WWU staff promote Inclusive Instructional Design in recent publication
How do you ensure that your readings, activities, and assessments represent a diverse range of identities? How can learners of all abilities meet your objectives and outcomes? How will you prepare to address inequities, racism, and difficult moments in your course – and potentially repair relationships?
These and many other ideas are posed in the Heuristic for Inclusive Instructional Design, a questioning tool that instructors and designers can use, along with whatever curriculum development methods they already employ, to reflect on their course with inclusive design perspectives. While the tool is continually updated with input and feedback coming from workshop participants, faculty mentors, and WWU colleagues, it is available on the Teaching and Learning Cooperative website, as published with a Creative Commons (CC BY NC SA) license: https://tlc.wwu.edu/hiid/.
The Heuristic was developed over the past few years by a professional development and faculty support group collaborating under the name, Teaching and Learning Cooperative (TLCo-op): Justina Brown (Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment/CIIA & ATUS) and colleagues Andrew Blick, Lauren Nicandri, and Lee Posthumus (Outreach and Continuing Education/OCE & WesternOnline).
The team felt that traditional instructional design models did not fully represent modern considerations for teaching. They wrote a chapter about the tool and their process for developing it that was recently published in the Handbook of Research on Innovative Frameworks and Inclusive Models for Online Learning. The publication and the chapter are now available via Western Libraries, searchable via One Search and available for free as an eBook. See their work in Chapter 8: Strategies for Planning, Developing, and Implementing a Heuristic for Inclusive Instructional Design for Higher Education Settings:
The team continually reviews and updates the Heuristic tool, and they expect to have second-level "Learn more" pages for each of the sections later this year. Having used the tool for faculty workshops and updating it each time, the TLCo-op team believes that now is a good time to let more people know about it. With the next level, it will be a reflection tool as well as a launching point for learning.