Global Accessibility Awareness Dayis this Thursday, May 20, 2021 Help us celebrate the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
Many faculty admit their minds go blank or that they are stunned into silence when student incivility, micro/macro aggressions, discrimination, etc., occur in the classroom. It’s more commonplace than you think. Research reveals most faculty (~50%+) are “not prepared to deal with diversity-related conflict in their own classrooms” (Stolzenberg, et. al., 2019). Nevertheless, faculty must address these moments given their negative impact on student learning and even more so for BIPOC students (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010). The purpose of this post is to provide faculty with example responses to be used as a foundation for creating and personalizing classroom management of student incivility.
Liberating campus-bound faculty.
Of the many remarkable things about online learning—its principal benefit—is to give students the freedom to learn almost anywhere. And that goes for faculty members, too, who might now have access to new opportunities to teach remotely for institutions around the globe—and let colleges hire online faculty with attractive strengths who happen to live far away.
That has already started to happen during the pandemic, with so many faculty and staff working and teaching from home. Since it has made no difference to their students where they were living, some, quite privileged, took off for country homes or slipped away to vacation spots, continuing to teach online as if they were at a nearby campus.
Dual coding is the process of combining verbal materials with visual materials. There are many ways to visually represent material, such as with infographics, timelines, cartoon strips, diagrams, and graphic organizers.
When you have the same information in two formats – words and visuals – it gives you two ways of remembering the information later on. Combining these visuals with words is an effective way to study.
Now, look at only the visuals and explain what they mean in your own words. Then, take the words from your class materials and draw your own visuals to go along with them!
From DSC: As the authors comment, this is NOT about learning styles (as research doesn’t back up the hypothesis of learning styles):
When we discuss verbal and visual materials, it does sound like we could be referring to learning styles. However, it is important to remember that a great deal of research has shown that assessing your learning style and then matching your study to that “style” is not useful, and does not improve learning (2). (For more, read this piece.)
What if we could create these kinds of calendars and/or apps for faculty and staff as well as for students? — idea from Daniel Christian. The vehicles could be developed as analog/physical formats or in digital formats and apps. In the digital realm, one could receive a daily notification.
For faculty/staff:
Teaching and learning tips; pedagogies (flipped learning, active learning, etc.); ideas that have worked well for others
Creative experiments to try (such as digital storytelling or with an emerging technology such as AR, MR, or VR)
Tips & tricks re: tools within the learning ecosystem of one’s organization
How to make digital content that’s accessible
Items re: bias, diversity, equity & inclusion
Dates to be aware of (for processes on one’s LMS/CMS as an example)
Notes of encouragement and/or humor
Links to key resources
Other
[The Corporate Training / L&D world could do this as well.]
For students
Studying tips
How to take courses online
How people learn
Resources, books, people to follow on Twitter, blogs and RSS feeds, etc.
Pictures of judges, legislative bodies, law offices, corporate HQs, other
One of the few welcome outcomes of Covid-19, and higher education’s rapid move to remote instruction, is that many faculty members are more aware than ever of who the staff members are and what we do.
As Lee Skallerup Bessette wrote in October, staff members — anyone working on a college campus who is not a professor or an administrator — have been on the front lines during the pandemic: “We are the face that faculty members see when they have questions, concerns, or struggles with the technology they have been asked to use. We are the face that students see when they have questions, concerns, or struggles related to distance learning or on-campus policies and procedures.”
Yet however much academics and administrators have been turning to us for help now, they still rarely involve and entrust staff members with campus decision-making around teaching, curriculum development, and research.
…
It behooves every college and university to consider what authentic collaboration between the staff and the faculty might look like. How? Here are three concrete steps in that direction. . Step 1: Offer incentives for faculty-staff partnerships. Step 2: Rethink hierarchical traditions. Step 3: Create shared experiences.
From DSC: Although I was an Adjunct Professor for over 5 years and have worked alongside faculty members for 20 years, the majority of my work and efforts have mainly been on the staff side of the house. So I appreciate The Chronicle hosting this article and I thank Jenae for writing it. It’s an important topic.
If traditional institutions of higher education are going to survive, there needs to be much broader governance, a much greater use of teams to create and deliver learning experiences, and a much stronger culture of innovating and experimenting with new ideas. At the end of the day, I think that the following two things will be the deciding factors on whether a particular institution survives, merges, shrinks, or closes its doors altogether:
The culture of a particular institution
Whether that institution has visionary leadership or not (and not just being data-driven…which comes up short again and again)
This report profiles key trends and emerging technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning and envisions a number of scenarios and implications for that future. It is based on the perspectives and expertise of a global panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape.
