Collaborating to Infuse DEI into Online Course Quality For All

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Brief Abstract

This session will present the results to date of a cross-institutional collaboration to simultaneously address DEI and online course quality. SUNY, Cal State LA CETL, and others are working to develop an online, openly-licesned, and freely available resource of annotations for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in online course design that can be used with any of the main online course quality rubrics, i.e., CVC-OEI, OSCQR, QOLT, or QM. 

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Alexandra M. Pickett, SUNY Online

http://commons.suny.edu/cotehub/meet-the-team/alex/

Co-presenter: Jeff Suarez-Grant, California State University - Los Angeles

Jeff is the Senior Instructional Designer at the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning at Cal State Los Angeles. He consults with faculty during course redesign, while also helping to enhance faculty teaching practices. To date, Jeff has helped faculty build over 100 hybrid and online courses. On the side, he teaches digital imaging and conducts forensic image analysis and accounting in civil cases involving copyright infringement.

Co-presenter: Sally Baldwin, California State University - Los Angeles

Extended Abstract

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and online education experts from SUNY, and expert staff and faculty from Cal State Los Angeles, Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (Cal State LA CETL) and the California Community Colleges are collaborating across our institutions to develop a flexible framework that infuses DEI practices into any online course quality rubric. The aim of this project is to help institutions, faculty, and instructional designers ensure equitable, diverse, and inclusive online teaching and learning environments without disrupting existing quality assurance processes. 

 

With cross-institutional teams of experts in DEI, online teaching and online instructional design, this collaborative workgroup has reviewed existing inclusive teaching practices, and adapted them to the online teaching and course design environments. The team has collaborated to cite, research and document, write, and tag a set of online, openly-licensed, and freely available DEI annotations, examples, and practices that can be mapped to Online Course Quality standards, and incorporated into the main existing online quality tools such as CVC-OEI, OSCQR, QOLT, and QM.  This flexible framework infuses DEI practices into any online course quality rubric, or initiative to address DEI in online course design and instruction. 

 

In addition to the collaboration with our California colleagues, the SUNY team is working in parallel to review current OLC OSCQR Scorecard standards with the online DEI lens, idendify any DEI-related gaps in standards, make recommendions on the need to add DEI standards, and determine if any DEI revisions are needed to the rubric and online support materials. Results of this project will be incorporated into the next version of OSCQR.

 

Targeting online teaching and learning environments, the DEI annotations that result from this collaborative project will assist institutions, online instructional designers, and online faculty to inform, influence, and ensure equitable, diverse, and inclusive online teaching and learning environments, and contribute to a national conversation to build further DEI awareness on effective online practices, tools, and resources for DEI-informed online education in general.

 

This session will provide participants with: 

  1. An overview of the project.
  2. A prototype demonstration of the annotations and platform.
  3. An opportunity for participants to discuss and provide input and feedback to the annotations.