Learner Stories: Preparing for a Life in Healthcare
Canadian teen’s career ambition sparked by Michigan Online course
Zafina Zaman, a 15-year-old high school student in Alberta, Canada, has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she can remember.
“I really want to go into medicine,” she said. “The funny thing is that when you’re a little kid you tell your parents ‘I want to be a princess or I want to be a fire truck,’ but even when I was 4, I’ve always said I wanted to be a doctor.”
One of Zafina’s earliest memories was when her mother had a cold and was sick in bed. With her father at work, she decided to try and make tea, warming water and honey in the microwave (which she was not allowed to use).
“Later [my mom] talked to the doctor, and they told her to do exactly what I did for her,” Zafina said. “That was fireworks in my 4-year-old brain. Oh my gosh!”
With the support of her family, Zafina has been able to pursue her passion for learning and healthcare despite her youth.
A Massive Love of Learning
While searching for ways to supplement her education, Zafina discovered her first massive open online course, or MOOC. The flexible timing of the course, “Sleep: Neurobiology, Medicine, and Society,” worked for Zafina and she completed the 12 modules over her summer break.
“They didn’t refuse me for being in middle school,” she said. “I wanted to know more about everything, and I thought, why not?”
Zafina loved learning more about how the brain works in everyday life. “There is so much that goes behind taking a step, that one movement. It was just eye-opening to be able to see that,” she said. “The human body — how and why things work the way they do — it’s so fascinating!”
She elected to take the optional honors track for the course, which gave her something to work toward and turned out to be motivating. The honors track option showed up on the certificate she earned upon completing the course, giving Zafina the chance to show others what she accomplished as well as perhaps inspire others to take advantage of these classes at no cost.
“They’re not age restricted. You don’t have to be a certain age or a certain grade level or have a Ph.D. to take these courses,” she said. “They’re free to anybody and everybody. Why not take them?”
Success on the honors track helped give Zafina the confidence to try other MOOCs, helping keep her brain occupied when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of traditional education. She took two more Coursera courses, “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life” and “Medical Terminology,” which fed her fascination with how the body and the brain work and how we are able to do the things we do.
MOOC Certificate Leads to Hands-On Experience
Once she had some health-related courses under her belt, Zafina added them to her resume and LinkedIn profile, which helped earn her a volunteer position with a local health clinic.
As a volunteer, Zafina helps with administrative work at the front desk and books patients. She recently gained the opportunity to triage a bit, such as taking blood pressure, height, weight, and settling patients into rooms.
“My favorite thing to do is shadowing the doctors because I’m able to connect textbook studies with actual hands-on experience, and that’s been so much fun!” Zafina said. “I’ve been working there for a while now, about a year, and it’s an amazing experience. I’m so grateful I’ve had this opportunity.”
Although there are difficult and awkward moments, the time is rewarding.
“I’ve always really enjoyed helping people. They call it helpers high,” she said. “I love the feeling of being able to see when you help make a change in someone’s life, a feeling of importance and being able to see the changes that you make.”
Thanks to the staff at the clinic who she says take time out of their day to help guide her, Zafina is gaining hands-on experience in the world of healthcare before learning to drive.
Family Matters
In addition to her interests in healthcare, Zafina also competes as a motivational speaker with Optimist International, a platform for youth to compete in public speaking.
She’s been competing since she was 8 and has been the youngest contestant during each level. At 13 she competed against high school students to earn a spot representing Canada and the Great Plains Region in the 2022 Oratorical World Championships, still the youngest person to compete in Optimist International history.
Zafina Zaman, the Great Plains Regional winner, holds hands with her mom, Farheen Akbar, as they await final results at the 2022 Optimist International Oratorical World Championships. Photo by Josh Castleberry, Optimist International
Zafina feels extremely grateful to her family for their support – driving her to a local university for an anatomy class, cheering her on in competitions, and encouraging her to pursue her interest in healthcare despite her age.
From taking care of her mother at age 4, through dressing up as a doctor for Halloween at age 9, and now considering her college plans, Zafina has never wavered from her desire to pursue healthcare. Even though she struggled through chemistry and needed to persistently work at it, the reward of learning and one day becoming a doctor makes the work worthwhile.
Zafina attributes her successes to her family and the wonderful opportunities that have allowed her to accomplish as much as she has despite her youth. With support at home and her internal ambition, Zafina remains as committed to her goal as she was at just 4 years old.
“It’s never been anything else,” she said. “It’s always been a natural field for me.”
Take the next step toward online teaching
Ready to inspire and inform learners around the world? You can learn more about online teaching and creating an online course through the Guides section of our website. The Center for Academic Innovation can help facilitate your transition to online teaching, either through our many resources or in a potential partnership.
Panorama tool offers easy, accurate remediation within Canvas
How this will help
Built-in tool can identify and fix accessibility issues
Checks that course materials meet federally mandated standards
Helps instructors design equitable lessons for all learners
Reviewing your course materials in Canvas for accessibility ensures all learners can participate without obstacles. As the importance of digital accessibility is demonstrated, the tools available to meet those requirements are more prevalent, accurate, and easier to use.
Panorama is one such tool and is currently available on Canvas. It can scan, evaluate, and fix content directly within the learning management system. Using automatic scripts and machine learning, Panorama reviews course materials and matches them to accessibility standards for color contrast, text, graphics, tables, and other issues that can pose barriers to learning for students with disabilities.
Like many major accessibility checkers, Panorama is built around Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG (commonly referred to as WICK-ag), which are considered the universal standard for digital accessibility. The University of Michigan’s Digital Accessibility Strategic Initiative aims to meet WCAG and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations by April 2026.
Getting Started
Panorama automatically audits all of the items in the course and checks their compliance with the prescribed accessibility standards.
Once Panorama scans every Canvas course for accessibility issues, and there are several ways to access those results and start making corrections.
Accessibility scores are also found next to each item in your course materials. Those scores appear in three colors:
Red – Warning icon. This indicates significant accessibility issues with this item.
Yellow – Caution icon. There are some issues that may be difficult for learners to navigate.
Green – Proceed icon. This means the item meets or mostly meets accessibility criteria, which is the ultimate goal for mandated requirements.
You can see the accessibility report for that item when you click on the accompanying icon. Instructors and designers can also open a full course report by selecting Panorama from the left-side navigation menu in your course. It should be noted that these scores are not accessible by students; they are solely to inform you as instructors or designers.
Full course reports give you a snapshot of a course’s overall accessibility and a complete list of items with their accompanying score. From this list, you can prioritize the remediation as issues are filtered by severity or content type, so you can rank the findings accordingly.
If you are creating pages in Canvas, the Panorama accessibility tool icon, which looks like a temperature gauge, appears underneath the text box. As content is added, any accessibility issues appear as a numeric count on the icon. Clicking it opens a report where you can review a list of all accessibility issues Panorama has discovered.
Making Corrections
Panorama allows course designers and instructors to create, scan, and fix digital content directly in the Canvas platform.
The most common issues flagged include:
Alt-text – Alternative text is a short description of an image and should be accurate, short, and contextual.
Tables – Tables should be used to help explain data, not create a visual layout.
Headings – Short text phrases that introduce sections in a document or page, and should follow a hierarchy of levels.
Color contrast – Difference between lightness and darkness of two colors that improves visibility of text.
Once you access the list of issues by clicking on the relevant icon and viewing that item’s accessibility report, instructors can make repairs using a few different options.
Fix Issue
The easiest way to update a not accessible item is to click the Fix Issue button listed on the accessibility report, if that button is available.
