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Inclusive Teaching Workshop

Craft Your Curricula to Reduce Bias and Increase Accessibility

Diverse group of adult learners seated in a library, working together

Workshop materials

Inclusive Teaching Endorsement

This workshop counts towards the Drake Institute’s Inclusive Teaching Endorsement.

Upstate Bias Checklist Resources

CDC Resources

University Resources

Adobe Stock for Images

All Adobe Creative Cloud products are available to faculty, staff, and students at Ohio State.  Among their offerings, Adobe Stock is a terrific resource for finding images already licensed for use by the university.  The filter options to the left of the search results make it easy to find precisely the type of image you need.

If you have any difficulty accessing Adobe Stock, you can also review this list of stock photo sites that provide images labeled for re-use. Several of these sites are created and maintained by marginalized communities, such as Nappy, Disabled and Here, and The Gender Spectrum Collection.

LinkedIn Learning

Ohio State faculty, staff and students have free access to LinkedIn Learning. Go to LinkedIn Learning Login and enter your Ohio State email address using the format, name.#@osu.edu and follow the prompts. You can also download the LinkedIn Learning app for iOS and Android for phones and tablets.

Effective lay presentations

Downloads

Guided notes as a Word document

Effective lay presentation PowerPoint slides

Learning objectives for this session

  1. Apply the backwards design process to presentations
  2. Access technology resources at Ohio State

Guided notes

This document is an example of a handout or guided notes that you could provide to learners.  Rather than putting all the wordy details on the slide, shift the focus of the slide to visuals that support what you have to say.  You are the expert.

Backwards design

In short, backwards design means starting with the end in mind.  What will your learners know, be able to do, or change their minds about by the end of your presentation?

Accessing PowerPoint at OSU

You have access to the full suite of Microsoft products, and can access them through any browser or download them to your personal device.

Adobe Stock for Images

All Adobe Creative Cloud products are available to faculty, staff, and students at Ohio State.  Among their offerings, Adobe Stock is a terrific resource for finding images already licensed for use by the university.  The filter options to the left of the search results make it easy to find precisely the type of image you need.

Color guidelines

While you’re welcome to use the university’s template of colors, you can also branch out.  Use the Adobe Color Picker to choose your own color palette.  Just make sure to verify the color contrast between the foreground color and background color.

Did you know?

Ohio State faculty, staff and students have free access to LinkedIn Learning. Go to LinkedIn Learning Login and enter your Ohio State email address using the format, name.#@osu.edu and follow the prompts. You can also download the LinkedIn Learning app for iOS and Android for phones and tablets.

Support resources

Peer tech tutors are fellow students who have worked with Ohio State staff to become pros at using learning tools from around the university. They know tips and tricks and can even help you decide which tech tool is best for completing projects. Schedule an appointment with us today for resources, recommendations, or demonstrations of tech tools from a peer.

You can also review all of the posts on this site that are categorized as student support.

Meet me in the IHSC

Welcome to Autumn 2023 and our new Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Center!  The technology in these classrooms is a little different from what we’re used to, so here are some quick tips.

(614) 366-8572 is the number for on-site technology support.

Change the display mode

The only way to adjust the displays on these computers is to press Windows + P on the keyboard.

Access OneDrive

  1. Open the browser, either Edge or Chrome, and navigate to office.com
    1. If you are under the College of Medicine, login with your medcenterID@osumc.edu
    2. If you are a university user, login with your lastname.#
  2. Click on the nine dots in the upper left corner, then select OneDrive
  3. On the left side navigation, select My Files to see everything organized the way you keep it.

Access your course in Carmen

  1. Navigate to osu.instructure.com
  2. Login with your lastname.# credentials
  3. Select the course

Access File Explorer

If the File Explorer icon (that yellow folder you’d click on to get to your files) does not appear in the taskbar along the bottom of the screen, do the following:

  1. Click on Start (the Windows symbol in the bottom left corner of the screen)
  2. Press Ctrl and Spacebar simultaneously to bring up the search bar
  3. Type File Explorer
  4. Select File Explorer from the results

Start a Zoom

  1. Navigate to osu.zoom.us

Open Teams

  1. Navigate to teams.microsoft.com

Strategic Initiative Feedback 2023

For the August 2023 school retreat in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

Purpose and goals

  • Share your ideas, input, and solutions for several important strategic initiatives.
  • Identify key actions that can lead us toward a more positive work culture, enhance our infrastructure, and elevate our operational efficiency

Discussion process and ground rules

There are two general categories. Each table will answer all three forms in round one and select 2 forms in round two, either research focus or teaching and learning focus.

Discussion Process

  • Use the links below to access the forms and questions
  • Discuss question topics as a table
  • Record the table group’s answers and responses to the questions
  • Enter the table group’s answers into the Form.
  • Each table will answer

Ground Rules

  • Be respectful of others’ ideas
  • Offer space for others to speak
  • Commit to both listening and contributing to developing the conversation

Round one forms

Round two forms

Research focus

Teaching and learning focus

Getting started with digital accessibility

Computer with a script Ohio desktop background sitting on a white desk. A small green plant is next to the keyboard.

