To plan for a facilitation of engagement, equity and fairness, you will need to spend some time thinking about the individual learners in your courses to determine how to best match their learning needs with your teaching intentions and remove potential accessibility hurdles. To support the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference, you will need to pay special attention to the following aspects of inclusive course design for learning:

1. the online learning environment,
2. the diversity in and different formats for resources you will curate, adapt, and/or create,
3. the choices you allow students to make relating to content, learning and assessment so they can stay invested and engaged,
   
4. the various levels of challenge in tasks and content,
5. your availability and willingness to respond to students’ question and ideas,
6. the tips you deliver how to stay motivated,
7. the connections you draw between the information and the real world applications,
8. the feedback you provide on students’ progress.

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2.2 Accessibility of Course Resources

When you choose or create teaching materials for your courses, you might want to ensure that all your students can easily access and use those resources.  Accessible content meets the requirements of the Alberta Human Rights Act, which “has as its objective the amelioration of the conditions of disadvantaged persons or classes of disadvantaged persons, including those who are disadvantaged because of their race, religious beliefs, colour, gender, gender identity, gender expression, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income, family status or sexual orientation.”

Content authors must ensure that their e-learning content is presented in multiple formats and, therefore, accessible through multiple senses. For people who are blind, visual materials require an alternative, typically in the form of text readable by screen readers. While an audio version of visual content (such as an MP3 audio file that describes a complex image) could be used as an alternative, chances are the audio will interfere with the screen reader output. Text alternatives, on the other hand, are easily adapted or even simplified, read aloud by a screen reader, turned into Braille to be output through a Braille display, or translated into other languages.

The graph above is used to show that there are multiple levels on which access to learning can be impeded, not only pertaining to the resources you create yourself. The online learning environments and content created by others come with their own in-built design features, which cannot easily be altered. However, there are a number of things that you can do ensure that the course resources you use are accessible or come with workarounds that allow all students equal learning opportunities. In the following activity, you will focus on learning challenges and ways to overcome those.

2.3 Represent Diversity in Content and Practices

By choosing specific content and pedagogical approaches, you signal to your students what stance you are taking to teaching diverse groups of learners.

If you want to take a moment here to reflect on your course to be transformed for online delivery and ask yourself in how far your content and the teaching methods

The following excerpt from the ASCILITE technology-enhanced learning accreditation scheme (standard 7.3) provides quality markers for online courses at universities in higher ed courses in Australasian countries and may be a useful instrument guiding your content choices to reflect diversity:

There are a number of ways in which you as the online course instructor create safe, equitable and inclusive courses that are inviting to all your  learners:

1. Assume students are diverse in ways that you cannot see –that might be related to race, national origin, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, physical and neuro-disabilities, sexual orientation, spiritual beliefs, or many other possibilities.
2. Be explicit about your assessment criteria and how they relate to learning goals, and share successful examples.
3. Vary and offer rationale for assessment types.
4. Examine and consider revising choices for scholarly articles and other resources, guest speakers, etc. to include a diverse range of information and representation.

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3. Managing Student Behaviour and Conflict

No different from traditional on-campus classes, online courses welcome a broad range of individual learners who, with their unique set of personality traits, desires for learning, life-changing events in their biographies, and high hopes for future advancement, will inevitably shape the dynamics of your course(s) through the interactions with you and her/ his/ zer/ their peers.

You can place bets on the fact that there will be students who keep quiet and tend to only hesitatingly take part in the course conversations. At the same time, you can expect their exact opposites – the take-charge students or the ‘noisy’ ones as defined by Ko and Rossen (2010, p. 343). There will likely be students who disengage from your course for different reasons opposite to those who will challenge your knowledge or your authority. No doubt, these difficult student behaviours can make online teaching difficult at times.

It is therefore very important to know which specific factors cause or amplify difficult behaviours of students in online environments. An awareness for those factors is crucial as it guides your course design to include proactive strategies that can help prevent behavioural issues from arising. It also equips you with management methods that you can utilize to if you need resolve conflict with individual students or with dissonant student groups after all.

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3.1 Managing Difficult Students

Students who demonstrate behavioural issues are often unclear about the course requirements or have not yet build proficient skill levels to learn independently online without some extra help coming from you. The difficulties students have and exhibit in their behaviour can thus take many forms – from an inability to adjust to new technologies, to domination or sidetracking of conversations, to a lack of participation and scapegoating others for the own lack in sufficient academic progress. As those difficulties might show up with a delay in an online environment, you will need to become able to read signs as early as they appear and know which strategies to apply for different types of behaviour issues, some of which we will examine with the following activity.

Activity 3: Management Strategies for Different Learner Types

Time Estimate: 60 – 90 min.

This activity has  2 steps (outlined below).

Purpose: This activity introduces different learner types, describes their impact on the course dynamics and provides strategies to effectively deal with difficult behaviour.

Navigation: You will navigate between this chapter and the spaces where you can access the necessary information and collaborate with your peers.

Technology: The technology used for this activity include Pressbooks and Youtube

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STEP 1: Choose your preferred way to learn about specific learner types, behavioural issues and suggested strategies below. Both formats present the same information, but in different ways (viewing/ listening a video presentation versus reading a book chapter).

Read the book chapter excerpt in  Ko, S. & Rossen, S. (2010). Online Teaching. A Practical Guide. Taylor and Francis. Read Chapter 12. Classroom Management. Special Issues, pp. 339 – 356. Available as a fair dealings copy on Moodle [new tab]	Watch the video presentation by Mandernach, J. (2013, October 22). Dealing with Difficult Students in the Online Classroom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nTStCJBECw [new tab] Pdf of powerpoint available from https://www.uttyler.edu/cetl/files/Difficultstudents.pdf [new tab]

STEP 2: Direct your focus to answering the following two questions while accessing the necessary information.

1. What are some common behavioural issues in specific types of online learners?
2. What strategies can be applied to manage those behavioural problems?

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3.2 Strategies for Working with Online Course Dynamics

Generally, experienced online instructors agree with the statement made by Ko and Rossen (2010) that:

[…] most problems can be averted by the skillful management of student expectations such as we have outlined in earlier chapters – the comprehensive syllabus, clearly written assignment instructions, protocols for communication, code of conduct and clearly stated policies and criteria for grading as well as instructor responsiveness, are all ways to ensure that students understand how to do their best in your online course. (p. 343)

Pratt and Palloff (2003, p. 185-6) have derived a series of tips out of stage theory and their own experience teaching online, which are listed in the accordion below. You can click on each of its titles to reveal further explanations for each of the points.

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Note: For a more in-depth discussion of the topic as well as additional learning activities and resources, you can refer to the comprehensive chapter: Working with the Online Learner and the three distinct module options presented with it here.

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