Tonight we ended the weekend by watching an ALT 2021 session entitled “Accessible and inclusive learning online: challenges and opportunities” by Jessica Humphreys and Kerry Pinny. Humphreys began by explaining their roles as a senior teaching fellow. They also described the new regulations for inclusive practices in 2018 and the shift away from the deficit model. In June of 2020 they launched a Teaching for Online Learning Moodle site and a Learning Design Consultancy Unit. This year they focused heavily on bringing the student perspective into digital accessibility issues. Workshops on inclusive practice and accessibility and feedback from the student experience helped share tips and continue conversations. As we have learned from other campuses and surveys, students appreciated having recorded lectures to rewind and review materials. For online seminars, the opportunity to interact with peers and engage through polls was mentioned. Interestingly, some mentioned feeling more comfortable interacting via video! Some of the challenges were inconsistent presentation and structure across modules, workload, unclear information when and where events were taking place, keeping up with transcriptions and captions, compatibility with assistive technologies (and Padlet was mentioned!)…Suggestions for instructors included structure and having clear expectations, shorter breakout room sessions. For the virtual learning environment, some suggestions from students to staff included having a checklist and using reminders for tasks and deadlines. Humphreys mentioned that these were the experiences on their campus (Warwick in the UK). Nevertheless, I keep on learning from others sharing their approaches and information… and notice similar trends.
A second session entitled “A Brave New World: An Inclusive Intercultural Virtual Erasmus Experience for Student Midwives” by Kirstie Coolin, Stathis Konstantinidis, Sara Borrelli, Antonella Nespoli, Silja Mets-Oja, Anne-Marike Smit, Maria Van Oost, Simona Fumagalli, Annely Karema, Louise Walker, Helen Spiby and Karin Falkenhagen. They spoke about the project and three partners in England, Italy, and Estonia. To design the learning resources, they used the ASPIRE framework:
- Aims
- Storyboarding
- Population
- Implementation
- Release
- Evaluation
They used that approach for working with their partners and developing workshops. While Coolin had some technical problems during the session, I enjoyed learning about the ASPIRE framework and how they developed workshops and materials collaboratively to engage instructors and students. What worked really well was how they collaborated with partners even internationally. Coolin ended by saying that the depth and authentic voices that came in by using technology was unexpected and motivating. One example was a midwife in a war zone sharing experiences with others virtually. I hope we can include student and stakeholder voices in BIT 295 through the use of technology.
