Designing for inclusion in online learning programs

Rebekah: [00:00:00] In the spirit of reconciliation, the Freelance Jungle would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the lands of which we are gathering today and their continued connection to land, water, and sea. We pay our respects to elders past and present and emerging and extend a very warm welcome to anyone who is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander who is with us today. The official position of the Freelance Jungle is that sovereignty was never ceded so we support the treaty and the recognition that is necessary for Aboriginal and Indigenous Australians to be recognized on a constitutional level.

Rebekah: Today, That means a lot more than usual because we’ve got the wonderful Dr. Amy McKernan here to talk to us about inclusion in online learning settings. And as Amy was mentioning, just before we started to get all your lovely faces in here. Inclusion often [00:01:00] is far more than what people think. Normally you’re thinking about disability, but there are many, different people that we need to think about in this sort of scenario.

Rebekah: So I’m actually handing over to Amy to do today’s presentation. She’s, PhD toting academic who has a very strong background in education. So there’s no necessity for me to be involved at all. Today, I’m actually got a little book here so that I can write notes and get my own inclusion stuff on. So without further ado, I’d like to hand over controls to Amy and yeah.

Amy McKernan: Thanks very much, Bec. And thanks for having me here. It’s very nice for you to let me rant about inclusion in learning, which is my absolute favorite topic in the entire world. Sorry, I’m just trying to set my little thing up so I can see your faces as well.

Amy McKernan: Thank you all for coming. I know it’s that time of year when everyone’s a bit busy and stressed.

Amy McKernan: But it’s really nice to have people here to [00:02:00] talk about this with, and then hopefully some more people can see it on the recording too. If you Just on the acknowledgement of country, I’d like to add my acknowledgement of the Indigenous owners of the land on which I am today, the Kabi Kabi people.

Amy McKernan: And in light of the subject that we’re talking about today, I’d like to acknowledge the history of educational trauma that Indigenous Australians have experienced in this country. But also the incredible work that’s been done by Indigenous educators and researchers to make things better for Indigenous students and for all students in the country today.

Amy McKernan: I am going to share a couple of quotes that I love from people who have written on critical pedagogy. So critical pedagogy is the way that we think about education critically, subversively, trans, in a transformative sense. There’s no such thing as neutral education. This is Paulo Freire says this education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.

Amy McKernan: [00:03:00] I want to talk about freedom today. And I want to talk about how we can think about freedom in a big way in education, but also we can think about what we’re doing with our students in small ways, one on one or in classrooms or online, to make sure that they’re included, that they have agency, that they have some power in the educational setting.

Amy McKernan: So I’m an inclusive and trauma informed educator, but I’m not perfect. And I think it’s a really important part of being a trauma informed and inclusive educator to acknowledge that you’re never going to be perfect. I’m still learning. Most of what I’ve learned about being an inclusive educator has come from students telling me what they need, what they want, what I’ve done wrong as well.

Amy McKernan: So it’s really important to be open to making mistakes. If you want to be inclusive, and also technology is changing enormously. So in the online space, we do need to learn from people what they need as well. So it’s important to [00:04:00] be as informed as you can. But also open to changing your practices and making sure that you’re doing what works for the students who are coming to you.

Amy McKernan: So I do know quite a lot about the topic, but I’m also really interested in what you know as well. Even if you don’t know that you know it. I generally use slides to illustrate concepts or often notes. So that means you won’t necessarily need to read everything on the screen as I’m speaking. I generally will explain what’s on the screen as well for people who can’t see my slides.

Amy McKernan: And then I’ll provide the slides at the end of the presentation so that you have them. And I usually provide them in a PowerPoint file because it tends to be better than a PDF. And then you have the option to make it a PDF that works better for you as well. You can ask questions anytime.

Amy McKernan: I’m going to try and leave some time at the end for questions. I do have a lot of content. I’m going to see where we’re going and maybe skip over some stuff and send it to you in the slides later. [00:05:00] But I think there are a few kind of key things that I want to get through. So you can ask me questions at any point.

