and bottom of each Student Accommodation Letter.

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