Key principles: Modelling EDII principles in interactions with learners

In a virtual course, the reality is that there are a finite number of interactions an instructor can reasonably have with learners.

You may communicate over email or in virtual office hours with some learners several times in term. At the same time, you may never interact directly with other learners, perhaps because they are confident in the guidance they receive from the course content and assignment instructions. Learners may be additionally confident from the guidance they receive from your course announcements, and the assignment feedback you deliver as the course progresses. If you have synchronous sessions, you may or may not engage directly with all learners depending on class size.

The good news is that regardless of what your learners need from you as an instructor, the asynchronous nature of virtual teaching offers an increased ability for you to create a welcoming and inclusive learning environment during term.

Strategies in action: Modeling EDII principles in interactions with learners

Offer a land acknowledgement

In the context of a course that you have been tasked to facilitate, it would be extremely unlikely for you to have the scope and/or capacity to significantly redesign or work to decolonize the organization, content, and delivery of the course. In such a context, such work would likely be inappropriate and ultimately lead to tokenism.

While online learning is often framed as “landless territory” (Huguenin, n.d.), offering a land acknowledgement is one small step that you can do to reconnect your learners to physical space and place, regardless where they might be. It is also a way to signal to your learners through your syllabus and, your dedication to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action in the context of post-secondary education in general, and your discipline specifically. This can be done on a dedicated page of your learning management system (LMS) or in a welcome announcement (text- or video-based).

A land acknowledgement is an intentional and sincere message of acknowledgement of the ancestral holders and owners of the land one finds oneself upon.

Many institutions have crafted institutional land acknowledgements, and this is a good place to start. However, these land acknowledgements should not be read just as statements; they should be personal and sincere, self-reflective, or guided by intended action.

For example, you might share

• how you relate to the land and others around you,
• aspects of your own reconciliation journey, or
• the kinds of actions you’ve committed to personally or professionally with regards to reconciliation.

In this way, land acknowledgements are a small but welcome gesture that help encourage your learners to think about their own relationship to Indigenous peoples, the land, and reconciliation.

Credit: Whose Land

Consider this example of a land acknowledgement

Adjust your email signature

You may consider adding new elements to your email signature to signal to your learners the values and principles you strive to embody in one-on-one communications, and by extension, your course. A personalized email signature shows that you are a real person, and helps to diminish the transactional distance between you and your learners when they reach out specifically to you.

For example, you may consider

• adding your preferred pronouns;
• including an equity or accessibility statement (for example, one provided by your institution or one inspired by it);
• if you use dictation to compose your emails, adding an explainer notice for this to account for any transcription errors that may inadvertently occur. This has the added benefit of sensitizing your learners to this alternate way to interact with their technology; or
• including a personalized land acknowledgement, or, if you are not yet comfortable crafting your own, using your institution’s land acknowledgement or affirmation.

Acknowledge real-world events in your communications

Your learners are not learning in a vacuum. They likely have other studies or work responsibilities as well as personal lives that affect how they might be able to interact with and engage with your course in different parts of the term. You are likely familiar with the fact that emergencies arise or that personal health or disabilities may require accommodation (understanding and responding to learner disclosures will be explored in Module 4.4). Additionally, other local, regional, or world events may similarly have an impact on your learners. For example, natural disasters in areas where learners may be living may be impacting them directly, or geo-political unrest may be weighing on learners who have family in that area of the world.

As a matter of practice, you may connect world events or news items in your weekly announcements to provide professional commentary as it relates to course content. From time to time, however, you may feel personally connected to, or know your learners are connected to, a particular event in the news. Providing a brief note acknowledging the reality of the world and that it may be a challenging time for some in the class, and offering to negotiate with learners who may need additional time on assignments as a result, creates an authentic and humanized environment where learners understand they will be heard if they choose to speak up.

You may not always know what events might be important to your learners, however by broaching this type of communication, even once, you can build strong foundations for authentic and brave relationships with them during the course. This strategy might occur naturally when engaging in in-person teaching, however, in the virtual space, this approach needs to be more intentional.

In this example, the instructor wanted to acknowledge the first National Truth and Reconciliation Day by changing course readings for the week. In this case, the class size was small and there were synchronous sessions every week. In order to democratically determine how to incorporate the day into class plans, he opened a discussion with the class via an email to see what they wanted to read and discuss to mark the occasion. For the instructor, the complexity of conditions offered a great heuristic for reflecting on how to structure a class in a way that provides recognition and space for diversity, yet also harnesses it to enrich the whole classroom collective. Presented is an excerpt of this communication.

In this example, the instructor sends weekly announcements via email. In this particular case, the announcement came around the same time as intense flooding was happening in British Columbia in late 2021. Although the course was being taught from an institution in Ontario, the instructor had personal connections to the region and knew some learners lived in BC. In her email she offers acknowledgement of the situation and offers her support to any learners who may be struggling as a result. Presented is an excerpt of this communication.

Key principles: Academic conventions and inclusivity

Higher education courses involve a range of academic conventions that structure the learning environment. By “academic conventions” we mean things like

• mandatory attendance (or asynchronous time-on-content),
• due dates,
• timed assessments, and
• many other obvious and/or subtle course conventions or practices.

Some of these structures may be carefully designed to facilitate the learning outcomes identified for the course, while others may be implemented based on administrative or logistical restraints that are external to the course’s learning outcomes. The ones that we need to be concerned about are those that have arisen purely from longstanding tradition.