Don’t know what you don’t know about digital accessibility? These two BuckeyeLearn trainings are a good place to start when learning about making digital content usable and useful to all audiences. And remember to also complete the required course on Digital Accessibility Policy.

Document Accessibility: Microsoft Word

Creating accessible Word documents is fairly straightforward when you begin with accessibility in mind.  This BuckeyeLearn course covers how and why to use styles for text formatting, how to create meaningful links, adding alternative text, why reading order matters, and lots more.  Many of the best practices for accessibility also make document creation and editing faster and easier – spoiler – you will never again make a table of contents manually!

  1. Login to BuckeyeLearn using your lastname.#
  2. Search for the training Document Accessibility: Microsoft Word
  3. Launch the class to begin
  4. This course should take 75 minutes to complete

You can check the accessibility of your document at any time in the creation process using Microsoft’s accessibility checker.


Document Accessibility: Microsoft PowerPoint

For instructors and many other roles, PowerPoint is a big part of our work.  Using PowerPoint templates and university provided resources can dramatically cut down on the time spent creating accessible slides. Just as with Word however, it’s easiest to create accessible content from scratch, rather than retrofitting old slides.

As of this writing, the BuckeyeLearn MS Word training is a required prerequisite to completing PowerPoint training.

  1. Login to BuckeyeLearn using your lastname.#
  2. Search for the training Document Accessibility: Microsoft PowerPoint
  3. Launch the class to begin
  4. This course should take 30 minutes to complete

For more, here is a roundup of all posts that address accessibility on this site.

Polling with Microsoft Forms

Getting a sense of where your learners are in their understanding, or lack thereof, is always helpful.  During a synchronous session you can get real time feedback from learners using polling.  To make this easier on you, I’d suggest creating a poll you can re-use and then updating the questions and possible answers on your slides.  Watch the following video for an example.

Too long; didn’t watch

Transcript

As of this recording, Microsoft Forms is one of the easiest to use tools we have at Ohio State for creating surveys and polls. It does limit you to relatively simple surveys or simple polls, but for our purposes on on this content, that’s exactly what we’re going for. So to get started with Microsoft Forms, you’re going to go to forms.office.com in any browser and click on the profile icon to to sign in. You’re going to use your university credentials or your medical center credentials, depending on where you live at Ohio State.

Once you are logged in, you’re going to select New Form. There is an option to create quizzes, but that’s another video and another topic entirely. You’re going to create new form. And from here, what I would suggest is that you create what I’m calling an endlessly reusable poll. So you would add a title to your form or some description to your form, and then you can start adding questions. You can see all of the question types available to you here. But for our purposes, let’s stick with a multiple choice question with just one single possible answer and you’ll see how we’re going to sort of hack that into a poll that you can use over and over and over again.

Once you’ve created your questions, you’re going to go over to the top right, and select collect responses. And then you do want to be sure that you select anyone can respond. You don’t want folks to have to log in to anything to answer your poll. You want this to be quick and easy, so make sure anyone can respond to the form. That also means it’s anonymous. Once you’ve got that, you can either copy the URL and provide that to participants or you can copy the QR code or you can do both, right? So if you’re doing this as a synchronous zoom session, you could paste that URL in the chat and ask folks to answer the poll. You could put the QR code up on the screen and ask folks to use their devices to go to the poll. That way you can do both. But in any case, you’ve got to be able to share this poll out with folks.

And then on your slides, on your PowerPoint slides or whatever presentation software are you using, you would put that QR code and your question in this case, I have a nonsense, no stakes question because I want folks to be engaged and start answering me. And so this is something I might use towards the beginning of a presentation to get folks comfortable with the idea of using a poll and answering my questions. You can see here there’s literally nothing at stake. There’s no right or wrong answer except that, of course, the right answer is Buckeye Donuts. And folks can answer this if they run out of time, it’s not a big deal. So this is a good way to introduce polling. But what you’ll see is once you’ve done this, you can clear out your poll results and use the same poll a second time with a new question. So here’s what your participants will see when they scan that QR code. They can see. Now the poll doesn’t have anything terribly specific. It just says, see the slide for question and possible answers. So if I’ve scanned this with my phone and I’m still watching the presentation up on the screen, I can still see what the question is and I can answer accordingly on my device.

And again, here are those possible responses. So, you know, tell me what the best food near campuses and why it’s Buckeye Donuts. And so once you’ve done that, you as the owner of the pole, you can actually go back to your endlessly reusable pole and look at the responses. So what you see here, you have the questions tab, which is where you’re editing your poll. The responses tab is where you can see your responses in real time. And you can see that for this particular poll, eight participants said, no, it’s not none of the above. There’s a different place we should be going to eat. And so you could use this to get immediate feedback Forms will create these pie charts for you automatically based on a multiple choice, single answer question. And so you can get this immediate feedback from your audience about whether they’re understanding what you’re discussing, what questions they might have, you know, what their current level of comfort is with your topic, you name it, you can make that question. And then what’s great about this is this little three dots here I can’t show you in this screenshot, but this little three dots to the to the right of open and Excel, you can come in here and clear out all of the responses and use the poll another time because you just have to know whether it was ABC or D. And so you can keep using that poll over and over and over again across all the presentations you can think of. And that way you’re not having to create a new poll. Every time you want to ask a question, you just need to adjust the question and the possible answers on the slide.

