Learn more about equity, diversity, and inclusion

Accessibility

• OER Accessibility Series and Rubric, licensed CC-BY

“The OER Accessibility Evaluation Rubric is an evaluation tool for faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and other stakeholders in open educational resources to determine the accessibility of the OER they are creating and/or adopting for use in their courses.”

Note: This tool can be used to evaluate the accessibility of all courses and materials, as it promotes accessibility for all learners. As it is licensed under the Attribution – Creative Commons licence, you can modify it to suit your needs.

• Development of the AASPIRE Web Accessibility Guidelines for Autistic Web Users
• “The guidelines offer recommendations for increasing the physical, intellectual, and social acceptability of websites for use by autistic adults.”

Following the WCAG web accessibility standards is deemed insufficient in addressing the needs of learners on the autistic spectrum. This paper offers concrete guidelines how to design instructional materials for online and hybrid courses.

• ‘Making Lab-based Courses Inclusive’  is an open book published Dr. Allyson MacLean, University of Ottawa. It provides considerations for increasing accessibility of labs and student testimonials.
• Free PDF accessibility checker – this is a useful tool for anyone who writes learning materials and saves them as PDF files or scans pages from various sources. It is a free tool that provides an in-depth analysis in relation to WCAG and PDF/UA accessibility standards. It also offers a screen reader preview so that you can check if your file will make sense for someone who uses screen reader software.

Course Design Considerations

• Simple strategies to improve equity and embrace diversity  – This open book by Alison Flynn and Jeremy Kerr talks about how to prepare for a more inclusive course. It contains recommendations for writing an inclusive syllabus, office/student hours, assessment, content and classes, etc.
• Course Design Considerations for Inclusion and Representation , a white paper published by Quality Matters.
• Designing Assessments for an Intercultural Class from Algonquin College offers a video and text-based explanation of how to create assessment for diverse cohorts. Diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment types along with the Universal Design for Learning principles are discussed with practical examples of how they can be implemented in courses. Some suggestions for adding intercultural components to assessment are also provided.

Learner Experiences in Higher Education

• Indigenous learners – Getting to know the experience of diverse learners helps us as educators understand the various obstacles that challenge them in our classrooms. What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom engages discussions and reflections on how to address issues faced by Indigenous learners in post-secondary.
• Diverse learners – What I Wish My Professor Knew offers us an insight into some of the issues First-Generation and/or Low-Income Partnership students have experienced at Stanford.

Miscellaneous

• Roumy Cheese Analogy for Inclusive Education reflects the notion that “different causes of inequity (e.g. racism, ableism, heteropatriarchy) require a variety of different interventions (e.g. culturally relevant pedagogy, UDL, trauma-informed pedagogy) in order to meet the needs of diverse students. Black peppercorns in Roumy cheese represent ways in which some interventions meant to support one group of learners may harm another group” (Maha Bali, 2021.
• Supporting multilingual learners – this open book on inclusive pedagogies by Christina Page at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) in BC offers strategies for supporting multilingual learners. For example, you might want to avoid using metaphors or culturally specific terms. If you can’t avoid using such terms, ensure that all students understand their meaning by providing an explanation or asking students to explain the meaning of the concept. There are many more useful tips in this book.
• Interculturalizing the Curriculum is a resource on interculturality.
• “Developed for the KPU Intercultural Teaching Program, this short book engages educators in two main strands of interculturalizing the curriculum:
• Revising curriculum to reflect intercultural learning outcomes, and diverse content from multiple perspectives, and
• Supporting student interculturality development.”
• Embracing weight diversity – All inclusion conversations must include body diversity topics to address the needs of students- and colleagues-of-size. For example, what kind of chairs do you have in your classroom? 10 Vital Ways to Support Fat Students on Campus provides great advice to consider in your teaching support and advocacy for students with larger bodies.
• To read more about how weight bias has been discussed in courses, explore this Fat Studies 101 article by Patti L. Watkins. This fat studies reading list was prepared by a fat, Black, non-binary person Da’Shaun Harrison.
• Writing your own territorial acknowledgment – University of Alberta’s resources on going beyond the script and writing your own land acknowledgement) for your course.