Activities must be accessible to ensure more students can engage. This creates a feedback loop: accessible education creates practitioners who understand accessibility needs and go on to design more accessible futures. A proactive design (for example, Universal Design for Learning) will always be better than making adjustments later, as many students may be hesitant to disclose their needs.
Ensure students are aware of the accessible learning resources and technologies available to them right from the beginning of the course.
Ensure curriculum-wide LMS accessibility compliance is systematically applied to all subjects.
Ensure all digital content is compatible with access readers for visually impaired students.
Support the use of speech-to-text software to assist students with writing difficulties in documenting their process.
Ensure closed captioning is available and accurate on all learning resources.
Hands-on learning may assume certain levels of mobility and physical dexterity, which may differ across a population. Provide alternatives to ensure all students can participate.
In physical spaces, desks and chairs that are adjustable and may need to be arranged to provide ample space for movement to help students with physical disabilities engage comfortably.
Ensure the course evaluation platform is compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies so that students of all abilities can give feedback in the student evaluation of teaching surveys.
Use microphones in live sessions to ensure audibility. Projection may be audible to most learners, but can be a challenge for people who are hard of hearing.
Use a headset to bring the mic closer to your mouth to improve the audibility and clarity of your voice for online sessions.
When students co-create the curriculum and engage in active learning, they become designers of their own education rather than passive recipients.
Students may express what they want in assessment, but educators will critically review and facilitate what students need in assessment. Ensure students are informed of all available resources and services when making choices.
Design assessments so student teams create their own project timelines and deliverables and develop presentation formats that best suit their projects.
Create an assessment where students could identify a community need and design a program exploring the physical and virtual environments they wish to engage with.
Co-create assessment tasks and rubrics to increase student agency. Provide students with a basic concept of the task, then develop the details together. Educators will guide the criteria, but co-creating rubrics helps students understand their design and purpose.
Engage with student partners to regularly review the use of assessment methods and make recommendations for continuous improvement.
Multiple perspectives arise from different cultures, individual identities, and disciplines within a similar field. Faculty competence is more holistic and robust by including diverse perspectives and theoretical standpoints.
Integrating multiple perspectives can cause friction when standpoints differ, so ensure educators are prepared with safe mediation strategies.
Embed diversity into the learning outcomes. This is highly impactful as they shape all learning across a program. This also becomes challenging and illuminating if the outcomes are developed with a singular cultural or theoretical bias.
Create a role play for a project where each role is a different stakeholder with a unique perspective and identity. Have students speak from that perspective and collaboratively develop a project plan as a unified group, incorporating each perspective within the plan.
Have students analyse a product’s design from a social perspective. Use a series of questions that allow students to examine the end user, their community, their culture, and how that user’s perspective may differ from the students' own views and experiences.
Use case studies and examples from underrepresented groups in the field to help students appreciate the contributions of diverse practitioners.
Offer a component of activities to explore the outcome of a design if one important detail about the client changes. For example, how would the product design shift if the client were a parent of young children or a carer of a disabled adult child?
Peer review curricula with a focus on representation. Sessions evaluate how well diverse perspectives are integrated into teaching.
The requirement of developing initial interpersonal skills and attitudes is particularly important early, as some students may enter their course from quite homogenous schooling experiences and may be underprepared for the diversity and richness of human experience and how to communicate and collaborate effectively and respectfully around this.
Explicitly teach students early in the course about the variety of social conventions across and within cultures, neurotypes, etc., to prepare them for effective cross-cultural group work.
Form diverse student groups to bring multiple perspectives to the table, enhancing creativity and innovation in the design process. With proper scaffolding, students can learn to appreciate and integrate different viewpoints.
Collaborate with industry and non-profit organisations to expose students to real-world challenges faced by a diversity of cohorts. Have students consider alternatives that cater more explicitly to a diverse population. Provide an online space for students to reflect on these experiences collaboratively throughout the course.
Seek to include guest speakers from various disciplinary backgrounds.
Develop faculty competence in acknowledging the educator-student power dynamic. Encourage them to share that power to promote student agency and improve understanding.
As an educator, reflect on the educator-student power dynamic, and move towards a ‘guide on the side’ approach to teaching.
As a curriculum development team, develop skills in relinquishing control over power, choice, content, and instruction. Explore the discomfort of facilitating projects without complete expertise in the discipline.
As an organisation, regularly emphasise that educators are not the holders of all knowledge and that they can continue learning alongside their students. Actively reduce red tape and allow educators to create assessments that are flexible and not so tightly controlled.
Sustainable and fit-for-purpose development requires that products and processes meet the true needs and can be maintained over time; this requires insights into the diversity of possible users and implementers, which is only possible with a diversity of peers and/or inviting external people who can contribute lived experience. The best way to enhance and integrate a diversity of perspectives in faculty teaching competence is by recruiting to enhance diversity within the cohort of educators.
When implementing or reevaluating the curriculum, elicit and enact feedback from stakeholders from multiple cultures and backgrounds with multiple perspectives.
Gain feedback from a diversity of students on whether their perspectives were represented in the curriculum and assessments.
Consult with people from various roles, cultures, and theoretical perspectives during a subject review.
If your work area lacks diversity, seek feedback from third-space professionals such as educational designers, academic skills advisers, and equity and inclusion consultants.
Include EDI champions in the review of assessment methods.
Eliciting and enacting multiple perspectives reduces potential weaknesses across the program and highlights areas for further development.
Identify the perspectives available within the program curriculum development team and, where there are blind spots, seek ways to improve the diversity of those represented in the integrated curriculum design group.
Expand the stakeholder network to include cultural and religious organisations, disability advocacy groups, LGBTIQA+ organisations and other equity-focused networks.