Designing Inclusive Online Courses
Designing online courses to foster an equitable classroom climate and provide learning-centered options for students is particularly important for serving minoritized students and others who can benefit from the flexibility offered by learning online.
Check out UCLA’s Inclusive Remote Teaching Checklist to reflect on your remote course structure and design. Stanford’s 10 strategies for creating equitable online learning environments may also be a good place to start.
Asynchronous Instruction
Asynchronous online courses are courses that students complete on their own time, rather than attending lectures or group meetings at a regular, specified time. Asynchronous courses often make use of recorded lecture videos to deliver course content and tools like Canvas Discussions to create opportunities for interaction among students.
By their nature, asynchronous online courses offer the highest degree of flexibility for students. At the same time, asynchronous courses present greater challenges for fostering an inclusive classroom community because students may have few (or no) opportunities to engage with each other face-to-face.
Instructors who teach asynchronously can take active measures to foster an inclusive classroom community in their courses, such as:
- Posting a short welcome video to introduce yourself to your students. The goal here is to establish a welcoming, supportive tone—not to reiterate details from your syllabus. Here is an example of a welcome video from online education scholar Michelle Pacansky-Brock.
- Asking students to introduce themselves to each other, using Canvas videos, Canvas Discussions, or another text-based discussion platform. Check out this UCSC resource on asynchronous discussions to learn more about setup, management and types of discussions.
- Incorporating peer review activities or social annotation as an assignment to build student interaction and support into your course design.
Synchronous Instruction
In a synchronous online course, students and the instructor(s) come together at regular and specified times—most often through a live video tool like Zoom. Synchronous online class sessions via tools like Zoom may pose additional challenges for equity. Participation in live Zoom sessions requires students to have access to a high-speed and reliable internet connection, as well as adequate technology to support the Zoom application.
Additionally, to get the most out of synchronous online courses, students should have access to a quiet and private study space from which they can call into Zoom meetings; unfortunately, not all students will. To make your synchronous online course more equitable, we recommend building in student choice to help mitigate these issues.
- Check out the TLC’s guide on webcam best-practices for the Zoom classroom. You may also benefit from reviewing this infographic on students’ camera use during synchronous course meetings.
- Synchronous remote learning also creates unique opportunities for participation and engagement, including various modes of non-verbal engagement that have their own benefits and challenges.
Additional Resources
- Learn more about critical Zoom captioning features: Enabling Captions, Managing Manual Captions
- Consider incorporating various kinds of discussion threads and peer review activities that encourage students to interact with one another: Canvas Discussions; Asynchronous Online Discussions; Peer Review Activities; social annotation with Hypothesis.
- Review your course materials using this Inclusive Remote Teaching Checklist, and consider incorporating some of these strategies for Creating Inclusive and Equitable Online Learning Environments
- Learn more about YuJa for collecting and organizing video resources, like Lecture Capture or recorded Zoom meetings.