Amy McKernan: And you always have a choice with me about how you participate. So none of you need to speak if you don’t want to, if you do want to, you’re very welcome to contribute. I will always give options for contributing in the chat box as well as speaking. And occasionally I get people to illustrate on screen, although I haven’t planned to do that in this session cause it does take up a bit of time when I do that usually.

Amy McKernan: Beautiful. So before we begin, Is there anything, and you can put something in the chat here. If you’re particularly good with zoom, you can actually click on the annotate button and you can annotate my slide here if you would like to. Or you can just wave at me or just start talking. If there’s anything in particular that you want to get out of this session.

Amy McKernan: I’ll say also that at this point in a session with a group of new people, I’m not actually [00:06:00] expecting a lot of answers to a question like this. It’s probably a different way to think about these kinds of sessions because mostly when you come into a session, particularly a short one, you’re expecting to just listen to the speaker and then maybe ask some questions at the end.

Amy McKernan: Inclusive education for me is also about what students are doing in any session that we’re working through. And so I want you to feel like you also have a say in what’s happening in this space. Excellent. Other Amy, nice. So you already do a lot of accessibility work online, great. I’m assuming that quite a few of you have got some knowledge about inclusion and accessibility, so that’s great.

Amy McKernan: Excellent. Annetta. Yeah. That’s a really good question. Hopefully something that I share today will be new to you and you’ll find some value in it. This is [00:07:00] what I love about the freelance jungle. So much willingness to contribute. It’s great. Beck wants to make things inclusive and more fun.

Amy McKernan: Always, fun is very important in learning. I want to understand. So this is Shannon. How best to tailor your presentations to neurodivergent folks. Beautiful. Understand inclusivity. Yep. Hopefully we’ll cover a bit of that. Sandra, that’s a really good, point. We never know what we don’t know.

Amy McKernan: Beautiful. Not wanting to overlook accessibility features in general. Beautiful. That works from with what I’ve prepared, I think.

Amy McKernan: Let’s talk about schooling because this is where most of us form our understandings of what education actually is and what teaching involves. So I’ve got a lovely picture there. My heading here says schooling and then the subheading is why everything you thought you knew about teaching is a capitalist scam.

Amy McKernan: Because I don’t like to mince words around this [00:08:00] particular topic. Okay. So let’s, have a look at this image. In the image, there is a teacher standing at the front of a group of students. Young students, primary school age, all sitting in desks at rows with their little notebooks open in front of them.

Amy McKernan: The teacher is reading it seems to be reading from a book in her hand. She’s pointing at the words. The students are looking at her all of them facing forward. Actually, they’re not all looking at her. But all of them are sitting in their desks and facing forward. It’s quite cramped.

Amy McKernan: That’s what I would say is in the image. What do we think is happening in the image?

Annetta: We are passing on the government approved unity approved because not all actually, since I’m not chewing at the moment, I can hello, government approved, line of thinking, because essentially you want just enough, [00:09:00] from a purely capitalistic, you want just enough education to have a productive, organized, compliant workforce.

Annetta: Exactly. The next generation to go into the factories. Don’t you just love sociology?

Amy McKernan: Yes, exactly that. As Shannon says as well, kids are being talked at. I see a lot of kids in this room who are not particularly excited about what they’re learning. I see a few who are switched on, focused on the teacher.

Amy McKernan: The vast majority have glazed eyes. They’re sitting, they look often uncomfortable. There’s a girl in the back row who I think is possibly in pain or just desperately needing to run around in a circle for a while. There’s no sense of these students different needs being catered for. They’re all really just sitting there and expected to listen, expected to sit quietly in their desks and as Annetta has said, conform to an ideal of what a student looks like.[00:10:00]

Amy McKernan: So education in the past has always been about creating controlled, conforming students who then go on to be controlled and conforming citizens, workers, parents. They do everything that they’re expected to do for the nation, basically.

Amy McKernan: What happens in these kinds of models, which we call the banking model, the idea being that students are all different. They go into school. They have knowledge deposited in their heads. They don’t question it. They absorb it. And then when they come out, what happens is we get little rows of neat gray students who have been transformed into something that conforms to an ideal.

