Our current context for building community in Bates classes include the challenges and opportunities of creating inclusive and equitable content and assessment for learning in remote and in-person, socially-distanced classes. Part I of this series points to tools and insights for building community in an equitable and inclusive hybrid course, in which some students may be remote while others are in-person.

Part I: Building Equitable & Inclusive Community in Hybrid Courses

Grounding Prompt: What has been the most revealing experience that you have had about teaching in response to the COVID-19 Pivot? Share your response via Poll Everywhere.

Part I (based on a December 2020 workshop hosted by Information and Library Services) offers practical guidance and strategies that instructors can implement to foster an inclusive community among remote and in-person students.

Reflection Prompt: What methods could you use to build inclusive community in the hybrid and remote classroom? Share your response via PollEverywhere.

Accessibility Considerations

In creating the interactive components of this series, we’ve gone with Poll Everywhere (a tool for gathering and visualizing participant responses) and Google Docs (which offers a lot of utility, and the advantage that many at Bates are already familiar with it). We considered using Padlet, another great tool for creating interactive components that also allows for social-media style interactions between users. Ultimately, we decided not to use it over accessibility concerns, favoring tools that allow for keyboard accessibility and better low-vision color contrast. We point out that a variety of tools are available for creating inclusive active learning in online environments; accessibility (central to equitable education) is one of many considerations in deciding which is most appropriate for specific applications.

Explore This Four-Part Series

Citation

“File:Noun Project Community icon 627732.svg” by Gregor Cresnar is licensed under CC BY 3.0