This Week in the LEC

Shark Notes is a brief summary of an article that our staff has found valuable, and here are the highlights from the latest article: Encouraging Self-Advocacy: How to Build Environments for Awareness and Self-Disclosure for Learners with Disabilities. As a professor, it can be challenging to learn about the capabilities as well as the needs of students with disabilities. This article discusses what professors can do to build an inclusive and effective learning environment that encourages self-advocacy. 

This article provides faculty with two principles to foster engagement with their online students to (1) build community to foster engagement online, and (2) create options for students to engage online and is the second part to “How to structure your online class for inclusion.” 

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many educational institutions quickly changed traditional classroom teaching to online, remote learning. As a result, some strain was placed on the student to teacher relationship since they were no longer face-to-face. Some students encountered challenges learning from home, which negatively affected their engagement and ability to learn.

One of the foundations when designing a course, is the learning objectives. Learning objectives aren’t just a list of what you plan to cover in the class, rather what you want your students to learn or achieve by the end of the course. If your students don’t know the end goal and if the course doesn’t have measurable learning objectives, your students could get lost along the way.