Higher education is on the verge of a “paradigm shift,” as a recent webinar hosted by Achieving the Dream with support from Every Learner Everywhere put it, to center equity and anti-racism, and that is trickling down to and filtering up from day-to-day equity-minded teaching practices.
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“Teaching online” can refer to a variety of things besides tools and methods, including fully remote and asynchronous courses. Even many face-to-face courses on a residential campus will involve digital learning tools of some kind, including courseware as a textbook replacement. In between those two poles is a range of hybrid teaching modalities with synchronous and asynchronous elements.
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The number of people without a high school diploma or GED inside the U.S. correctional system is as high as 47 percent, compared to 18 percent of the population outside the prison system. Students in the judicial system suffer with problems such as housing, finding a good job, and finding their place as a functioning member of society.
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Backward course design has been influencing classroom practices since 1998 with the publication of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s seminal book Understanding By Design and its 2005 second edition. Wiggins and McTighe define backward design as a planning framework that uses student learning outcomes as the starting point for curriculum design, performance assessments, and classroom instruction.
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DEI programs alone, particularly the kind that does not ask anything of participants beyond vague intentions of change, are not going to create the change required for higher education to become a truly equitable space for racially minoritized peoples.
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A new series of equity-centered “strategy guides” for college and university educators tries to move conversations about equity from an afterthought to an embedded part of planning digital teaching and learning.
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College and university faculty selecting quality digital courseware may be aware of an early version of CourseGateway, a free website that helps faculty, department chairs, program committees, deans, and other academic leaders filter and select digital courseware based on a variety of criteria. But since an equity audit in 2022 and the engagement of a panel of independent reviewers, the courseware-evaluation tool has become a more robust resource for addressing the needs of all learners.
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