Bridging "Good Teaching" with Inclusive Design

Core Idea

Inclusive teaching and design are always “good teaching,” but “good teaching” is not always inclusive.

Proposal

Have you heard of the WYSIATI principle? Coined by Nobel Prize (Economics) laureate, Daniel Kahneman and pronounced whiz-ee-yaht-tee, this term is an acronym for What You See Is All There Is. It’s theorized as a common, unconscious bias that even well-intentioned educators make: I can’t see it, so it doesn’t exist. It’s the idea that our minds are prone to make judgements and form impressions based on the information that is available to us. In teaching and learning, the WYSIATI principle is an idea with consequences. That is, the students in our classes have all kinds of invisible circumstances that can impact their learning. Some of these circumstances include the following:

• Attention or comprehension problems because of an emotional hardship or learning disability.

• A single device, like a phone or a tablet, for doing all of their digital coursework.

• Familial or other work obligations outside of school.

• A long commute to and from campus.

• Homelessness or food or housing insecurities.

• Low vision, but not blindness; difficulty looking at a screen for extended periods of time

• Difficulty hearing, but not necessarily deafness.

• A lack of experience or experienced mentors in higher education or in particular disciplines.

• Returning to school after a period of time and feeling rusty, insecure, or imposter syndrome.

    A faculty colleague shared with us that she had taught for nearly an entire semester, favoring a particular color to emphasize important ideas in her documents, before a student revealed to her that he could not see that color. Had she known, she would have made a simple change so that the student could read or understand the most important parts of the course documents. This is the WYSIATI principle at work: she couldn’t see her student’s colorblindness, so she didn’t know to do anything about it.

As though it were not already challenging to detect and address invisible learning challenges, the physically-distant quality of online, blended, and digital course components can compound the WYSIATI principle’s effects.

Fortunately, there are many conversations happening in our community of practice around “good” online/blended/digital teaching. These conversations include research-based and practitioner-endorsed practices (in addition to online/blended quality assurance efforts), such as:

• Releasing the syllabus before the start of the term so students can make preparations (Darby, n.d.).

• Stating learning objectives and aligning content and assessments to them (Nilson & Goodson, 2018).

• “Humanizing” the online experience with video, voice, and empathetic interaction (Pacansky-Brock, 2018)

• Enacting a quick turn-around time for assignments so that students receive timely feedback on their work (Dobrovolny & Coddington, 2015).

All of these qualities (and many more) comprise important elements of “good” teaching, but even an instructor who does all of these things might still overlook certain intersecting, invisible barriers that their students are experiencing.

This presentation will begin with an activity designed to help participants articulate what they already know about what makes “good” online teaching, followed by a demonstration of specific, actionable techniques for inclusive design. Some of these techniques include:

• Using style guides to create readable documents.

• Name pronunciation. 

• Student-centered language. 

• Alternative formats for media.

This demonstration is intended to reveal how good teaching practices can benefit from an inclusive design framework and will function to bridge the two. As an example of this bridge, we have added inclusive design considerations (in the form of guiding questions) to the “good” teaching practices we mentioned previously:

• Releasing the syllabus before the start of the term so students can make preparations

  • Is the document accessible? Is there proper text formatting, list styles, unique hyperlinks...?

  • How or where is the document available, particularly when updates are made?

• Stating learning objectives and aligning content and assessments to them

  • Does the course content reflect multiple points of view?

  • Are there multiple opportunities for representation, expression, and engagement (UDL)?

• “Humanizing” the online experience with video, voice, and empathetic interaction

  • Is the media captioned?

  • Does the instructor pronounce students’ names correctly in voice or video feedback?

• Enacting a quick turn-around time for assignments so that students receive timely feedback on their work

  • Are scoring guides or rubrics used to attempt unbiased evaluation of student work?

  • Are students acknowledged by name and is the spelling or pronunciation of their names happening correctly?

Session Goals

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• articulate qualities of “good” online teaching;

• articulate qualities of inclusive design;

• note overlapping and distinguishing qualities of good online teaching and inclusive design;

• brainstorm ways to effect change in the contexts where they have influence. Some questions we will pose to participants: 

  • What is a technique that you plan to apply to your own practices?

  • Who will you share these techniques with and how will you go about sharing? 

Session Outline & Interactivity

The presenters have developed an activity sheet (Google Doc) to facilitate learning, discussion, and reflection around online/blended/digital teaching and learning during this session. This document will be provided to attendees in hard copy and digital form. To begin the session, participants will be invited to brainstorm qualities of good online teaching. We will then move on to our presentation about the specific, actionable inclusive design techniques described in this proposal (e.g., style guides; student-centered language), which participants can record on their activity guide. The <10-minute group session will involve a “tea party” activity, where participants convene with nearby attendees and fill in the center portion of the guide, which asks for overlapping ideas that bridge good teaching and inclusive design. When we reconvene as a whole group for the final five-minute reflection, the presenters will invite participants to share and consider how to apply these findings to their respective spheres of influence. Responses will be recorded (by the presenters) on a Padlet that will be tweeted and shared with the larger OLC community. Hoping to also engage our virtual audience, we will include online access to our activities and one of the presenters will monitor their participation, serving as their voice when they contribute to the session. It is our hope that all attendees--virtual and physical--will leave this session with inclusive design techniques that they can use and share immediately.