Clicking the Fix Issue button launches a pop-up box that lays out what the issue is, how you can fix it, and recommends a change. Clicking Add Change will automatically make the correction.
Manual Remediation
The remediation process depends on different factors like the type of item or what accessibility problems are prevalent, so not all issues will have automated repair options.
In those cases, instructors will have to manually correct the accessibility problem. Solutions can be found by clicking Learn More next to the listed item, which will provide step-by-step instructions on remediation.
If the issues are with a source file, you can download the file, make corrections as advised, then upload it again using the update document feature in the accessibility report. Panorama rescans the item, then registers the item’s new accessibility score.
Panorama for Students
Panorama also generates alternative formats for materials in Canvas so students can select the format that works best for them, ensuring equitable access to course content. These files are individualized and only available to the user who created them. Learn more about these accessibility services offered to students.
Don’t Delay
Since reviewing and updating every page, document, and activity in your courses can take time, accessibility advocates advise planning time to work with Panorama and improve content over multiple months to meet your deadline.
While ideally it’s recommended to build accessible content at the beginning, remediation will still need to occur. Working through your materials ahead of time means you won’t be scrambling to make everything accessible on the first day when, for example, a student using a screen reader can’t access a PDF. Trying to remediate content on demand is not only an added stress for instructors, but also forces the student to wait and risk falling behind in the class.
So, avoid the scramble and the burnout and start using Panorama to check your course materials. Those working with faculty emphasize that progress, not perfection, is the current goal. With such a large volume of materials to review, accessibility advocates hope to see broad improvement rather than 100% accessibility ratings for a handful of courses.
As new guidelines are released, Panorama will update to meet those standards. This means that the sooner instructors implement its usage, the better they’ll be prepared to meet the needs of incoming students.
Grackle
Grackle is a Google workspace tool that checks the accessibility in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Grackle can be added as an extension for U-M Google accounts.
Practical Tips
Share your experiences and issues with the ITS Service Center. Any problems are sent to the vendor for corrections and updates.
Register for a training session or take the Canvas Accessibility with Panorama course from the Canvas Accessibility Service.
For those who don’t have access to Canvas and Panorama, there are external resources that can help check your course’s accessibility.
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools (wave.webaim.org) are available as a browser extension, subscription-based or stand-alone products that identify issues in web content.
Axe accessibility testing tools (deque.com/axe) include a free browser extension as well as more in-depth products.
Answers to common questions about forming student groups
How this will help
Well-constructed team-based assignments help students build skills and knowledge
Surveying students at the beginning of a course can inform better group formations
Establishing team roles gives learners structure and clear expectations
Project-based team learning is a great way to engage students and help them build real-world collaboration skills. But organizing your students into groups that blend easily and productively can be a daunting task at the beginning of the semester.
Below are common questions about forming student teams, along with answers to help you create team projects that support your students and their learning goals.
How can I get to know my students at the beginning of the course?
A student survey at the beginning of the course may help you learn about your students and form teams more effectively. Consider including any of the following questions in your survey:
Where will you be living this semester?
What days of the week are you most available to meet?
What time of day are you most productive?
What concerns do you have about teamwork in this class?
What are your priorities or goals for yourself in this class?
How much experience do you have with [skill relevant to the class or project]?
You can also survey students about personality characteristics and working styles. Here is a sample survey for rating personality characteristics:
In some cases, students with similar characteristics do well in the same groups; other characteristics are better served by being spread out among the teams. These insights help you build cohesive and equitable teams.
Consider the following guidance for grouping students based on the survey sample:
Characteristics
Grouping Type
Extroverted vs. Introverted
Group diverse
Precrastinator vs. Procrastinator
Group similar to maximize team happiness Group diverse to maximize team productivity
Belongingness
Avoid stranding low-belonging students on a team of high-belonging students
Controlling vs. Collaborative
Spread out controlling students
Self-censoring vs. Contributing
Avoid stranding self-censoring students on a team of high contributors
How should teams be formed, and which factors should instructors consider?
Forming effective teams is the first step in setting students up for success on their team projects. Here are some strategies for team formation:
Aim for diversity in skills, experiences, and perspectives.
Aim for similarity in schedules and campus location (or time zone if students are remote) to reduce logistics issues.
Grouping students with similar time management approaches and procrastination styles may reduce conflict within the team, though it may also reduce project quality.
Consider outcome goals, academic strengths, and previous experience with the topic and skills when forming teams.
If you have students who indicated they don’t enjoy teamwork or have conflicts with others, consider assigning them to a team with students who:
Have strong collaborative skills and patience.
Share similar goals for the class.
Are empathetic and adaptable.
In some cases, it may be better to let a student work alone on a project, especially if they have previously had difficult team experiences due to factors outside their control (e.g. cultural differences, neurodiversity, etc.).
How can instructors make structured teams (with roles) work well?
Planning and communication are key when designing and assigning roles for group work. Important considerations include:
Clearly define roles and explain how each role benefits the team’s success. Team roles can include a facilitator to lead team meetings, a timekeeper to track deadlines, and a reporter to record team decisions.
Ensure equitable distribution of the fun or exciting tasks, or tasks that help students build critical skills.
Rotate roles if possible. For example, note-taking should be a duty each team member takes on, rather than the same person always doing it.
Talk about different leadership roles and how to share them in a team. Students can be idea leaders, task leaders, social leaders, or organization leaders (or a combination of leadership types).
Leadership type
Strength area
Common contributions
Social leaders
Help to create the necessary social bond and cohesion among teammates
– Facilitate conflict resolution – Amplify teammates’ voices and ideas to increase equity of participation and contribution – Foster an environment of shared respect for teammates and excitement over the teams’ work
Organizational leaders
Offer needed structure to the team and project
– Spearhead conversations about team policies and norms – Develop and implement approaches to project scheduling – Provide big-picture project oversight to make sure all aspects of the work are moving forward as needed
Idea leaders
Help get the team’s work off on the right foot and provide a boost when needed later in the project
– Model strategies for idea generation – Suggest alternatives when a solution isn’t working – Collect, evaluate, and prioritize feedback
Task leaders
Make sure that the team’s work progresses by using their skills and strengths to complete project tasks
– Demonstrate and teach skills to teammates who are motivated to learn – Outline tasks, objectives, and strategies to complete tasks with teammates – Set deadlines and guide teammates when there are gaps in knowledge
How can instructors form equitable teams?
Instructors should create teams thoughtfully to reduce learner barriers and encourage a sense of belonging, particularly for students who may hold a marginalized identity. Important considerations include:
When possible, avoid stranding students who may be underrepresented in their area of study on a team of all majority students. You can accomplish this by asking an open-ended question about how each student would prefer to be grouped.
Allowing teams to self-select may help, but it may also create more homogeneous teams.
Forming teams based on self-reported sense of belonging may help accomplish this (e.g. not stranding students who report a low sense of belonging on a team with all high-belonging students).
Consult with expert resources on your campus to develop strategies that meet this goal while complying with privacy, legal, and ethical considerations.
For more information on team equity, see the scoping review conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, as well as a graphic illustrating their findings. They identified seven themes of team equity: alignment, dialogism, heterophily, participation, power, ownership, and risk.
References
Legal notice: Protected identity characteristics (race, ethnicity, sex, etc.) cannot be used to assign students to teams, and should not be collected in any team formation survey. The Tandem survey tool meets these guidelines. For more information, reach out to the University of Michigan Office of the General Counsel.
Finding ways to support every student is a fundamental challenge for instructors. When the learning occurs online, ensuring an equitable experience can seem daunting, especially when students are part of teams that meet outside a professor’s purview.