Amy McKernan: And then we have the pile of students below who have fallen by the wayside because they couldn’t conform to that very narrow ideal. In an inclusive model, what happens is we have a whole lot [00:11:00] of different students. They come into school, we accommodate their needs. We figure out what they want. We empower them to make choices about their learning.

Amy McKernan: And then at the end, we get a whole bunch of students who are shooting off in different technical directions. They’re all different. There are similarities. They’re finding their community, but they’re living their lives the way that they want to. And they’re empowered to use what they learn in school to make a difference in the world.

Amy McKernan: It’s a much better way to do education. So the key thing for inclusive education is that we understand learning needs. So literally everybody has learning needs. I’m not only talking about students with disability here, but learning needs are often talked about in the context of disability.

Amy McKernan: I also think our preferences matter in education.

Amy McKernan: So this is particularly true for you if what the courses that you’re creating are not compulsory. In school, you can get away with just focusing on learning needs, even though I [00:12:00] don’t think you should be focusing on that. But in a course where you’re creating something that you want people to pay to access that they don’t have to have, you have to make sure that you’re accommodating preferences as well.

Amy McKernan: So learning needs and preferences can be physical, They can be audio and or visual, they can be linguistic, social, emotional psychological, and mental, they can be related to literacy and numeracy, they can be related to interests, they can be based on the time of day, the location or what a student has had for breakfast and by saying those things, I mean that they vary.

Amy McKernan: Essentially, are there any questions at this point? I’m going to try and give you some illustrations of what I mean when I talk about a learning need by looking at some example students.

Amy McKernan: So my three example students all with L names. Thank you very much. This is actually come from a set of seven students with L names, [00:13:00] which is fun.

Amy McKernan: Okay. So Logan, has ADHD and finds it really difficult to sit at a computer and focus for longer than 20 minutes or so. He needs to be able to take regular breaks and know what he’s up to when he comes back to the course. So the learning needs that we can identify from this little description of Logan are that he needs short, stints.

Amy McKernan: So content shouldn’t require that he sit there for a really long period. There should be opportunities for breaks and there should be structure and clarity in the way the course is designed so that he’s not coming back and thinking, Oh, what were, where am I, what am I doing? He knows what’s going on in the course.

Amy McKernan: Louie has an acquired brain injury that makes it difficult to concentrate for long periods.

Amy McKernan: So there’s some similarities between Logan and Louie, but obviously very different disabilities. Moving images on screen sometimes trigger migraines. So he prefers to avoid videos and animations. So for this student, we need again, short stints. [00:14:00] We need chunked content, which sounds horrifying but it’s actually just a way of saying that we needed content to be in manageable chunks.

Amy McKernan: Now, what constitutes manageable varies depending on the audience. So for most of our adult learners, you can think about it in terms of maybe about 10 minutes of content is about the maximum I would ever go. So I’ve said that it’s difficult for Logan to focus for longer than 20 minutes.

Amy McKernan: That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to make sure that all my videos are 20 minutes long because for Logan to be able to really absorb the video, take the notes that he needs, maybe do an activity associated with the video. I want all that to be taking place within 20 minutes.

Amy McKernan: Louie also need static imagery, where images are required, and transcripts are really helpful. So we often think about videos as being accessible as soon as you add captions, but that wouldn’t be [00:15:00] accessible to Louie.

Amy McKernan: Lillian. So Lillian’s deaf she sometimes lip reads, but much prefers to watch videos with captions. She doesn’t have a great memory for content, but she can remember what knowledge is, not what knowledge she uses, especially if she gets to be creative with it.

Amy McKernan: This is actually a really common thing for students that they don’t necessarily remember everything that’s been told to them, which is precisely why that banking model doesn’t work for a lot of students. Most of us will only absorb, a small amount of what’s said to us. We need to be using it as quickly as possible in order to be able to remember it and also make it meaningful in our own lives and our own work.

Amy McKernan: So Lillian needs captions on videos. And she needs transcripts. She also needs student centered work. So you need to be thinking about what can I [00:16:00] ask students to do in my online course that is meaningful to them, that actually gets them to think about how they’re going to use this work in their own lives and work.

