Post #3

Prompt: How can you adjust your planned learning activities to meet the needs of your learners if an unexpected event occurs? (for example, a pandemic arises and many of your employees must now work from home – how will you ensure that they can still do their jobs? What training will they need, and how will you deliver it, knowing they must remain at home?) This is a common discussion thread right now as many schools and universities have made the switch to teaching online.

I think that being able to design for inclusion is a key principle in entering any workforce in today’s society, especially in teaching. Covid-19 has been a good example of how society must remain flexible and supportive to provide people with equity. Universal design learning embraces this by removing the barrier, so we can identify what we need to do to support students instead of just labeling their struggles and adjusting to them. I think especially with my Pod’s topic being Study habits and strategies for academic tests, it is really important that the way we teach this remains flexible and highly adaptive since studying styles vary for different students. It is very important that students are able to learn in an environment that they are comfortable in as well as make sure that all learners can pursue a good quality of education with no barriers. I would make sure that teaching this would be done in person with a live stream zoom session at the same time so that students would still be able to ask questions and join in on class discussions. I would also ensure that the recordings are available after class with close captioning for those unable to attend, or for students to go back and use for a deeper understanding of the tasks. I would also adjust my planned learning activities by incorporating multiple means of representation, multiple means of action or expression as well as multiple means of engagement so that all students will have flexibility in their learning styles that will enhance their learning of the topic being taught. Additionally, by having a flexible teaching style no student is having their learning decreased or damaged. By having flexibility in the different types of teaching styles students can use these resources outside of the intended flexibility like catching up or attending therefore by having flexibility in teaching styles all students will end up better off than if there were no adjustments. Ultimately there is no way to predict unexpected events and I think that when these events arise the best way to approach the adjustments is to be as flexible and open-minded as possible because you never know what each individual is going through or how these changes have affected them.