According to researcher Yiwen Lin, interventions aimed at boosting student engagement and experience are effective, and the strategic use of generative AI could ensure group learning benefits every team member.
Local Inspiration
As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Lin got a glimpse into her future research while attending a talk on the student support tool ECoach. Developed by the Center for Academic Innovation, ECoach software provides students personalized feedback and tailored strategies for success.
Lin recalled attending the presentation given by ECoach founder Tim McKay, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics, Astronomy, Education. She was struck by McKay’s finding that while female physics students did not frequently speak in class, they did engage and contribute in other meaningful and important ways.
“What he found was that women like to back channel,” Lin said. “I thought, well women engage, but oftentimes they just engage differently, and it’s hard for an assessment that only looks at the frequency of participation.”
Lin, now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh, researches this deeper data with an eye on gender differences. She examines how psychological factors impact the persistence of online STEM learners, the quality of participation in team settings, and what interventions can be used to encourage more equity among students. Lin shared her research in an Innovation Insights talk titled “Charting Equity in Online Learning Teams: Opportunities and Challenges,” presented by the center.
Male vs. Female Motivation
Examining gender differences in STEM learning has traditionally evaluated how students’ psychological experiences impact outcomes. Lin’s research delves deeper into the learning process, revealing some surprising findings.
In one study, Lin and her team replicated a previous research project that looked at how a sense of belonging and STEM identity impacted female students’ desire to continue in STEM. But unlike the former study, Lin’s research used a pool of international online learners, many of them graduate students.
The results corroborated the importance of belonging and identity for women. However, when they examined the same connection for male learners, Lin’s team found that belonging and identity were also strong motivators for men. In fact, identity and belonging showed a slightly stronger link to STEM persistence for men compared to their female peers. This was the opposite of the previous findings.
Lin believes the pool of students (international and online) may have been a factor in the divergence from past research. Either way, interventions designed to increase female learners’ belonging and identity also clearly impacted male learners. Subsequent polling showed that a positive group dynamic impacted both male and female retention in STEM.
“We found that facilitating effective group dynamics can be potentially quite important for cultivating a more inclusive psychological experience,” Lin said.
Beyond Quantifying Participation
It can be challenging for instructors of online courses to incorporate those interventions, especially for small groups meeting outside the virtual classroom.
Lin outlined those challenges and the importance of diving deeper into the data in a study monitoring 88 small teams (three students per team) who were given a series of challenges to complete in a short period of time. Examining the gender differences in participation, Lin’s team confirmed that women spoke less in mixed-gender groups as well as male-majority teams, using fewer words and speaking less often compared to their peers.
The team then ran a language analysis on the transcripts of the students’ collaboration and found the female students actually provided a higher quality of participation than their male peers.
“Female students were better at responding to their teammates, building onto their contributions, and also being more cohesive with their own participation,” Lin said.
It affirmed her assertion that research can help look beyond the initial observations about frequency. Lin hopes that assessing the quality of contributions will be key to developing effective tools that encourage student participation in online courses and bring more equity to small groups.
AI for an Equitable Learning Experience
What those tools may look like is an exciting proposition to Lin, especially generative AI tools that can be applied to what she describes as the “in between,” the learning experience of students as they work through their course and team assignments.
“We sort of conceptualize that it is useful for AI to help us assess and model collaborative processes, rather than only collaborative outcomes,” Lin said.
Generative AI tools could provide personalized support for students, identifying learning patterns that may require intervention, like an intelligent tutoring system. Lin also sees potential in creating a similar generative AI program for teams, encouraging more equity in their collaboration and helping students from varied backgrounds and diverse perspectives interact in constructive and respectful ways. She referred to the center tool Tandem as an example of how well-designed support tools can reveal more about team dynamics and help instructors better support and guide students. Tandem coaches students working on team projects and allows instructors the chance to intervene when they see a group needs assistance.
Lin acknowledges that integrating generative AI with student support comes with challenges. That is why, Lin says, instructor input is key to ensuring tools are built using careful consideration of privacy and bias, and are extensively tested before launch. When done correctly, they could be powerful tools for building a more inclusive and equitable online learning environment.
“We wanted to think more deeply about how we can leverage AI as a tool for equity,” Lin said. “And this would perhaps be always a constant discussion in the community as we move forward with it.”
Generative AI (GenAI) tools are becoming increasingly popular for a wide variety of uses, including in classrooms. Whether you’re generating images, building slides, or creating summaries of readings, it’s important to be thoughtful about the tools you’re using and the impact they can have on both your students and our world as a whole.
Bias
A GenAI tool is only as good as its training data; if that data contains content that is racist or sexist, we shouldn’t be surprised when the GenAI tool develops the same kind of bias. Bias can come in a variety of different types: stereotypical, gender, and political. All of these biases can lead to certain groups being inaccurately featured more or less in outputs.
Bloomberg tested the biases present in the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator in 2023. When they prompted the model to create representations for jobs that were considered “high-paying” and “low-paying,” the images generated of high-paying jobs were typically of people with lighter skin tones. People with darker skin tones featured more prominently in images of low-paying jobs. Bloomberg found similar results when they looked at the gender of the people in the images. Stable Diffusion generated three images of men for one image of a woman. When women did appear in the generated images, they were typically in lower-paying and more traditional roles, like housekeeper. Prompts for jobs like “politician,” “lawyer,” “judge,” and “CEO” led to images that were almost entirely light-skinned men.
Harmful Content
Besides being biased, GenAI can produce content that is harmful in a variety of ways. GenAI can hallucinate content that is not based on actual data, and is instead fictitious or unrealistic. It can be used to produce artificial video or audio content impersonating a person’s likeness. When this kind of video and audio content is done with permission of the person, it’s commonly called “synthetic media.” When people create artificial video or audio content of someone without their permission, it’s referred to as a “deep-fake.” Deep-fakes are often used to harass, humiliate, and spread hate-speech. GenAI has made the creation of deep-fakes easy and cheap, and there have been several high-profile cases in the US and Europe of children and women being abused through their creation.
Policymaking efforts to combat the proliferation of and harm caused by deep fakes have become common both in the U.S. and abroad, with proposals often including disclosure requirements for the use of synthetic media, at least for certain activities. While educational uses of these technologies are unlikely to be restricted or banned, users should strongly consider disclosing the use of these technologies by default in the interest of transparency and in anticipation of any future requirements to do so that may apply. It may also be worthwhile to consider whether companies offering these products are well positioned to comply with this quickly evolving regulatory landscape as well as whether they are making reasonable efforts to help prevent the misuse of their products.
Data
The collection of data used to train GenAI models can raise a variety of privacy concerns, particularly around personal and proprietary data. Some personal data collection can be declined, although the methods of how to do so are often buried in lengthy terms of service that most users don’t read. Those terms of service also cover how the GenAI tool can use the data that you put into the tool via prompting, so you should be cognizant of the kind of information you’re feeding it.
Recently, the Cisco 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study revealed that most organizations are limiting the use of GenAI, with some banning it entirely, because of data privacy and security issues. This is likely because 48% of employees surveyed admitted to entering non-public company information into GenAI tools. There’s also a general lack of transparency around what kinds of data sets have been used to train GenAI tools. Although some explicitly state where their training data comes from, many are vague about what the training data was and how they accessed it.
Copyright
Right now, many believe that using content, like books, images, and videos, to train GenAI falls under fair use in the U.S., but there are currently multiple lawsuits challenging this notion. If companies are unable to leverage fair use to acquire training data, the effectiveness and availability of GenAI is likely to decrease dramatically. The cost of obtaining licenses for the incredible amount of data needed will likely drive all but the biggest companies out of the market.
