Two free online courses developed by IU School of Education faculty and students for K-12 educators are now available.

Culturally and Linguistically Inclusive Online Teaching and Responsive Engagement and Virtual Learner Assessment can be used by teachers navigating online education and caregivers who are supporting youth in virtual instruction. Both courses are eight credit hours each and are self-paced. Completion of each course should take about 8-10 hours.

Course content is guided by the principles of culturally-responsive teaching, second language teaching pedagogy and inclusive online teaching pedagogy, according to Faridah Pawan, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology, who led a team of interdisciplinary School of Education graduate students to develop Culturally and Linguistically Inclusive Online Teaching. That team included Angela Lankford, Jinzhi Zhou, Karen Pollard, Yichuan Yan and Zixi Li.

“The course takes teachers through an examination of their own implicit biases, activities that bridge students’ home and school experiences, linguistic and conceptual scaffolding in instruction, universal design for learning (UDL) to support varying learning styles and the enactment of teaching, cognitive, social and learning online presences in virtual instruction,” Pawan explained.

Making sure English learners are included in online courses is vital to these students’ motivation and success, especially as online learning is likely to be more prevalent in education moving forward, she added.

Daniel Hickey, Professor in the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, designed the Responsive Engagement and Virtual Learner Assessment course along with School of Education Learning Science Ph.D. students Grant Chartrand and Tripp Harris to help practicing educators with zero experience teaching or taking online courses create new asynchronous courses as efficiently as possible.

“There are plenty of guidelines out there already. But many encourage educators to create new content. That is really laborious and ignores the large growing pool of high-quality open educational resources available for almost every topic,” Hickey said. “The existing guidelines can also result in courses that include little peer interaction or require students to find their way in messy discussion forums [or] overwhelming expectations for individualized instructor feedback and grading, which can result in instructor burnout. The pandemic certainly drove that point home.”

Hickey and his colleagues assumed that participants would need to first experience responsive engagement routines and virtual assessments before creating them.

“In the second module, participants first use a social annotation tool to collaboratively read and discuss articles about social annotation. They then are provided with an assignment template and step by step instructions to modify that template to create an assignment for their own students,” he explained.

The courses are part of an initiative from Indiana University to develop 62 free virtual middle school and high school courses and curate resources for elementary-level courses that educators can use for their virtual needs starting this fall. With nearly $2 million in grants, the courses and virtual professional development opportunities will help establish and maintain a virtual course repository and create a virtual educator license addition.