Centering Equity and Inclusion in Online Course Design and Instruction: A Model for Post-Pandemic Faculty Development

This chapter focuses on how two organizational networks, Aspire, a NSF INCLUDES Alliance, and CIRTL, a professional development network of higher educational institutions, addressed the large, real-time need of current and future faculty for equity, inclusion, and accessibility-centered professional development programming for teaching and learning online. The authors provide evidence of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice unrest in the United States on participating graduate students, postdocs, instructional staff, and faculty. The chapter discusses how extra-institutional networks of organizations, such as Aspire and CIRTL, were able to leverage their broad communities and years of experience with online pedagogy to provide immediate training opportunities, which contrasted with the often “equity agnostic” responses of institutions of higher learning. The authors also reference multiple, evidence-based practices for more inclusive and equitable online teaching that are derived from Aspire and CIRTL online programming.