Last week was National AccessAbility Week in Canada! A very important week to observe ways in which we can promote and practice more inclusive activities and try to incorporate them into our lives and activities. This blog post will be dedicated to answering an important question:
“How can you adjust your planned learning activities to meet the needs of your learners if an unexpected event occurs?”
An expected event is mostly accounted for in the learning design. When something unexpected occurs, it’s hard to deal with it and act in the best interests of all students. However, it is still very important that the learning continues, and the situation is dealt with smoothly.
Let’s take an example for this situation. In the past year, a pandemic stuck the world and education took a huge blow because of how in-person classes were banned. With little guidance or experience, lots of instructors and students had to shift towards online tools to teach and learn along with facing different types of symptoms/personal issues. This is a great example where teaching approaches have been changed and affected. There were lots of new approaches emerging and everyone shifting to online teaching methods. There have been lots of advantages and disadvantages of this teaching method. The key here is to make sure all the students are feeling included in the learning and are gaining knowledge even from an ‘online’ environment. The government and the school makes all required efforts to help students get access to learning resources.
Instructors play a crucial part in the current situation helping students learn through the use of technology. A lot of ways can be used by the instructor to propagate learning. I strongly believe one of the key factors is to help all students feel inclusive individually and helping them over simple one on one calls and chats is helpful to students. The syllabus and tests can be more tailored to online content and application-based learning instead of traditional learning. Students have access to a lot of resources and online, and instructors can make use of that. Another important thing to note here is to make a contingency learning plan in case students start to feel drifted off their learning. This is an important step as even some parts of the contingency plans could be later inter-looped within the original learning plan. Using as many online resources as possible is the best way to make sure all students have places to visit to gain more information in case they need it. Not everyone learns at the same pace and making sure everyone gains the skills and knowledge from designed learning outcomes is critical. I want to conclude by sharing a TedTalk about the importance of inclusion and how it shouldn’t be overlooked as it can play a profound difference in education.
Attributions
Cover photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash
2 Comments
Hi Utkarsh,
I really appreciate your unique insights. I can clearly see your logical thinking in this blog. To be honest, I learned about the existence of Canada’s National Accessibility Week because of this EDCI course. The new crown virus has changed many of our lifestyles. Insufficient distribution of online resources, low efficiency of students’ online classes, and uncertainty of teacher’s online office time led students to rely on their own learning methods. Therefore, more learning skills and knowledge should be obtained by designing an effective learning plan. The inclusiveness you mentioned at the end was the main reason we study this chapter. Inclusion was also the most overlooked point in education. I learned a lot after watching the video.
Thank you for sharing.