Amy McKernan: Shannon, great question. How can we adjust for these different learning needs in course design? I think you’ve just answered this question. I partly answered it, but I’m going to go on to look at, we are going to go on to look at videos and how we make videos accessible in online courses. Cause this is, so videos are obviously one of the main ways that people communicate content in courses.

Amy McKernan: And they’re also one of the main ways that I see people fail at being inclusive. So let’s have a look at video content for each of our learners. So if we think about Logan, Louie and Lillian, and we think about course videos, what are some of the things that we definitely need to do to make our videos accessible for each of these students?

Amy McKernan: So I’m going to suggest that each [00:17:00] of you focus on one particular student, and then you can type in the chat box. Or raise your hand what you think needs to happen for that student in relation to videos to make videos accessible.

Amy McKernan: Any hands raised? Nope. Okay. So Shannon, you looked at Logan who has ADHD. You said that they should be short, less than 10 minutes and very structured and clear. Definitely, maybe an option for a break in the middle as well is a really good thing. What you can actually do with videos is say, okay, so here’s a key kind of point in the middle.

Amy McKernan: Here’s a question for you to think about. You can pause here and think about that question. And then that gives people an opportunity to say, I’m going to pause there, go away, think about that question while I walk around the block or whatever they need. I had a student once who used to, she used to say, That she just couldn’t sit still for a 90 minute class, which is fair enough, and so she would just signal to me and then she would disappear [00:18:00] to see her kind of running up and down the hallway outside because she just needed to move, which is fair enough.

Amy McKernan: Yeah. Shannon’s also suggested a video that can be listened to instead of watched like a podcast. So it’s good if people can download your videos as well. I know there are copyright issues potentially with that kind of thing, but frankly I, tend to sacrifice the kind of security of my content for accessibility.

Amy McKernan: I don’t think it’s an issue usually. Beautiful. Bek louie, no flashing stuff, slow visuals to focus on, low speed, deliberate space in audio and switching one shot, not multiple shots. Yeah, I think you get this one there. Videos are a tough thing for people with migraines or any kind of epilepsy, any kind of seizures that are triggered by that kind of visual movement and flashing and speed.

Amy McKernan: So we tend to think about wanting to be really [00:19:00] engaging. And in order to be engaging, we think we have to have a lot of color, a lot of things happening on screen, a lot of movement, and it is too much for those students. So it’s actually more engaging for them. And I think probably for a lot of people to just have really thoughtful materials that are well designed to not overwhelm.

Amy McKernan: Exercises for Lillian. Yeah. So actually most students benefit from student centered work. Most students benefit from being able to go off and have a, think about things or, maybe illustrate something or create whatever it is that it’s really hard to give examples of this without having a specific course in mind.

Amy McKernan: But all of those things are really good. I’ve just seen the time as well, so I’m going to keep going. Short episodes. Thanks, Felicity. Yeah, these are really good points as well. Stills and slides without moving imagery. Voiceover and text on screen. Yeah, beautiful. Captions, transcripts. That’s a really good point from Rhiannon as [00:20:00] well. If you are sharing a video and you’ve got, you’re sharing your computer screen, you’re sharing slides, it’s really good to have you, a little image of, a little video of you in there as well, actually speaking it, because there might be people who want to lip read.

Amy McKernan: These are all great suggestions, but I’m going to keep going. And then hopefully we can save the chat at the end. So we’ve got them all. Beautiful. So I think you already know quite a lot about what you can do in terms of accessibility. I wanted to also talk about, here are my examples.

Amy McKernan: So you’ve pretty much said all of these. The one thing that I would add is that I think people overlook transcripts a lot in relation to video content. Transcripts and closed captions are not the same thing. If you’ve got somebody who, for example, has a limited memory for content, reading through captions might be quite frustrating.

Amy McKernan: And particularly if they need to go [00:21:00] back and check any information, having a written transcript is much easier. Then you also get people like me, for example, who much prefer to read than listen. I don’t know what that says about me, but this is just my preference for learning. I will take it in better if I can read it.

Amy McKernan: So having a transcript is really important. Marion also loves transcripts. Thanks, Marion. Beautiful. So for video content to be accessible, it should be short under 10 minutes. Ideally, it should include captions. I will say that the short in duration thing, it does vary a bit depending on the audience.