Virtual learning environments are less steeped in tradition than face-to-face PSE learning, but there are still academic conventions that play out in virtual learning. In Module 2.5 Learner mental health and wellness in virtual courses, you were asked to rethink the value of “rigour” in PSE as a driver of academic conventions. It was noted in that section that there can be a tendency for course elements to be designed to emphasize challenge and/or personal discipline in ways that may not be directly connected to the course’s learning outcomes, and that such conventions have the potential to be exclusionary or uninviting to students. Exclusionary conventions built into the design of a virtual course or broader institution can either be escalated or reduced by the way the instructor facilitates the course.

Strategies in action: Implement common academic conventions with inclusivity in mind

In our calls to review academic conventions and consider whether these traditions may exclude or disincentivize engagement in a course, we want to clarify one point, and recognize two barriers to implementing these suggestions.

Revising academic conventions: Proceed with caution!

To clarify, every academic convention exists in its own specific context. Our intention here is not to encourage the elimination all traditional conventions in PSE, but rather to interrogate whether those conventions are legitimately tied to course and credential learning outcomes. There are some cases where academic conventions have important functions that serve important learning outcomes (e.g., the requirement to test nursing students’ medication dosage calculations under time constraints, because there is a functional need to perform such calculations under pressure in professional practice).

Revising academic conventions: Barriers to consider

Some structural barriers exist to our guidance in this section.

First, we recognize that not all course instructors have full academic freedom to make in-the-moment adjustments to course design.

Second, most academic conventions have developed over the many centuries that post-secondary institutions and academic and professional disciplines have existed. Therefore, we recognize that these conventions can be deeply engrained, and may be difficult to adjust or eliminate immediately. This is especially true where change requires additional funds to support an alternative instructional approach, or where a significant collective shift of andragogical mindset is required before change can be universally implemented. In such instances, inclusively-minded instructors may work “behind the scenes” to effect change, while they use professional judgement within their sphere of influence to provide learners with support and compassion to promote learning.

Strategies in action: Embracing inclusivity through an accessible teaching approach

Ensure your LMS is well-organized

One of the key points of contact between you and your learners, and ultimately their success in your course, is the virtual course space. Many institutions use learning management systems (LMS), but some may use websites as their main hub for content, as well as learner-learner, and learner-instructor interaction.

Regardless of the platform, the course environment should be intuitive and easy for learners to navigate, so that they do not spend valuable cognitive processing time trying to figure out the course structure, or the LMS interface, or locating where things are in the course. Instead, they can focus on their learning. The impact of a disorganized learning space can have serious consequences on learner engagement and motivation as it is the major point of contact learners have with the course.

Consider the following questions:

• Is the syllabus easy to find?
• Is a consolidated course schedule or timeline readily available and clearly visible? Is it logically presented?
• Are the assignment descriptions, rubrics, and exemplars (if applicable) easy to find?
• Is it clear where assignments are to be submitted or posted?
• Is the course content organized in such a way that the expectations for each week are clear?

Even if you have no ability to change the content of the course you will teach, you may still be able to organize your virtual learning space to present it in the most effective way. This may be achieved by using LMS templates.

To get started, we recommend the following:

1. Use an LMS template to help organize your course.
   • These kinds of templates are great organizational prompts and can help you to determine if you need to add supporting documents (e.g., a weekly schedule).
2. Ask a colleague or teaching assistant to review/navigate the LMS with fresh eyes and point out any areas of confusion or gaps in your current LMS structure.
3. If you have time, determine whether there are simple elements that you can add to provide a more humanized, inclusive, and welcoming experience.
   For example,
   • adding an “About the instructor” page with your picture and biography (see: Sharing your personality and passion);
   • posting a written or recorded land acknowledgement, and
   • pointing to relevant institutional resources (see: Promote course and institutional supports in your course LMS).

A well-organized learning space sets clear expectations, enhances findability, and provides comprehension support for learners, ultimately making it a more accessible and equitable learning experience.

Ensure the accessibility of materials produced for the facilitation of the course

In some virtual courses, the design of the course might require you to:

• produce short recorded narrated presentations that summarize key concepts or that connect content to current affairs;
• prepare material to share with learners during synchronous virtual sessions, or
• provide additional content support to your learners in response to check-point/formative activities, learner feedback, or assignment quality.

To address this, you might want to create an announcement, video (2-7 minutes maximum), summary image, or presentation deck tailored to your current cohort of learners. By keeping the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in mind as you produce these materials in term, you can signal to learners your commitment to ensuring that all learners have equitable access to content and an effective learning experience.

Refer to Module 2.4 Universal Design for Learning and Equitable Access to Online Content for the basics of UDL which involve the key principles of multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. Here we will focus on a few key points to assist should you need to create new documents or multimedia during term.

References and credits

Huguenin, M. (n.d.). Integrating Indigenous pedagogy in remote courses. Teaching and Learning, Trent University. https://www.trentu.ca/teaching/integrating-indigenous-pedagogy-remote-courses

Office of Indigenous Initiatives, Queen’s University. (n.d.). Land Acknowledgement. https://www.queensu.ca/indigenous/ways-knowing/land-acknowledgement

The material related to the sections “Ensure Your LMS is Well-Organized” and “Ensure the Accessibility of Materials Produced for the Facilitation of the Course” on this page is derived from the original work High Quality Online Courses: How to Improve Course Design and Delivery for your Post-Secondary Learners [link to https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/hqoc/]. The original work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, except where otherwise noted. This derivative work retains the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.

Whose Land. (n.d.). Treaties & Agreements. https://www.whose.land/en/. Used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.