Our campuses are home to diverse student cohorts, some of whom are at risk of marginalisation because of specific needs. Without appropriate provisions in place in the classroom, those with sensory, intellectual, psychosocial and neurodevelopmental disabilities and conditions are at a disadvantage. In this resource, we will outline strategies and tools to make the learning experience inclusive. But before making any changes to your provision, ensure you lay the groundwork.
Upskill: seek out training to learn about your students’ needs. Workshops and courses will clarify concepts relating to disability, accessibility and inclusive education. They should also teach you the principles and best practices of Universal Design for Learning, which will help you design your course.
Get to know your students: gather information about your students (learning styles, academic skills, interests, disability and accessibility needs, for example) early on. You can collect this information via surveys, quizzes and discussions. Once you understand your students’ needs, you can make reasonable adjustments and tailor activities and assessments accordingly.
Assess your course’s accessibility: thoroughly review your course materials, including the formats they take, their presentation, content and accessibility. This will make it easier to identify which elements require improvement. For example, we may need to apply changes to audiovisual resources, provide format options for learning materials, adapt instructions for activities, adjust some assessment criteria, and make other accommodations.
Learn from your peers: speak to colleagues about their experiences, practices and results to help you design your action plan. In our own experience, the conversations we have had with other teachers enriched our perspectives and helped us develop strategies to make learning materials and delivery formats more accessible and inclusive.
Once you’ve laid the groundwork, explore the following options.
Captions and subtitles: enabling subtitles on videos can help those with impairments understand course content better. You can enable video subtitles in videos in a range of languages on YouTube. We recommend using Microsoft Stream to add subtitles to a recording of an online session.
- Spotlight guide: Making your campus neurodivergent friendly
- Teaching visually impaired students – and making class materials more accessible for everyone at the same time
- What I’ve learned from a decade of working with a disability in academia
Microsoft PowerPoint allows users to enable available automatic captions by navigating to the menu slideshow, and then to the subtitle settings options before choosing the spoken and subtitle languages. You can do the same on Zoom.
Audio/visual and interactive supports: reinforce the course content with multimedia resources to help students with diverse needs consolidate their learning. For example, you can pair written information with a short video, audio description or infographic. Another method is to end activities with a gamified element from Edpuzzle, Worldwall or Quizizz (online resources that allow users to create quizzes and educational games). Other formats to consider include podcasts, infographics, comics, presentations, mind/concept maps, posters and comparative charts/tables.
Tools such as Powtoon, Canva, Storyboard That, Prezi and Piktochart are useful for experimenting with different learning material formats.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools: AI tools can help educators tailor content to diverse learning profiles when used with clear prompts and appropriate oversight. For example, Canva’s Magic Studio allows you to create images from scratch that you can use to support complex texts or concepts. On the other hand, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can assist in adapting text to easy-to-read formats. To do this, you’ll need to provide the original text and specify your expectations, including length, reading level and any other elements to change. Hone your AI prompting skills by practising regularly to ensure you can get the most out of these tools.
Collect student feedback to evaluate whether your adaptations are effective. That way you can evaluate and adapt your teaching as needed.
Making your teaching inclusive means levelling the playing field for students with specific learning needs and helping them to thrive in your classroom.
Nelly Ramírez Vásquez, tutor professor of online courses at a professional level in the area of business and engineering, Tecnológico de Monterrey. Eunice Costilla Cruz, tutor professor of online courses at the professional level in the area of humanities and social sciences, Tecnológico de Monterrey.
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