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Accessible PDFs
Developing and delivering accessible instructional content—meaning content that students with and without disabilities can readily engage with and use—is essential to the success of an online course. While many accessibility standards and guidelines are broadly applicable, there are also specific considerations unique to different content formats and delivery modes. In this piece, we present recommendations for enhancing the accessibility of PDFs for students.
Quantitative Course Best Practices
"What I hear, I forget; what I see, I remember; what I do, I understand." –Chinese proverb
Accessible Use of Text
Students with diverse cognitive, linguistic, and academic abilities benefit from accessible text. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) establish numerous requirements (known as success criteria) to ensure that text is perceivable, operable, and understandable to all users. This guide synthesizes the essential criteria related to text accessibility. Following these guidelines when creating course content, such as documents, slides, and pages in the LMS, will help you eliminate potential barriers for your learners.
Developing Instructional Materials
Once you have defined the learning objectives for your course, you can begin to develop assessments to ensure students achieve those objectives. Once you have created assessments, you can begin to develop materials to ensure students succeed on those assessments. This backward design process—which moves from objectives to assessments and finally to materials—is known as learning-centered instruction, and it directs every course task toward the mastery of certain skills and competencies. This blog focuses on the third stage of this process, the development of high-quality instructional materials, beginning with the idea that robust and engaging online courses contain a mix of created and curated content. Below you will find guidelines for creating and curating instructional materials to help you achieve the optimal balance for your course.
Five Instructor Feedback Essentials
Providing student feedback is a key component of an instructor’s role and an important part of effective instruction. Research shows that ongoing feedback keeps students engaged and improves their morale, motivation, and learning (Best, et al, 2014). Yet, providing high quality feedback can be a time-consuming commitment, especially in courses with large class sizes or numerous written assessments. Instructors should keep in mind the tools, structure, and best practices that can help them provide feedback.
Presentation Best Practices Guide
Many online courses focus on written communication skills, featuring discussion posts, papers, and case study reports among other assignments. However, oral communication and presentation skills are just as integral to students’ success, and, indeed, many employers list presenting as one of the most desirable skills for job candidates (Suhadi et al., 2021).
Group Work Best Practices Guide
Group work in online courses can facilitate student learning in unique ways. In particular, group assignments can provide students with opportunities to engage in authentic tasks and develop collaborative skills applicable to their future careers. Williams, Duray, and Reddy (2006) argue that team learning stimulates student thinking at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, including application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Group projects can serve a variety of different purposes across a wide range of academic programs and subjects. Additionally, group projects can foster interaction and community building amongst students, which can be especially valuable in an asynchronous online classroom (Martin & Bolliger, 2018).
Accessing Open Educational Resources
While Open Educational Resources (OERs) can take on many forms, including assignments, videos, and articles, open textbooks have provided students with more affordable options for accessing and purchasing required course materials.
Copyright
From time to time instructors may want to include in their courses copyrighted materials like images, print content, audio recordings, or videos. The University of Minnesota Libraries define copyright as “the area of law that deals with creation, ownership, sale, and use of creative and expressive works.”
Rubrics as a Tool to Support Equity and Inclusion
While student populations have become increasingly diverse, many groups, including first-generation, non-native English speakers, and individuals with disabilities, still face barriers and bias that can derail their success in college (Super et al., 2020). Traditional grading practices—including penalties for late work, writing in dialects other than standard English, and even plagiarism— are prone to bias and only perpetuate disparities, the research says (Feldman, 2019; Savini, 2021).