3 Tech Trends Shaping the Future of Post-Pandemic Teaching and Learning — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly The landscape of higher education has been transformed by COVID-19, and that impact is a major factor in the 2021 Educause Horizon Report. Here are three key technology trends to watch as the lasting effects of the pandemic play out.
Excerpt:
What’s in store for higher education’s post-pandemic future? The latest Educause Horizon Report has identified the trends, technologies and practices shaping teaching and learning in the wake of COVID-19. The potential lasting effects of the pandemic “loomed large” in the trend selection this year, the report stated, emphasizing that although it remains to be seen whether the transformations of the past year will persist into the future, “it isn’t hard to imagine that higher education may never be the same in some important ways (good or bad).”
In the realm of technology in particular, it’s clear that the pandemic-induced shift to remote learning has dominated the trend landscape. The top three technological trends identified by the report are…
Students Want Online Learning Options Post-Pandemic— from insidehighered.com by Lindsay McKenzie The experience of learning remotely during the pandemic left students with a positive attitude toward online and hybrid courses, a new survey suggests.
Jessica Rowland Williams, director of Every Learner Everywhere, agreed. “The pandemic has given us the unique opportunity to pause and listen to each other, and we are beginning to discover all the ways our experiences overlap,” she said.
Udemy has become one of the best-funded companies in edtech, having raised another $80 million at the end of 2020 bringing its total raised to nearly $300 million. So, what are its plans, and how does it see the market for online courses changing after the pandemic?
Those were some questions we brought to Udemy’s CEO, Gregg Coccari, in a recent interview.
“They become professional at this,” he says. “They have assistants that handle the questions. They work at this every day. They’re always looking for new publishing ideas, more courses, they’re upgrading the courses they have. And so these become very professional online teachers.”
But those millionaires are, by and large, the exception.
From DSC:
I read an interesting article out at Inside Higher Ed from the other day: Rejecting Remote Proctoring — from insidehighered.com by Elizabeth Redden University of Michigan Dearborn made a universitywide decision to reject remote proctoring and invest in faculty development instead.
At the same time many other colleges were considering whether to employ the technologies, UM Dearborn’s leadership made the choice that eproctoring was unacceptably invasive, at least when it comes to students who hadn’t signed up for that kind of surveillance.
From DSC: Lower stakes assessments offered with a greater variety of ways to check for mastery. That fits in with what I’m reading about re: the topic ofUniversal Design for Learning (UDL), which offers:
Multiple methods of engagement
Multiple methods of representation
Multiple methods of action & expression <– to demonstrate what they are learning
It also reduces anxiety — something that’s needed in this period of time.
As students yearn for in-person interaction and the familiarity of their school buildings, platforms like Gather are filling the void — virtually.
Gather, also known as Gather.town, simulates buildings and classrooms on campus where students, professors, and teaching assistants can interact with one another through personal avatars during office hours. Its main feature, “Interaction Distance,” launches a video call between users whose avatars are within five steps from each other in the virtual space. As the users’ avatars walk away from each other, their video and audio quality decrease, simulating an in-person interaction.
Improving Digital Inclusion & Accessibility for Those With Learning Disabilities — from inclusionhub.com by Meredith Kreisa
Learning disabilities must be taken into account during the digital design process to ensure digital inclusion and accessibility for the community. This comprehensive guide outlines common learning disabilities, associated difficulties, accessibility barriers and best practices, and more.
“Learning shouldn’t be something only those without disabilities get to do,” explains Seren Davies, a full stack software engineer and accessibility advocate who is dyslexic. “It should be for everyone. By thinking about digital accessibility, we are making sure that everyone who wants to learn can.”
…
“Learning disability” is a broad term used to describe several specific diagnoses. Dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, nonverbal learning disorder, and oral/written language disorder and specific reading comprehension deficit are among the most prevalent.
What is flipped learning? A common and oversimplified answer is that it is an approach that asks students to watch lecture videos at home before class so that class time can be used for more interactive activities.
But the best way to describe it is to contrast it with traditional teaching frameworks. In the traditional framework, students get first contact with new concepts in class (the “group space” as I call it in my book on flipped learning) and then higher-level interactions are all on the student side through homework and so on (in the “individual space”). Flipped learning puts first contact with new ideas before group space activities, then uses the group space for active learning on mid- and upper-level tasks.
It’s worthwhile to compare flipped and traditional frameworks by contrasting the assumptions that each framework makes…
We can no longer assume that a pure lecture pedagogy is an acceptable teaching model or that banning technology is an acceptable practice.