The outputs created by GenAI can have their own copyright issues, depending on how much they pull from the training data. If the image generated by GenAI, for example, is substantially similar to an image in the training data, there could potentially be some liability for copyright infringement if or when the image is used. Many GenAI tools are attempting to avoid this by refusing to generate content that is similar to copyrighted material, but there are ways for creative prompters to get around these restrictions.
Although many GenAI tools claim to be trained on openly licensed content, studies show that when asked about licensing requirements, 70% of the tools didn’t specify what license requirements were for the generated work, and if they did, the tool often provided a more permissive license than what the original creator intended.
The use of GenAI brings up ethical issues around authorship that are often related to copyright but are separate. For example, when using information gathered from GenAI, there may be an ethical obligation to cite the original source to avoid claims of plagiarism. GenAI doesn’t typically provide citations, and when it does, those citations are frequently incorrect. There are also concerns about the displacement of human authors and artists by GenAI; this frequently comes up when GenAI is used to create works in the style of certain artists or authors.
Environmental Impact
GenAI has a huge environmental impact. Research has shown that training the early chatbots, such as GPT-3, produced as much greenhouse gas as a gasoline powered vehicle driving for 1 million miles. Generating one image using GenAI uses as much energy as fully charging your phone. ChatGPT alone consumes the same amount of energy as a small town every day. On top of that, the data centers needed to house the training data and infrastructure for these tools require large amounts of electricity and water to keep them from overheating. Right now, it’s nearly impossible to accurately evaluate or know the full extent of the environmental impacts of GenAI.
Equity
There are a variety of different types of equity concerns when it comes to GenAI. Most GenAI tools are trained on data from data rich languages and are less likely to include non-standard dialects or languages. There are also access and efficacy disparities. Not everyone will have access to GenAI tools, whether it’s because of the cost, a lack of internet access, or because there are accessibility issues with the tool. Underrepresented or underserved groups may find their experiences missing from the training data, which is only optimized for some groups, not all, limiting the efficacy of the outputs.
Finally, it’s important to remember that all of the legal and ethical issues discussed so far have a disproportionate effect on marginalized groups. For example, negative environmental effects tend to be felt the worst in more vulnerable communities. Considering the major impact GenAI has on the environment, how are we going to work with these groups to help ensure they’re not further harmed?
Conclusion
Overall, there are pretty significant legal and ethical issues we should consider before using GenAI tools. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use GenAI tools; it means that we should be thoughtful about when, how, and why we’re using them. And we should know that the way we use them might change in the not so distant future. The current lawsuits will take years to work their way through the legal system, and depending on how they shake out, GenAI tools may have to go through some major changes when it comes to their training data.
Practical Tips
Here are five tips for navigating through these complex issues:
Investigate the reputation of the GenAI tool and the company that created it. Perform an online search for any potential legal or ethical issues. Add search terms like “complaint,” “violation,” or “lawsuit” with the company’s name, and be sure to read product reviews.
Check the terms of service. Review the terms of service and privacy policies before using GenAl. Caution should be taken before publishing materials created through GenAI.
Protect sensitive data. In addition to data shared for training purposes, it should be assumed, unless otherwise stated, that data shared when using GenAI tools will be accessible by the third party tool provider and affiliates. Data sharing must adhere to U-M policies.
Consider the ethics/limitations. Continue to remember, and remind your students, that GenAI tools are often biased, as the technology is designed to output common results based on its learning model. GenAI can also “hallucinate,” so specific claims should always be verified before sharing.
Consult resources and ask for help. We are still swimming in uncharted waters. Utilize resources available here at U-M, including training and workshops on GenAI that are hosted across U-M. There is also a new GenAI as a Learning Design Partner series led by U-M instructors that is freely available via Coursera.
When the Covid-19 global pandemic began, so did a more frequent conversation about the collective trauma endured during this time, from healthcare to housing to education. As time has passed, specifically within the educational sphere, discussions about trauma-informed pedagogy, once commonplace in the scope of the pandemic, seem to have receded. However, understanding the impact of trauma in the classroom continues to be essential for student success.
What is Trauma-Informed Pedagogy?
Sarah Le Pichon and Steve Lundy, 2023, share that “…trauma-informed pedagogy does not seek to provide a “cure” for students’ personal or social histories of trauma. But a trauma-informed pedagogy…entails that there are measures educators can adopt that do not exacerbate and may even mitigate trauma in the course of learning”. The CDC states that “[a]dopting a trauma-informed approach is not accomplished through any single particular technique or checklist. It requires constant attention, caring awareness, sensitivity, and possibly a cultural change at an organizational level”.
Trauma itself isn’t always tied to a dramatic event or story. Roger Fallot and Maxine Harris, commonly attributed with developing trauma-informed care principles in 2009, note that “Trauma is pervasive. National community-based surveys find that between 55 and 90% of us have experienced at least one traumatic event. Individuals report, on average, that they have experienced nearly five traumatic events in their lifetimes. The experience of trauma is simply not the rare exception we once considered it. It is part and parcel of our social reality.”
In considering how to conceptualize trauma-informed pedagogy in the current context of higher education, specifically online, we spoke with four education innovators at University of Michigan to gain insight into their expertise of how to best understand and practically apply this concept.
Who is Trauma-Informed Pedagogy For?
Trauma-informed pedagogy is for everyone. Dr. Kyra Shahid, Director of the Trotter Multicultural Center, shares that it’s not only for everyone, but specifically for “those invested in education being a pathway towards healing, restoration, innovation and change”. She continues, “We’d be remiss to not pay attention to how global, national, and local trauma impacts the way students see the world who have seen vast changes in how we teach online.” Shahid feels that this work is relevant to the world we live in now and helps learners to avoid cognitive dissonance during a time when the world is vastly changing. Due to this, she feels that one must disrupt the “normal” and teach in a way that is responsive to what this generation has lived through, from racial terror to mass shootings.
Dr. Rebeccah Sokol, Assistant Professor of Social Work, adds that Trauma-Informed Pedagogy is beneficial to both her, as instructor, and to her students. It’s simply put, a “compassionate teaching style”. She feels that open communication about her students and their lives is really beneficial & helps her students and her be more authentic in the process, which opens the door to being able to learn and receive information. Sokol shares that because of Trauma-Informed teaching practices, she comes to every classroom setting with the understanding that students are coming to the learning experience with a lot of lived experiences. She recognizes and honors their diversity of experience which enriches the depth of learning for the entire community.
“Trauma-informed pedagogy is a learner-centered approach that focuses on the needs of students first and foremost. Since the pandemic, I think we have seen an overall shift toward putting the experience of students first, even if it means making adjustments to expectations and timelines for course delivery,” says Dr. Rebecca Quintana, Director of Blended and Online Learning Design at The Center for Academic Innovation. She also shares that these ideas can also be applied to instructors. “Instructors need to give themselves grace as they seek to provide grace to their students. For instructors, it can be challenging to know how much visibility to give students into challenges they are facing personally, so it is important to thoughtfully navigate each situation on a case by case basis.”
Dr. M. Remi Yergeau, Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute, notes that there are misconceptions, or bias, when it comes to trauma-informed pedagogy. They note that before one can do the work of learning, one does not need to resolve their trauma. “There is a common misconception, more of a bias, around trauma as well as disability…that people who are in the throws of lived experience, like people experiencing the traumatic impact of a life event, people who are going through a medical event, disabled folks…there is a presumption that you shouldn’t be here”. They add that there is a presumption that you need to get your life in order before you can do the work of learning, which is harmful and presumptuous that experience is not valuable. Yergeau also feels that it’s important to remember that trauma isn’t just one thing; it can be in the community, a lived experience, social structure, identity, or even one’s body.