Amy McKernan: There are some audiences for whom you can have longer videos, but in most cases, 10 minutes is pretty, pretty optimal. They should include a transcript. You should describe visuals. So if you’ve got students who are, for example, going to read the transcript [00:22:00] rather than, look at your video, you need to be saying to them, okay the image that I’ve got here shows this.

Amy McKernan: And that’s also true for anyone who is listening to the content, but not seeing it. Yes, and as Felicity has just said, transcripts are searchable by users. Yes. Beautiful. And the captions, themselves are a whole other accessibility kettle of fish, as Beck has just pointed out here.

Amy McKernan: They’re so frequently not totally visible, to people with visual impairments. So that’s really important to consider as well. The one thing I haven’t put on here too is that I think it’s also really helpful to include your slides or make your slides available to learners as well, because particularly if they need to look back at content and there’s images that you’ve used that are important it’s good to be able [00:23:00] to do that.

Amy McKernan: Videos should always be on topic and clear, they should be structured and they should be meaningful. So we’re not just including videos for the sake of having something entertaining on screen. We’re including it because it has importance to the topic that we’re teaching. Beautiful. Shall we talk about quizzes or shall we go on to questions?

Amy McKernan: I’m getting the sense that there’s actually quite a lot of knowledge in the room about accessibility and inclusion, which is great. Do we want to talk about quizzes? Yes. Okay. I hate quizzes. Quizzes are, so Annette is dropping quizzes. Great. I’ve included a picture here of a, it’s another historical picture from 1940.

Amy McKernan: A group of students sitting at desks, in rows, hunched over, writing their exam papers. It’s very, again, conformist. They’re all doing the same thing. [00:24:00] That, for me, is the same kind of vibe that we get from quizzes, right? You’re expecting people to all do the same, exact same test. The problem with multiple choice quizzes is that they only test a very specific, very narrow kind of knowledge in general.

Amy McKernan: There’s no creativity in a multiple choice quiz. There’s no critical reflection on what is the best answer. It’s basically right or wrong. They’re closed questions, which do have their place. They can be really helpful if they’re used really effectively, but they are also, as Felicity says, they’re anxiety inducing and competitive.

Amy McKernan: They trigger something in our brain that links us back to You know, tests in school and I’ve got to get the answers right. And it becomes about getting the answers, and not about understanding the content and figuring out how to use the content. So I think also a lot of courses, lot of [00:25:00] courses use quizzes as a checkbox, check box exercise that you have to pass in order to get on to the next stage, which is gamifying learning, although in quite a weak way, it’s also not accessible, right?

Amy McKernan: If anyone has any kind of issue with your quizzes, they’re not going to be able to continue your course. Which is a huge problem. Quizzes also prioritise, as I’ve said, they prioritise memory of content. So they’re about remembering what you’ve said. Which isn’t necessarily evidence of understanding.

Amy McKernan: And as Rhiannon says, it’s often really clear, which is the right answer from how the question is written, which is how I get through most of my HR induction things when I do them, right? Because you can just skip to the end and go, okay clearly it’s that one. I shouldn’t admit that on the recording.

Amy McKernan: There you go. There’s my silly thing that I said. Beautiful. So shall we look at our learners and think about [00:26:00] quizzes? I’m just going to talk through this one because then I want to make sure I’ve got some time at the end for questions. So Logan with ADHD, he needs a quick quiz if there is going to be a quiz, but I also think it’s really important to think carefully about the value of quizzes, which is my diplomatic way of saying that if you’ve got a student with limited attention, do you really want to waste a whole bunch of that attention checking if they’ve taken if they’ve remembered the wording that you’ve used? Or remembered particular pieces of information that you’ve shared? Or do you want to spend time thinking about how that student can then look at the content that you’ve shared, critique it, reflect on its relevance to their life, think about how they would use it, practice and understand the material that you’ve shared?

Amy McKernan: Louis might be okay as long as there’s no flashing or whatever in the quizzes. But we have to make sure that the [00:27:00] quiz questions don’t rely on having engaged with any kind of flashing videos or graphics. Which is another possible accessibility flaw there.

