Hello everyone ! Welcome to Week 9!
As you complete your Pod Equity Projects (see the bottom of Week 8 blog post for project information) I want you to spend some time thinking about all the different aspects of “access to learning” that are explored through the UDL Framework.
This week in your reflective blog, I want you to consider the ethical bias and inequity in distributed and open learning environments.
First, I want to take the time to consider the writing of my colleague Dr. Chris Gilliard. In our weekly reading, you will be introduced to some of Chris’ writing which examineds the pervasive digital redlining that occurs across Higher Education. Other digital redlining has been identified by Joy Buolamwini, whose MIT research examined How she is Fighting Bias in Algorithms.
Then, you will take a different cultural perspective of digital learning design. In Chapter 4, Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Spaces, Kral and Schwab (2014) advocate that the way to design for safe and culturally responsive digital learning spaces is to ask the learners for their input. You will read about Indigenous youth who share their voice, to help us all better understand how to be inclusive and create authentic, relevant and authentic learning tasks in online and open learning environments. This is a longer article to read, but it is full of exciting examples and case studies.
I hope that you have a wonderful week – and I look forward to your Equity Pod Group assignments due this Sunday, Nov 8, 2020. Only one person needs to add the link to your assignment into the D2L Assignment Dropbox.
Please consider using FlipGrid to make your group video (NO Editing required and lots of room for additional resources), rather than writing out your group project.
Please be reminded that Blog Post #3 for Topic 3 is optional.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me…
Dr Roberts 🙂