“Honoring and Valuing Student Feedback to Build Community in Online Learning” is the session’s title from the CAST UDL Symposium presented by Irma Gomez, Jeanna Gravel, Monica Ng, Zach Smith, and Carina Traub. They shared their slides as a GoogleDoc along with a handout. Ng mentioned that the inspiration for the session was a course they designed that focuses on equity and opportunity for incoming Master’s students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Their course focuses on “the social and cultural forces that lead to the discrimination and exclusion of individuals with disabilities.” Traub was one of the students in the course and disclosed being a student in the course with a disability. Traub encouraged participants to participate however they felt comfortable. Smith mentioned that a challenge of UDL may be having a lot of options to engage. The first prompt for breakout groups was: “How might we co-define engagement in ways that honor learner variability?” Ng noted that we should all be thinking about creative ways to measure engagement in ways that honor learner variability. This is an important consideration: we use the same assessment methods. After the breakout rooms, they shared their thoughts in the chat. Ng explained that they used a Google Form with a simple questionnaire for feedback after each class. Ng spoke about the challenges of getting feedback. Using the Mural or chat, they asked: is there a way to collect learner feedback in a way that honors learner variability? Gomez was a student in the course and spoke about at first being concerned that feedback was requested after each session. They mentioned that the form also had a field to ask for Tweets to share that summarized the session topics/concepts/main ideas. That’s an awesome idea! Smith mentioned that implementing this “flattened the hierarchy structure” and made it feel more like a community. Gravel spoke about how this approach was intended to make students codesigners and students could quickly communicate.
Gravel shared the form and that at the beginning of every class, they shared the feedback results. For example, they shared a table with two columns: one for the question “What about this session worked for you?” and a second for “How we acted on it.”Gravel shared student quotes and how the instructional team responded to comments as a co-teaching team applying UDL to their course. Gravel then shared constructive feedback from the anonymous Google Form. The question was: “What could we do differently?” For example, different learners had different feedback about the breaks in the course sessions. Traub explained examples of how the feedback was incorporated into class sessions and how they felt heard. Gravel shared their prompt to tweet about their learning.” They mentioned that this activity worked really well to learn how students were experiencing the course and making meaning of it. Ng explained how course time was limited, and they also recorded video feedback and reflection that mentions the why of this reflection. In one final breakout group session, participants thought about how they might use learner feedback to improve their online courses. Gomez shared that in their group, they discussed how to make the form more accessible for more students. Gomez shared takeaways including the need for more and different data sets to not overgeneralize the learner experience, collecting data, using student feedback to improve teaching, and requiring a willingness to dedicate time. I loved how Gomez emphasized how quality online learning and engagement require trust.
