Inclusive design is substantially important to our Pod’s learning design process and our goals for our final assignment. Beyond the obvious importance of equity-minded teaching principles, our chosen topic is about racialization, racism, and anti-racism. Equity is central to anti-racist education. We are being careful to consider how our learning design can be universal and inclusive for learners with diverse relationships to race and racism.
For example, we are not designing our learning environment based on any assumptions about our learners’ race. Our goal is to provide valuable knowledge about the ways racism complicates life for racialized people. Many students will already be aware of concepts and histories we will explain because of their own lived experiences. To teach about racism as if it were a new topic would be alienating for non-white students, just as white students would be alienated by not highlighting how pervasive structural racism is in every facet of life for racialized people. Every individual has a relationship to our topic, but those relationships are not easily comparable. Our inclusive learning design will not assume the lived experiences of learners, but will instead offer the necessary information for all individuals to contextualize their own lived experiences of race and racism.
As someone who has ADHD, I am personally well acquainted with the invisible gorilla. I understand the importance of learning environments which utilize multiple forms of engagement, representation, and expression. Our learning design will have frequent checkpoints after each learning module to test learners’ understanding with short multiple-choice quizzes and term-definition matching activities. I have found this format especially helpful for online asynchronous learning environments, especially when the checkpoints are designed to inspire recollection, rather than being firm roadblocks. If a learner gets a quiz question wrong, they are offered the correct answer, along with a justifying explanation. Don’t get me started about when I spent sixteen hours being forced to watch eight-minute onboarding videos over and over again until I got every quiz question correct for a summer job at Home Depot. The rigidity of Home Depot’s training design made freedom my goal, and ultimately, I retained nearly no knowledge from the entire program.
This is an informative and personal blog post, and I can feel your passion as I read it. One improvement you could make is to include at least a visual element, such as an image. Also, including one of the blog prompts as a heading in your blog would help the reader to figure out quicker which prompt you chose. Anyway, I’m sorry for your experience with Home Depot.
Hey Kevin, the part about your Home Depot training is honestly the perfect example of what NOT to do. Sixteen hours of watching the same eight-minute video until you pass every quiz is the kind of “engagement” that makes you actively resent learning, and you completely nailed why it failed (you were trained to escape it, not to retain anything from it).
Your distinction between checkpoints that inspire recollection versus firm roadblocks is something I hadn’t really thought about explicitly before but it tracks perfectly with what we’re trying to build in my own pod’s design. The retry-friendly low-stakes setup is so much better for actually learning instead of just gaming the system. Out of curiosity, are you planning to embed any of those H5P checkpoints directly into the WordPress site, or are you thinking of hosting them somewhere else? Would be cool to see one in action when the final resource is ready.