In teaching writing, I learn new things about writing.

One of my main areas of research and scholarship has been in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to join GSOLE and take the certification course was to further my UDL knowledge and align with the DEI/Accessibility goals of GSOLE and the online writing instructors that I support as an instructional designer in one on one consultation and in faculty development training. Therefore, I chose an accessibility report for a module in IDL6543 Faculty Development at UCF. as my artifact related to participating in an OLI community. My plan is to take all the knowlege I learned from the readings, my peers in the annotated reading discussions and scaffold this for the 

Although we have an in-house accessibility checker (UDOIT ) for Canvas that helps in findings for those with special abilities in accessing an LMS (for example, UDOIT will check that all photos contain alt text). However, there is a gap in what is used by our professors either because of lack of training or awareness. IDL6543 and UDOIT  has no training on LMS access workarounds (eg: using mobile devices and not a desktop). Therefore, I focused on making sure that a new IDL6543 assignments would be easily explained and could also be accessed via mobile devices so that instructors can see from this unit how their students would be involved in a course, too. UDOIT does not extended to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion issues which also needs to be updated and addressed within IDL6543. I was heavily influenced by MacKinnon, K., Makos, A., Wilton, L., Brett, C., Malhtra, T., Avery, T., & Raman, P., Instructor perspectives on building community in online discussion-based courses: Issues of pedagogy and functionality reading. I found it to be inspiring for meeting a learner on their level—no matter where that may be! The emphasis on building a community of diverse learners, despite challenges, is most applicable here for accessibility of many students. While we have a few pedagogical pages in the faculty training course on "Mobile in Mind" and "Chunking," there needs to be more than just a template explaining the hows/whys/importance of all forms of accessibility in online learning. By focusing on UDL principles, this will also aid in giving the participants a wider example of how DEI plays a part in the accessibility and inclusion of learners that rely on handheld devices. 

My hopes are that this report and artifact will help me refine the Faculty Development course IDL6543 to discuss DEI/Accessibility issues in OWI courses as well as allow me to expand on my current pedagogical research in Online DEI. The idea is to create more peer discussions and reflections both in live sessions and in assignments.