Amy McKernan: Lillian has a terrible memory. She will probably fail the quiz.

Amy McKernan: She needs tasks that use her skills, including her creativity, in order to be able to remember what she’s learned. I’m going to come back to your question in a second, Melissa, if that’s okay. Beautiful. That’s the end of my kind of prepared content, and I rushed through the end a bit there.

Amy McKernan: I’ve shared a quote here from bell hooks, who I love. If you want to read a book on education, actually, you would love this Bek, Teaching to Transgress.. Very formative book in my teaching career. So “to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. The learning process comes, but comes easiest to those of us who teach, who also believe there’s an aspect of our vocation that is sacred. Who [00:28:00] believe that our work is not merely to share information, but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. So to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we’re to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin”.

Amy McKernan: And I think we start to do that by thinking about our students as human beings with varied needs, varied preferences, who we need to accommodate and we put first in our teaching. So rather than teaching, being about us, transmitting all of our expertise and dumping it into other people’s heads, we like them to create with us the knowledge that we’re building together.

Amy McKernan: And so that means we need to be open to their ideas about things. Beautiful. Okay. I’m going to go to questions now, cause I do really want some time for questions cause I think you’ve got good questions coming at me, hopefully. Melissa’s [00:29:00] question was, how would you recommend gamifying courses? I look, I disagree with some people in the field in this sense, in that I don’t actually recommend gamifying courses. Gamifying learning, I’ve not really seen it done particularly well. For me, it’s more important to make learning meaningful to my learners than to make it you know, a game essentially. But that said, there are definitely people out there who are probably doing this and probably understand this better than I do.

Amy McKernan: But in general, and it varies a lot depending on the kind of course that you’re doing. In general, I think learning becomes more fun and more powerful when we make sure that it relates to students lives. When we are using getting them to use their brains in more complex ways than [00:30:00] just remembering or clicking a box, we’re getting them to think about what they can create with what they teach, what we’re teaching them, how they can critique what we’ve teaching, what we’ve taught them as well is really powerful.

Amy McKernan: So yeah, but in general, I don’t necessarily recommend gamifying. Thank you. Sandra, this is the question. So do I recommend a particular LMS learning management system or platform that accommodates people with disability and how they might use the software? For example, using tabs versus mouse, adjust text size, et cetera.

Amy McKernan: I don’t think any of them are particularly amazing or any of the ones that we would likely use. And then there’s a lot of different courses in creating courses for the public. Some of the more kind of high level university used ones like Canvas is quite good for accessibility in some ways.

Amy McKernan: But it’s. [00:31:00] My understanding of that one is it’s hugely expensive and it’s really only used by big institutions. So the things like Teachable and Thinkific and Kajabi and all of those and LearnDash and all of those kinds of things. They’re all pretty similar but they are all changing in some ways.

Amy McKernan: They’re too slow to change. This is always low down their list of priorities, right? So there’s, no particular platform that I would recommend is, the, short answer there. But I would also say that it is possible to create quite a good inclusive course on a reasonably limited platform.

Amy McKernan: And it is also possible to create a really inaccessible and really bad course on a really whiz bang amazing platform. So you are more important than the platform that you’re choosing is what I would say there.

Rebekah: I’ve got a question there, Ames. [00:32:00] Yep. What can we do before we start building to make sure that we’re getting the audience right?

Rebekah: When you, do you go through what you’ve done previous with people? Do you put out a survey? If you were to build something from the ground up, how would you go about that? Would you do, look at research? How would you go?

Amy McKernan: Great question, Beck. Thank you. So I, Beck knows, I am actually doing this at the moment.

Amy McKernan: I’m creating a course on inclusive and engaging online learning. And the way that I’m doing that is I’m designing for everything I know about inclusive education from the outset. And this is, what I always recommend. It shouldn’t necessarily be audience dependent. So you shouldn’t necessarily be relying on there being a person who is visually impaired in your course to be making those accommodations for somebody with a visual impairment.