Shahid also shared that we need to reframe our thinking that trauma-informed pedagogy is therapy: “…[Trauma-Informed Pedagogy] is not focused on individual needs but on the collective needs of the entire classroom, instructor included”. Sokol shares it could be as simple as a mindset shift to “…come to teaching with understanding that people have a diversity of experiences and backgrounds and being mindful of that diversity when teaching and interacting with students.” Overall, they emphasize that a student’s life experience is valuable within the learning environment.
Trauma-Informed Pedagogy for Online Learning
When we asked Shahid about practical ways to incorporate Trauma-Informed Pedagogy into their online teaching, she suggested that instructors build in time to reflect and time to incorporate the body. “Don’t fall into the practice of education just being an exchange of intellectualism,” she warns. “[We need to acknowledge] the ways that our body is impacted by what we learn, how we learn, where we learn.” If content is particularly challenging–whether due to the nature of the topic or technical difficulty–students can benefit from pausing and allowing the tension of that stress to move through them. Online learning environments can feel somewhat disembodied, relegating student representation to posts on a discussion forum or a small box on a video meeting screen. Technology can engender cognitive dissonance, Shahid says, and establishing ways to remember students as part of a learning group—and as part of their bodies—can support learning.
Shahid points out that most of human communication is actually nonverbal. “It’s not the words we use, it’s our body language, it’s the eye contact, it’s the energy that we share when we come into a room,” she explains. “It’s those things that really influence how we experience, what we learn, and what triggers in our body that we’re safe or we’re not safe.” Since online learning tends to be absent of many of these cues, this can be particularly challenging for learners with a history of trauma, or for anyone living through unpredictable times. At the same time, she says, technology can bridge gaps, and bring in forms of engagement less common in a classroom.
Yergeau notes that instructors don’t have to limit their online teaching to tools like Zoom or Canvas. Platforms like Discord, for example, may have a steep learning curve, but can also allow for students to signal ways they would like to engage, and more layered conversation. No tool is perfect, and Yergeau suggests “pulling in students to do the critical work of assessing those technologies themselves.” They ask, “how are these technologies imagining their users?” Similarly, how are we as instructors imagining learners as we make decisions about how we teach?
While technology presents incredible opportunities for online teaching and learning, Shahid points out that educators aren’t always trained in how to fully utilize it in ways that are continuously accessible to students. Yergeau also notes that it is important to consider how the tech we use ultimately uses the data of our learners, with or without their consent.
Trauma-Informed Pedagogy and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
The principles of trauma-informed teaching—for example caring awareness, transparency, and empowerment—can support all learners. They also provide a framework for instructors to be human too, sharing our pedagogical decisions with students so that they can be improved. Because of its focus on trustworthiness, collaboration, and voice, trauma-informed approaches can be the glue that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion not only in the classroom, but on campus as well.
Shahid points out that trauma-informed pedagogy, DEI, and other forms of healing centered practices are interrelated. “For me, [trauma-informed pedagogy] is what allows us to apply the good work of DEI that we have been doing for so many years in ways that are responsive to the students we are working with in the moment.”
Whether we are talking about DEI or trauma-informed pedagogy, Yergeau says, “we’re talking about ways of viewing and approaching the world.” They note that it can be easy to imagine how individual trauma intersects with disability, but that it can also intersect with class, intergenerational trauma, legacies of colonialism, racism, and war – the ways in which our country is structured around violence and disempowering folks. We can provide learning experiences that support people where they’re at, Yergeau says, but we can also come at it thinking in terms of providing learning experiences that support social and educational transformation.
Practical Tips
Looking for concrete ways to incorporate trauma-informed pedagogy into your online classroom? Check out these tips below, synthesized from our conversations with faculty.
Environment: Think about the kind of learning environment you want to create.
If you have synchronous meetings, plan the way you kick off each session. Are there ways to cultivate an atmosphere that gets students feeling welcome and ready to learn? Some instructors make use of icebreakers, check-ins, Zoom surveys or chat prompts, or music.
If your course is asynchronous, are there regular announcements that can be sent, or can periodic introductory pages be embedded in a course site? These can be ways to create rich regular touch points that use clear expectations, reminders, or gifs to build a cohesive community that helps learners to orient themselves and prepare.
Work with class participants to develop a group agreement. Sometimes called community guidelines or ground rules, activities like this can make transparent expectations and requests of one another as a class.
2. Time: Slow down and take stock of the moment.
Build in time for the class to pause and reflect, such as mindful moments before and after engaging learning activities. This can help students to prepare, shift gears, or reflect and synthesize.
When traumatic events or experiences occur in the world or lives of individuals it can be feel dissonant to go about business as usual. If you are aware of something that may be weighing on students’ minds or bodies, consider creating moments to shift outside of routine. This can mean journaling, an unplanned discussion, or taking the opportunity to connect what is going on with course content so students can see how what they are learning is relevant.
3. Bodies: teach to the whole person.
Think about ways to acknowledge how the body is impacted by how and what we learn. If you teach online, recall that sitting for long periods can cause physical discomfort or present challenges to concentrating. Consider taking breaks for movement, or incorporating the body into the learning process. If course content is emotionally difficult, movement can be an ally to work through the material and any tension it may cause in the body.
Consider cultivating a learning environment that normalizes rest and restoration rather than busyness and opportunity/information overload. This could look like a segment of the course schedule that doesn’t introduce new content or assignments so that learners can focus on wellness, or regular messages that go beyond content to support student wellbeing.
4. Engagement: include yourself and students in your pedagogy.
Let students know why you’ve made certain decisions about class assignments or structure, and the ways in which your teaching style supports you–your passion and values, and also your own wellbeing and boundaries. Students want us to support them, but they don’t want us to burn out.
Invite students to be a part of class design or making decisions regarding their assessment. This can provide a sense of control, fairness, inclusion, and importance. We can do as much as possible to plan for learner success and inclusion, but nothing takes the place of students’ determining their own learning. Tools like Gameful that integrate with Canvas or other Learning Management Systems can be an effective way to support learners in individualizing their learning and assessment.
Learning isn’t just a two-way street between students and teachers, but also among students themselves. Invite students to share from their own knowledge and experiences, and build in time and activities to help build connections among learners. This can be particularly important in online classes, where students can sometimes feel isolated or as if they are going through class materials alone. For example, there could be regular discussion prompts that get students talking to one another about life or hobbies, and not just course material. Some instructors hold weekly synchronous drop in office hours where students can chat with the instructor about anything, or find fellow students and connect with them. It can be helpful to let students know that there is always room for conversation, connection, and disagreement.
5. Flexibility: Build in a diversity of ways to participate.
Online learning can rely heavily on live or recorded lectures, quizzes, and discussion forums. This can feel predictable for students–in both good ways and bad. To create a variety of ways of engaging with material, some instructors layer in use of Discord or other tools. This can provide opportunities for students to go beyond what Zoom or Canvas allow in terms of communication and relationship building (think gifs, or threaded chats, or ease of movement between multiple concurrent video discussions). Other instructors encourage opportunities for video, audio, or image responses as alternatives to writing.
Not all technology is equally accessible. The burden of pointing this out can fall to students whose needs aren’t being met. Before that happens, some instructors engage students in analyzing and selecting options that work best for the group or individuals.
Create ways for students to signal how they want to interact if they choose. For example, do they want to be reached out to outside of class for study groups, or do they like communicating by email, text, or other apps?
Hitchcock, Laurel Iverson ; Báez, Johanna Creswell ; Sage, Melanie ; Marquart, Matthea ; Lewis, Kaitlyn ; Smyth, Nancy J. (n.d.). Social Work Educators’ Opportunities During COVID-19: A Roadmap for Trauma-Informed Teaching During Crisis. Journal of social work education. Washington: Routledge. (see page 87).
You may have heard that recently, there have been updates to regulations implementing Title II of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA). These updates impact almost all of what we do in the online learning environment. With the aim of reducing burden for members of the disability community and providing equitable access to web content, the updates introduce technical guidelines that large public universities such as U-M must adhere to starting on April 24, 2026. We’ll discuss this further, and some exceptions to the rule, below.
Prohibiting Discrimination in Digital Spaces
The ADA is a civil rights law which blanketly prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. More specifically, Title II of the ADA extends the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of having a disability to services, programs, and activities of state and local government entities, which includes public universities. In April 2024, rulemaking by the Department of Justice updated Title II regulations (added as a new subpart H to 28 CFR 35) by establishing specific technical standards to help ensure that all web and mobile applications are accessible.
Prior to this update, web content under Title II was required to be accessible, but public entities did not have specific direction on how to comply with ADA’s general requirements of nondiscrimination. Many organizations noted that voluntary compliance with previous digital accessibility guidelines did not result in equal access for people with disabilities. With the new guidelines in place, people with disabilities will now have equal access to all web-based content created by state or government institutions.
This is important progress for removing barriers to access in our very web-based world. Universities have become increasingly reliant on technology, whether for learning, working, or for transactions. With more than 10 millions students enrolled in some form of distance education, ensuring all students have equitable access to the same information, are able to engage in the same interaction, and can conduct the same transactions as their nondisabled peers is critical. As online learning continues to grow, it is important to remember that more than 1 in 4 people in the US have disabilities, this includes an estimated 13.9% US adults with a cognitive disability impacting their concentration, memory, or decision making, 6.2% with a vision disability, and 5.5% with a hearing disability.
This is not a solution in search of a problem; individuals with disabilities are consistently reporting challenges when accessing the web. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) noted that they have resolved and monitored more than 1,000 cases, reported by members of the public, in recent years related to digital access. These complaints addressed the accessibility of many facets of the web: public-facing websites, learning management systems, password-protected student-facing content, and mass email blasts of colleges and universities, to name a few.
Technical Standards: WCAG 2.1, Level AA
Web content is defined as the information and experiences on the web, and it now must be readily accessible and usable to those with disabilities. This includes text, images, social media, sound, videos, scheduling tools, maps, calendars, payment systems, reservation systems, documents, etc. This also applies to web content that was made by a contractor or vendor. Universities may no longer rely on alternative versions or other workarounds to address barriers to inaccessible digital content or a reactive response when a student requests accommodations.
The technical standards themselves, WCAG 2.1, Level AA, are an international set of standards developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization that sets standards for web design. Generally speaking, they set clearly defined standards for content so that it is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Though this is a new technical standard that all public universities must adhere to, the practice of producing and maintaining accessible content isn’t new at U-M. Since anyone at U-M can create digital content, our digital accessibility Standard Practice Guide Policy, deployed in 2022, states that any U-M developed or maintained electronic information technology (EIT) must meet the same technical standards required in updated Title II regulations. This is to ensure that these technologies are as effective, available, and usable for individuals with disabilities as those who do not have disabilities. This applies to a wide range of technologies, from web-based applications, to digital textbooks, to electronic documents. Individual U-M units are responsible for maintaining the accessibility, usability, and equity of their EIT over time, in collaboration with other U-M units.
Limited Exceptions to the Ruling
If we build our content accessible, adhering to these guidelines, we are greatly reducing the chances that an individual with a disability is unable to access our content. Similarly to a curb cut in a sidewalk, not only can a person with a wheelchair access the street or sidewalk, but so can bicyclists and strollers. This concept applies to web content as well:If we build accessible web content, everyone can benefit. Given this, there are very few, limited exceptions to WCAG 2.1, AA conformance requirements that are further explained in the Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments. Note: please defer to guidance from your university for interpretations of these exceptions. In summary, some exceptions that come up in your teaching include:
Archived web content: Oftentimes, there is web content that is not currently used as it’s outdated, not needed, or repeated somewhere else. If the content was created before the compliance date, only kept for reference/recordkeeping, is held in a special area for archived content, and it has not been changed since it was archived, then it would not need to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. An example could include a 2019 report on the enrollment data for an online degree program that hasn’t been updated and is stored in an “archived” section of a website.
Content posted by a third party: When a third party, which is not posting due to contractual arrangements with the university, posts content on a university website or mobile app, these standards likely do not apply. For example, if a student comments on a discussion board within your course, it will probably fall under this exception.
Preexisting conventional documents: These documents, such as old PDFs, word processing documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, that were made available prior to the ruling date AND are not currently being used An example could include a PDF for a research symposium event in 2022 that was still posted on the university’s website.
Other exceptions include password protected documents for a specific individual and preexisting social media posts made prior to the compliance date.
Common Questions
What if a student reports they cannot access my web content, despite WCAG 2.1, Level AA conformance?
This is definitely possible, as every person’s needs are different. One wouldn’t have to change their web content in this case, but would need to provide an equivalent alternative to that individual.
Can we just depend on a learner’s accommodation request?
This is considered an undue burden to a person with a disability by having them constantly request access to web content as resolutions to requests could take several days or weeks to comply. By designing web content to be accessible upon its creation, individuals with disabilities will have an equal opportunity to access content.
Are there resources and trainings available to learn more about digital accessibility that are tailored for instructional faculty?
At U-M, there are many opportunities to learn about a variety of accessibility topics, including those relevant to faculty, found on the Accessibility Training page maintained by ITS and ECRT. Additionally, there are many great resources available to increase the accessibility of your web content including:
Educators can use generative AI to transform dense, technical material into clear, easily understandable content. This improves students’ comprehension and makes the learning experience more inclusive to a wider audience. While students are growing in their knowledge of complex academic topics, sometimes academic terminology can be a barrier. Particularly early in the course, students may not yet be familiar with the jargon and language of your subject matter. In addition, you may have learners in your course with a wide range of educational and cultural backgrounds. Some of your students may be from countries outside of the United States, and English may not be their first language. By demystifying complex concepts, jargon, and metaphors with generative AI, educators are empowered to create more equitable and effective learning environments for our diverse array of learners.
For example, you can use the following example prompt to get started:
“Could you please rewrite the following text to an 8-10th-grade reading level (using Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and clarify any complex jargon: “[Your text]” Thank you!”
In this prompt, we are asking ChatGPT to rewrite text to an 8-10th-grade reading level on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Scale. This is the reading level recommended for a general adult lay audience. Feel free to adjust this to fit your target audience.
Example: An Online Course on Neuroscience
Drafting
Now imagine that you are a renowned neuroscientist and a highly regarded faculty member at Michigan Medicine. You are interested in developing an online course that will bring neuroscience concepts to a lay audience. You are excited to get started, but as you begin to develop content, you quickly realize that your typical content is aimed at seasoned medical students and filled with jargon that may be daunting to those without prior knowledge. You realize that generative AI may be able to assist you in breaking down concepts into simpler terms.
You fill in the example prompt with some of the text from one of your old in-person presentations with key concepts that you would like to include in this online course:
“Could you please rewrite the following text to an 8-10th-grade reading level (using Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and clarify any complex jargon:
In our introductory exploration of neuroscience, we delve into the intricate workings of the central nervous system (CNS), focusing on the complex interplay between neurons and glial cells. We examine the fundamental principles of neuronal communication, emphasizing the role of neurotransmitters in synaptic transmission and the significance of action potentials in neural signaling. A detailed analysis of the brain’s functional anatomy is conducted, where we dissect the various lobes of the cerebral cortex, the limbic system, and the intricate circuitry of the basal ganglia, highlighting their contributions to cognitive and motor functions. Additionally, we explore the mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity, emphasizing the synaptic and non-synaptic changes that facilitate learning and memory. The course also delves into the pathophysiology of neurological disorders, exploring the etiology and progression of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis, and discusses the latest advancements in neuropharmacology and neuroimaging techniques.
Thank you!”
In response to your input, ChatGPT gives you the following output:
“In our first look at neuroscience, we study how the central nervous system (CNS) works. This includes understanding how neurons (brain cells) and glial cells (supporting cells) interact. We learn about how neurons talk to each other, focusing on neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that help send messages in the brain, and action potentials, which are electrical signals in neurons.
We also look closely at the brain’s structure. This includes studying the different parts of the brain, like the lobes of the cerebral cortex, the limbic system (which deals with emotions), and the basal ganglia (important for movement), and how they help us think and move.
The course also covers neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes to help us learn and remember things. We look at both synaptic changes (changes at the connections between neurons) and non-synaptic changes (changes within the neurons themselves).
We also learn about neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. We study what causes these diseases and how they progress. Finally, we discuss new developments in treating brain disorders and ways to look at the brain, like neuropharmacology (study of how drugs affect the brain) and neuroimaging (brain scanning techniques).”
In this example, ChatGPT keeps all of the main concepts intact while using simpler language, providing definitions of terminology used (rather than removing it entirely), and breaking the large paragraph into more digestible, smaller paragraphs or chunks.
Refining
As a content expert, it is important to read through the output and ensure that all key concepts remain intact. It is also up to you to determine whether the revisions are sufficient and appropriate for your audience. You may choose to ask for stylistic revisions as well. For example, ChatGPT wrote the text as though the course is currently happening. However, you plan on delivering this information at the beginning of the course to talk about what the learner will learn. This is your preference.
You can ask ChatGPT to revise with the following:
“The course hasn’t happened yet. Please rewrite this to account for that. For example, using the phrase “we will” throughout.”
ChatGPT will then go through and make the requested revisions to the text using the appropriate tense that you indicated in your input:
“In our upcoming exploration of neuroscience, we will delve into how the central nervous system (CNS) functions. This will involve understanding the interaction between neurons (brain cells) and glial cells (support cells). We will learn about neuronal communication, focusing on neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that help send messages in the brain, and action potentials, the electrical signals in neurons.
We will also closely examine the brain’s structure, studying different parts such as the lobes of the cerebral cortex, the limbic system (which deals with emotions), and the basal ganglia (important for movement), and understanding how they influence our thinking and movement.
The course will cover neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes to facilitate learning and memory. We will observe both synaptic changes (alterations at the connections between neurons) and non-synaptic changes (alterations within the neurons themselves).
Additionally, we will explore neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. We will investigate the causes of these diseases and their progression. Finally, we will discuss the latest developments in treating brain disorders and methods for examining the brain, such as neuropharmacology (the study of how drugs affect the brain) and neuroimaging (brain scanning techniques).”
Continue to refine as needed. Consider feeding into the chat examples of your tone of voice so that the content is not only accessible for learners but also contains a human element. In addition, you can increase your expectation of language understanding as your students grow in their knowledge and your expectations of understanding increase.
Extended Reality (XR)
Extended Reality (XR) allows learners to reach beyond the classroom into another setting through 360 videos and other simulations that can be used on different platforms whether that is headsets, web browsers, or mobile devices. Creating these learning activities in XR allows learners to practice needed skills in a simulated environment. These low-stakes practices enable students to try and fail, get feedback, and try again without the usual costs of in-person scenarios. Courses such as First Aid, electric wiring, and public speaking could be augmented with opportunities to practice the necessary skills and behaviors in a low-stakes environment. All courses could integrate XR whether in a classroom with headsets or online with mobile devices or web-based browsing. Digital accessibility considerations are not always at the forefront in design such as the visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor needs of learners. Yet they are necessary requirements to make sure all learners can participate in learning and not be left out as new technology is integrated into online classrooms. Thus questions such as these can arise amidst excitement – What are the accessibility considerations in the XR space? How accessible is XR?
There are research groups and associations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XR Access that focus their work on XR and accessibility to build collective knowledge and practice. Here at the University of Michigan, the Center of Academic Innovation has experts in XR and accessibility such as Pamela Saca, the learning experience designer for accessibility. She will provide insights into these questions along with the resources to dig into to make sure as innovation expands, so does access for all.
Making Learning More Accessible
While many immediately think of the accessibility limitations inherent in XR technology, there are accessibility benefits as well. XR promises great potential for communicating and engaging more effectively in a remote, immersive environment for many learners who may not have had the opportunity before the integration of XR. The aspects of XR allow for engagement in both technical and humanistic fields of study and in allowing practice for skills such as wiring. It is poised to impact any discipline where objects of study are spatially relevant, allow students to gain confidence in analytic skills, and increase access to things that would cost time, money, or safety (Cook and Lischer-Katz).
There are also specific tools that increase accessibility. When thinking about the 1 in 4 people in the United States with a disability, these benefits can allow students to be more active participants in the classroom while also enhancing the learning experience of content. XR features can increase accessibility by enhancing surround sound from one side of the body over the other, using a technology that allows a virtual reality headset to dynamically highlight sharp contrasts of picture quality in peripheral vision for visually impaired users and enabling walkability for those confined in a wheelchair through movements similar to walking around a boardroom table. XR tools support students to engage and change the tools so that they fit their needs and fulfill the vision of building the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors for their course.
Accessibility Challenges
However, there are accessibility challenges with the use of XR, that can affect all learners, even without disabilities. Students working in noisy spaces may also have challenges hearing. Some students struggle with new technologies or have motion sickness when using a headset. Some XR tools like 360 degree videos or first person perspective movement depend heavily on motion controls. The technology requires the user to manipulate their body to control their movements and placements which forces the challenges in accessibility when there are learners who have difficulties with motion controls.
Planning for Accessibility
Although Pamela Saca, the Learning Experience Designer for Accessibility at the Center for Academic Innovation, believes that extended reality could support many people in their learning, she knows nothing can be 100% accessible because one thing that “works for one person will be in direct conflict for what might work for another person.” In her work in design teams, a change made to help one type of learner and their specific accessibility needs may make it more difficult for another. Therefore, she suggests the following considerations that can help design teams and instructors make more inclusive choices.
Consider accessibility from the beginning. The XR collaborative recommends planning XR experiences explicitly considering accessibility at the start of your project. It’s more efficient and less expensive than having to remediate. Think about the types of learners you may have in your course and what kind of needs they may have. This could include captioning audio or providing alternatives for physical movements. There are resources for testing accessibility whether that be through user testing before launch, XR Guidelines, or the W3C amongst others that need to be implemented throughout the design process from ideation to implementation.
Build with an audience in mind that is as inclusive as possible, or better yet, involve people with disabilities as members of the course design, managers, and testers. You may find challenges you hadn’t anticipated due to your own design bias.
Test the learning activity with a diverse group of people to ensure ample feedback and to be able to build in alternative activities if it is not 100% accessible. During one set of user testing, what designers thought to be a great design instead had a lot of challenges. The XR experience had to be changed to accommodate the broad population that would be using it, even if it didn’t align with the originally planned experience.
Extended reality is a tool that can be used to enhance learning through low-stakes practice, continuous feedback, and real-life situations. It, like many other learning technologies, has limitations and introduces the possibilities for exclusion whether that be because of technological difficulties, inaccessibility, or other issues unknown to the designer. Extended reality, like many technological innovations, is exciting but should also be used for expanding learning for all.
XR Access: A community committed to making virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR) accessible to people with disabilities
World Wide Web Consortium: The W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the We
The Roundup on Research series is intended for faculty and staff who are interested in learning more about the theories, frameworks, and research in online and technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
One of the first questions many educators ask when getting started teaching online is “How do you recreate the experience of a face-to-face classroom in an online environment?” While there are many facets to that question, many instructors refer to the sense of community and connection as a gap that they struggle to overcome. However, much research has been done on the impact and development of learning communities in the online classroom. In this article, we will discuss the influential framework Community of Inquiry (CoI), how it can be used to inform your own teaching, as well as how it has been used to frame online learning research in the research.
Community of Inquiry Model
One of the most used frameworks applied to the understanding of online learning environments is the community of inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, et. al, 2000). Originally developed by observing asynchronous text-based learning environments, CoI suggests that there are three core interdependent elements to a learning experience: social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. The intersection of the three presences results in what is categorized as “deep learning.” Rooted in the belief that learners construct meaning within social contexts (social constructivism), Community of Inquiry makes meaning of how learners interact online to create knowledge.
Three Presences: Cognitive, Teaching, and Social
Cognitive presence is the capacity for meaningful construction of learning. Cognitive presence is often what instructors might think of the active learning portion of a class. Indications of cognitive presence include asking questions, engaging in reflection on a topic, and scaffolding engagement with a topic. Cognitive presence can be supported by an instructor asking probing questions, modeling reflection, and encouraging active participation from learners. As the community grows together, other learners may (and should) also participate in the facilitation of cognitive presence.
Teaching presence is the design, structure, and guidance that directs the learning experience. Instructional design is one of the earliest ways to demonstrate teaching presence (course materials, assessments, activities). However, it is also important to consider how the instructor demonstrates active teaching presence throughout the time of the course. This can take the form of weekly introductory emails, specifying expectations for Zoom sessions, or providing assistance to a student struggling with a topic. Teaching presence is not isolated to the instructor alone, rather, can also be exhibited by students by providing structure and guidance to fellow students.
Social presence is the ability for participants in the community to represent themselves as whole people complete with emotions and personality. It is easy to focus on the design of a course thinking about the content that needs to be taught or the learning objectives to be met. In a face-to-face classroom, much of the social presence happens spontaneously through a shared location. In an online setting, we design our courses and spaces to encourage the development of social presence. This could involve including an introduction area for students where the instructor shares (and encourages students to share) some pieces of personal information, infusing weekly posts or announcements with personality as well as giving students space to express their own personalities.
COI in the Literature
As one of the prevailing frameworks in current online teaching and learning, the Community of Inquiry model has been in the academic spotlight frequently over the past several years. In a recent search, CoI has been cited in over 1000 articles during the last three years alone. As classrooms transitioned to emergency remote and/or online teaching during the pandemic, CoI has been used to explain students’ motivation in courses (Turk et al., 2022), how to understand the bridge between informal and formal learning (Chatterjee & Parra, 2022), and leveraging learning analytics for student feedback (Yılmaz, 2020). It is also hypothesized that different types of disciplines may have different need profiles for presence, for example, some disciplines may have greater social presence needs vs. teaching presence needs (Arbaugh, 2013).
Most critically, social presence has been associated with student satisfaction in online learning. While teaching and cognitive presence are positively correlated with students’ perceptions of learning (Akyol & Garrison, 2008; Turk et al., 2022), social presence was highlighted as faculty transitioned to emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. Studies of social presence have cited timeliness of feedback and coaching (Conklin & Dikkers, 2021), frequency of communication and feedback (D’alessio et al., 2019), and the opportunity for social interactions regardless of whether those opportunities were acted upon (Weidlich & Bastiaens, 2019) as ways to build social presence. The benefits of increased social presence suggest decreased issues with academic integrity (Eshet et al., 2021), increased student performance (D’alessio et al., 2019), and increased higher-order thinking (Stein et al., 2013).
Critiques of COI
While being one of the most popular frameworks leveraged in online teaching and learning right now, CoI is not without critique. First, it assumes that learning is inherently social. If your teaching philosophy does not align with the underlying beliefs of social-based learning (like constructivism), this may not be the best framework.
In Xin’s (2012) critique she notes the challenges of parsing out what is a “social presence” interaction (since CoI assumes all learning is social) from the other types of presences. How are cognitive presence and teaching presence different if they are also inherently social? In addition, because CoI is rooted in written communication between community members, is there a difference between what happens in written, asynchronous communication versus what may take place more spontaneously with spoken, synchronous communication? Others have suggested that CoI does not take into account interpersonal contributions to learning. Learners may also need to take responsibility for their learning, and they may not always be invested in a learning community (Shea et al., 2014; Wertz, 2022).
Finally, CoI was developed during a time when synchronous communication (like videoconferencing) was at a premium. The research has not yet determined whether CoI applies equally as well when a portion of communication is taking place synchronously.
How to Incorporate COI Into Your Online Design
One of the reasons the Community of Inquiry is so popular is that it can be used proactively as a framework for creating a more engaging learning environment. Facilitating an online course can feel like teaching to a black box. CoI provides a way to be proactive in development to make teaching online more effective. The best way to leverage CoI is to think about the three types of presences and how you are planning to address them each week.
Since CoI is rooted in active communication, one of the best things to do is to create a communication/engagement plan.
Ideas for Increasing Teaching Presence:
Write weekly introductions and weekly summaries. Consider including points that you may have found particularly interesting and/or general comments on discussions within class.
Use the Announcements feature to post timely updates.
Return emails and assignments within a set expectation. For example, “I will return short assignments within 3 days. Our longer papers will be returned within 7 days”
Create a survey for students to get feedback on organization/communication. Make adjustments based on feedback, and then communicate those changes back to students. Students need to know that you have made changes based on their feedback.
Ideas for Increasing Cognitive Presence
In videoconferencing (like Zoom), create handouts or guided notes so students can be active during lectures.
Tools like Persuall can engage students asynchronously with communications on readings.
Use case studies, application, and reflection assignments to encourage students to consider content topics and make meaningful connections
Ideas for Increasing Social Presence
Social presence is facilitated by the instructor. Demonstrate commitment to connection with students. Create a communication plan. Students frequently cite feedback from instructors as a critical aspect of feeling connected in a class. Give students expectations for timeliness of feedback and provide enough detail to build an academic relationship.
Create space for social interactions during Zoom sessions. Take the first 3 minutes for small talk, have a question of the day, or use a poll to encourage students to share about themselves if they feel comfortable.
Use a discussion board for informal conversations. Consider a theme – favorite meme, favorite place to travel, food that reminds you of home. Make sure that as the instructor, you participate as well.
If you are interested in learning more about Community of Inquiry, visit the COI website.
Xin, C. (2012). A Critique of the Community of Inquiry Framework.International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education / Revue Internationale Du e-Learning et La Formation à Distance, 26(1), Article 1.
