Inclusive Design is a teaching approach acknowledging students' diverse needs, abilities, backgrounds, and experiences. It aims to create a learning environment that recognizes this diversity based on student needs, abilities, backgrounds, and experiences, as well as changes in technology.
The Guiding Principles
Designing an inclusive course is an ongoing and creative process. It requires anticipating the different dimensions of learners coming into a course and planning accordingly. There are a few guiding principles that, when taken into consideration, significantly enhance the accessibility and usability of the learning environment for all learners.
To explore each guiding principle, click the following tabs.
Choice
Students appreciate having a choice in how they engage with your course, and since they learn in different ways, making your course content available in various formats is helpful.
To include choice in your course:
- Provide multiple ways for students to gain and demonstrate knowledge.
- Survey students to determine their interests and provide optional resources to meet their varying needs.
- Enable students to pick from assignment options based on what they wish to gain from your course. For example, they could choose between writing a term paper or creating a multimedia project.
- Allow students to form project groups based on interests, goals, learning styles, and abilities.
- Provide multiple ways to interact with your course content and each other.
- Present course materials using a mix of media (text, audio, video, images, graphics, presentation slides, etc.).
Transparency
Clearly articulate your course objectives and expectations in your course syllabus and throughout your course.
To include transparency in your course:
- Use a modular design model, where content is organized by week and divided into lessons with dedicated pages for additional resources and practice activities.
- Explain the purpose of course materials and activities, as well as how they align with your learning outcomes.
- Include Weekly Overview pages that identify the week's topics, outcomes, and activities.
- Use plain language, simple sentence structures, bulleted lists, and brief summary paragraphs to help students understand and identify key information.
- Create a rubric for each graded assignment to inform students precisely what is expected to receive full credit.
Sensitivity
Students should feel valued as unique individuals whose experiences enrich your course. Courses should demonstrate sensitivity to students' diverse cultural backgrounds, privacy, and comfort level with technology.
To include sensitivity in your course:
- Instruct students to share as much information as they "feel comfortable with."
- Provide students with additional technical support to succeed in the course.
- Give students multiple attempts to take a quiz, and do not set a time limit for the duration.
- Provide assignments that allow students to draw on relevant personal experiences and reflect on the value of doing so.
- Anticipate potential technical obstacles, and provide solutions. For example, providing screenshots with instructions within the assignment details to prevent issues with uploading assignment files or submitting text entries.
Accessibility
Inclusive design overlaps significantly with accessibility for students with special physical, sensory, or cognitive requirements, and it should account for the different ways that students learn.
To include accessibility in your course:
- Caption all recorded lectures or videos.
- Add alternative tags to embedded images so that screen readers can read a description of the image.
- Tag and format PDFs so that screen readers can read them. Avoid uploading scanned PDFs.
- When possible, use bulleted lists instead of tables.
- When using tables, include headers in the top row to be read by screen readers.
- Place links over descriptive text explaining what information your readers will find when they click the hyperlink.
Additional Resources
You can also explore these additional accessibility guides: