When designing online college courses, it is critical to ensure an equitable environment where each student receives a high-quality experience that aligns with their academic readiness and goals. Through intentionally unbiased and inclusive teaching practices, faculty play an important role in improving learning outcomes and therefore increasing course completion and graduation rates.
Differential instruction is a viable asset-based approach that can serve as an engine for students who face historically systematic barriers in higher education institutions. There are some key strategies and adaptive learning technologies that can help instructors address students’ prior knowledge and support their performance by differentiating the content, process and assessments.
“Differentiated instruction is a viable data-driven pedagogical approach for the virtual college classroom that supports engagement and student achievement, said Ruanda Garth-McCullough, Associate Director of Teaching and Learning at Achieving the Dream and former faculty member in the School of Education at Loyola University of Chicago, during REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit. “This approach aligns strongly with the Achieving the Dream’s mission of student success and to lead and support a national network of community colleges to achieve sustainable institutional transformation through sharing knowledge, innovative solutions, and effective practices and policies that lead to improved outcomes for all students,” she said.
In order to ensure an equitable environment where students receive a high quality education, it is important for colleges to design instructional experiences for their students that work against the business as usual or one size fits all mentality, according to Garth-McCullough. Instructors need to be aware that some of their students have benefited from access to resources, social capital and enriched curricular experiences while others had to navigate structural barriers, discrimination, and inadequate academic and social support, she said, adding that teachers are continuously surprised when they get different student outcomes from a traditional curriculum.
Something Has To Change
“It takes an intentional and focused effort to create an equitable environment in college courses. Equity is a new buzzword in education, and it is too often misused. We all recognize that equity refers to the principle of fairness, but we confuse it with equality,” Garth-McCullough said. “Equity requires a shift that can be uncomfortable for educators who have been taught that the right thing to do is to treat everyone the same. Differentiation calls for faculty to make equity moves in their classrooms that are fair and just, but not always equal, and to recognize the social and historical context of exclusionary practices in American higher education.”
To be equity minded, instructors need to take personal and institutional responsibility for the success of their students and to critically reassess their own teaching practices, according to Garth-McCullough. This is a student-centered pedagogical approach that warrants more consideration because it is responsive to the students—their learning profile, needs, goals, readiness, prior knowledge, languages they speak and their cultural and social economic backgrounds, she said.
Online Learning Opportunities
The good news is that this type of responsiveness lends itself more easily to an online learning environment.
“As you attempt to make classes more interactive, engaging, and student centered, you can integrate personalization and authenticity through well-planned class activities by using online learning tools,” Garth-McCullough said. “This effort involves considering critical factors that help you get to know your students, assess their prior knowledge and monitor their performance. Whether you gather information using paper and pencil assessments, or have access to the robust student level data and learning analytics from adaptive courseware, there is potential for faculty to personalize the student learning experience and environment based on real time data by course, content and objectives,” she said.
When instructors are equipped with more in depth information about their students’ interests, abilities and content specific performance, they are in a better position to present meaningful course content, more relevant assignments assessments and an overall better learning environment, according to Garth-McCullough. In fact, research shows that differentiated instruction has a positive impact on student learning equity and outcomes, she added.
“A differentiated lesson will resonate with more students If it targets visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic senses. This means applying several different teaching approaches in your lessons, such as watching a TED talk, listening to audio clips, or putting students into virtual breakout rooms for a facilitated discussion,” Garth-McCullough said.
This will lead to a higher quality educational experience, which then leads to higher completion and graduation rates, which inevitably will result in social and economic opportunities for people who historically have been marginalized, according to Garth-McCullough.