The Floe Inclusive Learning Design Handbook is a great open educational resource that helps teachers, content creators, Web developers, and others creating and improving educational resources. After reading the whole handbook, there are three important concepts I want to mention in this week’s reflection.

First, as the book mentioned, “the health and prosperity of a society are in large part dependent on equal access to educational opportunities.” (Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, n.d.) In many places, we still cannot achieve an equitable distribution of educational resources. I went to a primary school for an internship when I was at Normal University. I found that students’ educational resources are limited due to their different family backgrounds and living environments. However, every student should have the right to use educational resources. OER gives them the opportunity. OER can support inclusive education.

Second, learners always get the best learning result when their learning experience is personalized to their learning needs. However, when students have learning disabilities or feel neglected for their personal learning needs, learning breakdowns, dropouts, and lack of commitment to education may occur. (Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, n.d.) So, no matter we have the class for students or create teaching materials, we should consider what learners’ needs are and whether they can have a positive effect on their learning.

Third, in the three dimensions of inclusive design, the handbook talks about use inclusive, open & transparent processes and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives. (Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, n.d.) Open and transparent processes allow creators to manage public perception. Cooperation can help teachers or creators get more ideas, more comprehensive understanding of the needs of different learners.

Cooperation

In addition to these three important concepts, there are two ideas I am having difficulty understanding. First, “Designers are taught to reduce and ignore complexity and diversity by creating the representative persona of the typical or average user.” (Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, n.d.) I think it is difficult to achieve in reality, only a few designers can do it. Especially for educational resources, the designers may also need to have knowledge of education. Second, to achieve an accessible or inclusively designed OER system, information about each learner’s access needs and the learner needs to be addressed by each resource are needed. But with a large number of learners with different learning goals and levels, how could the OER know which is the valuable information.

The Floe Inclusive Learning Design Handbook provides a great model to create and improve educational resources. But I think some concepts are ideal methods that are difficult to implement or succeed in reality. So I want to know is there any real cases of implementation following this template.

 

Reference

Cooperation image. Retrieved from http://news.blrstage.com/app/uploads/sites/3/2013/07/Cooperation.jpg

Creating Inclusive Learning Environment. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-4nOlxJOQM

Inclusive Learning Design Handbook from OCAD University. Retrieved from  https://via.hypothes.is/https://handbook.floeproject.org/