Put inclusion and equity at the forefront of teaching

It is essential to create an inclusive and equitable learning environment where all students can learn and succeed. UC Berkeley is committed to providing high quality education to everyone in our diverse student body.

Here are some ways you can ensure equity and inclusion in online teaching:

  1. Conduct a pre-class survey. In addition to getting to know more about your students’ educational backgrounds, prior knowledge and skills, interests, and business experience, you may want to survey students about any barriers they may face in learning online.
  2. Adopt inclusion and equity as a pedagogical mindset. Let what you’ve learned about your students inform your teaching. Ask yourself if your approach is inclusive of all your students and their needs. Include a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement in your syllabus to communicate your goals to students.
  3. Request a DEIJB consultation with queen jaks, DEI Instructional Support Consultant.
  4. Design with accessibility in mind. Check out the Accessibility section below for more information.

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Incorporate Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that has been adapted for teaching and course design. When followed, the principles in UDL will ensure that your teaching is inclusive of all learners’ abilities and backgrounds. While accessibility is a key component of UDL, the framework also addresses creating equitable learning environments. Today, students may face various difficulties when learning online, such as lack of access to proper technology or a suitable learning space, inadequate communication with instructors or peers, and limited opportunities to exercise higher-order thinking skills. By following some of the guidelines in the UDL framework, you will create a more equitable learning experience for your students.

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Build Your Course with Accessibility in Mind

Part of creating an inclusive learning environment is designing your course with accessibility in mind. If you understand and apply the principles of accessible web practices as you build your course, not after, you can save yourself hours of work by avoiding accessibility remediation. For example, PDFs that are scanned as images may be readable for sighted students but would not be useful to students who depend on a screen reader. Having to remediate a slide deck or PDF that is a scanned image can take hours, so it’s better to avoid that in the first place. Fortunately, Berkeley offers many resources to help to ensure that your online course and content are accessible:

As part of our commitment to accessibility, Haas Digital designs media with:

  • Closed-captions, transcripts, and slides for course videos
  • Meaningful descriptions of images
  • WCAG 2.0 compliant color contrast ratios for text
  • Color-blind safe color combinations

Educational technologies that we support will also go through a campus accessibility review.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of course content and educational technologies. Please let us know of any accessibility issues you encounter at [email protected]. We try to respond to feedback within 2 business days.