Project options for multiple displays

Icons of the Windows Key and letter P key, with a plus sign in between to indicate that both keys must be pressed simultaneously to activate this keyboard shortcut on Windows.

When presenting from a Windows computer, you can quickly access the display options using the keyboard shortcut Windows + P.

Screen shot showing the projector options that appear after pressing Windows + P. The options are PC only, duplicate, extend, and second screen only.

PC screen only

Use this option as you’re preparing to present. This turns the display screen to black, so no worries about anyone watching you mistype your own username as you login to university websites.

Duplicate

You will see on the podium PC exactly what the audience sees on the second screen. This is great when you are demonstrating how to navigate a website or use a particular software.

Extend

In this mode PowerPoint will show you the presenter view.  The audience will only see the slides, but you’ll see the current slide, notes associated with that slide, and the upcoming slide.

Second screen only

I cannot think of a use for this, but this would turn the podium PC screen to black and only the second screen would display.  If you can think of a reason to do this, I’d love to hear it in the comments!

Presentation resources

Splash of rainbow colors of paint falling from above

WOW your audience with your next presentation

Here are the slides, resources, and references from my workshop on PowerPoint.

Learn practical and creative use of Microsoft 365 PowerPoint to create effective presentations that will grab your audience’s attention and meet accessibility standards.

Downloads

Branding and templates

  • brand.osu.edu for university templates, art, photography, fonts, and more
  • BrandSource for resources specific to the College of Medicine and Wexner Medical Center

Images

Recording

PowerPoint tips and tricks

Additional trainings

Presentation skills

Digital Accessibility

References

Colorsplash

Book Review: Inclusive Teaching Wrap-Up

Wrap-Up: Assessment

Looking back on my teaching career, I would implement changing my office hours to be more accessible. The likely place would be the library or the Student Union or both, in addition to my office.  The office can sometimes seem intimidating and the library and Student Union are more frequently visited. I definitely had some structure during my in-class activities, but I can think of group work where there were students who may have been left out or overshadowed by an outspoken peer. TPS works to keep all students engaged- having students think to themselves (and perhaps write things down), then share with their group, and finally, share with the class. In the past, I have not had the think-to-oneself portion and just have the pair and share. There are ways in which without that “think portion” in groups of more than 2 people, some students slip through the cracks. This is a clear example of “the more structure the more inclusive your classroom will be.”

Some of the things that I did implement was letting the students know I want them to succeed in the class. Actions included letting them know the format of the exam ahead of time and having practice questions or sample exam questions. There were also low-stakes assignments such as an “identity paper” at the start of class and quizzes along the way. Much of the course included presentations that matched the number of points of an exam so that there were equal stakes among assignments that tested their knowledge and presentations on topics that they chose and were interested in.

Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom was extremely useful in understanding what an inclusive classroom looked like and what inclusive teaching would be like. The carefully chosen subject headings, questions, lists, charts, and an Instructor Checklist at the end of every chapter made it extremely accessible. I walk away with not only an appreciation for access and belonging in the classroom, but tangible ways in which to create this.

I found It is easy to reflect upon Sathy and Hogan’s text and compare teaching practices to those they suggest. Even though they were in STEM fields, all points, theories, assertions, and suggestions are easily transferable to the Humanities and Social Sciences. A mantra that could be useful could be adopted and that is “structure, structure, structure.” In addition, being of the mindset that all should have access to performing well can create a culture in which equity can thrive. Along with the mantra of structure, you can take away what the authors encourage you to ask yourself. They say

“every pedagogical question should be countered with two questions: 1. Who might be left behind as a result of my practice? And 2. How can I invite them in?” (p. 11)

This book provides many examples where you can revisit your teaching style and criteria. I am certain everyone can find at least one thing they could change to be more inclusive. Having an inclusive mindset will help you reach your goals of equity and an opportunity for all students to succeed. Which inclusive methods can you implement in your teaching?

Book Review: Inclusive Teaching Chapter 7

Reflection and refinement

How should we reflect on our teaching and look for opportunities for growth?  In Chapter 7: Reflecting and Documenting Your Inclusive Practices, the authors note that midterm and end-of-course evaluations give great opportunities for growth. Sathy and Hogan say end-of-course questions like the following allow for feedback on the level of inclusiveness in your class:

  • In what ways has your instructor demonstrated they care about your learning?
  • Is there content from the assignments or class discussion that has made you feel included or excluded? Explain.
  • How did the diversity of your classmates contribute to your learning in the course?
  • How might the class climate be made more inclusive? (p. 205)

In addition to the data you receive from students about the class, they both suggest getting peer faculty to assess your class based on your criteria of an inclusive class. This has to be carefully structured in order to get valuable feedback on the items required for an inclusive class, according to YOU—not the evaluating professor. This way you can see if you are meeting your own standards for an equitable and inclusive environment in the classroom.