Amy McKernan: Because the accommodate [00:33:00] because firstly, that’s just. Good practice. But secondly, the, sorry, the accommodations that you make for someone with visual impairments will benefit a whole lot of people like in ways that they don’t even necessarily predict and they wouldn’t necessarily ask for. For example the adjustments that I would make for someone with colorblindness are going to make it more clear for somebody who is short sighted, for somebody who just needs a better kind of contrast and in fact for everybody, because actually those sorts of, things are hard to read on screen. And also for people who have variable visual impairments, in certain lights, in certain situations when they’re more tired.

Amy McKernan: It’s just better to have more visual kind of more visible content. Did I answer your question? [00:34:00] Yeah, I, I guess my, what I would say is that I design for all of the kind of basics for inclusion. And I’ve got some tips that on some of the slides, which I’ll share with you soon, for how you do that.

Amy McKernan: But there’s, obviously quite a lot here. And if you want to know more about it, you can do my course. All done. But yeah, so there’s also, there are some resources that I’ve shared that have access to some other free courses that do some of this and also content that you can use to the WCAG two guidelines are quite helpful, obviously as well.

Amy McKernan: But yeah so, good teaching involves differentiating from the outset. Which means we don’t assume that all of our students can access content in the same ways. We give them choice. We give them options that will suit different disabilities, but also different learning needs and preferences. [00:35:00] Yeah.

Amy McKernan: And then the other thing that I often do with people is, If I’m running a course and I know that I can communicate with students first, I will send out a little form saying, do you have any learning needs? I should know about not, do you have a disability? Do you have any learning needs? Cause that’s all the information I need.

Amy McKernan: Okay, cool. Thanks, Beck. Good question. Allow me to plug my course.

Amy McKernan: Rhiannon has asked, so with gamifying, I’m wondering if by keeping sections shorter, having creative engagement would be a way of having that reward aspect without falling into the gamifying issue. Yes. Yes. That’s essentially what I think we should be doing. We should be making it, in a sense, if you’ve got shorter sections, you’ve got people who are ticking things off quicker and they enjoy that usually gives you a sense of achievement.

Amy McKernan: We know that people when they’re learning will be spurred on by successes. So we want to give them the opportunity to [00:36:00] say, okay, finish that moving on. It gives you a good feeling. I personally love taking things off a list, so it works for me. And the creative engagement as well. I think is really rewarding for learners often.

Amy McKernan: There are definitely times when people just want to sit there and listen and they don’t want to do anything. So you could, you, you should accommodate that too, but in general, it’s quite easy to accommodate that. Cool. Any other questions?

Rebekah: I’m going all right for time. I did have one question that I got asked from someone else last week and I didn’t know how to answer it because she was building a course and she was saying, does it matter that my lessons are uneven? So some of them are really short, some of them are really long. Do I need to break it down in other spots and all the rest of it?

Rebekah: And I couldn’t answer the question. I

Amy McKernan: think that’s a great question, and it also [00:37:00] brings me to another thing that I would quite like to share, which is that you can do a lot of things and include, including varying the length of your lessons but it’s a good idea to make sure that learners know that’s what’s happening.

Amy McKernan: So if you can give an estimated amount of time that you think the module will take at the start of the module, then somebody can say, Okay I can’t do this module right now. I’ll come back to it. Or I can do half this module. I’ll come back to it. Where you lose students is if you don’t communicate those things often, like it’s quite annoying if every module has been 20 minutes long and suddenly you’re an hour and 20 minutes into it and you’re only halfway through I probably wouldn’t recommend varying them quite that much.

Amy McKernan: But if they’re varying a bit it can be helpful to say this module has this much content. And if you’ve got a good course outline, most of the platforms will show you we’ve got a video [00:38:00] lecture and then we’ve got some questions for you to answer and then we’ve got a summary at the end.

Amy McKernan: That’s quite helpful too. Thanks everyone for coming. Thanks Beck for having me. This was very fun. I do love talking about this topic. I did rant more than I expected to. I’m sorry. But yeah, I’m really happy to hear from you if you’ve got any more questions.

Rebekah: Thanks. The soft and gentle rant. I didn’t even pick up on them.

Rebekah: That’s it. Yeah. And if you want to catch Amy again, thanks so much for doing that. You know where to find it. It’s amymckernan. com