Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

11 – Accessibility and Universal Design
linear path through course-specific material. If you do
not have time or know how to make these yourself, then
you can search a variety of online clearinghouses and
repositories for appropriate learning resources. The
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and
Online Teaching, or MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org),
is a free website containing thousands of learning resources
in the fields of Art, Business, Education, Humanities,
Math and Statistics, Science and Technology,
and Social Sciences. MERLOT is primarily for higher
education instructors, but some materials would be appropriate
for secondary school students as well.
Next, you can ask the students to create the resource.
In the online environment, this can be as simple as requiring
all students to build a glossary of terms for a
chapter or topic. You can ask them to send their terms
by email, to post them to a threaded discussion, or to
post them using a glossary tool that comes with a
Learning Management System like Moodle. Other types
of student-created resources include databases or
spreadsheets containing results of experiments, student
or class websites, and student videos.
Finally, more advanced resources act as a framework
for student activity, described below. For example, a
WebQuest (see http://www.webquest.org) is a web-based
research activity that you can find or create for student
group work. While most WebQuests are for K–12 students,
it is not difficult to create one appropriate for
college or university students. The WebQuest is highly
interactive and collaborative, making it an ideal online
resource for tactile/kinesthetic learners.
Keep in mind that not every resource for students
must be stored in the online environment. Some of the
most interesting and meaningful lessons require students
to interact with the world and then to come back
and reflect or report on what they learned. For all types
of learners, this increases the number of possible resources
to global proportions … literally! Structured
activities might involve students performing lab experiments
and then completing online lab notebooks; collecting
scientific data and then entering it into a
communal online database; observing master teachers at
a school and then writing a reflective weblog entry; or
interviewing an expert and then posting the text, audio,
or video file.
Combining strategies means that you can accommodate
greater numbers of learning preferences with one
resource or activity. For instance, if you use an Excel
spreadsheet to demonstrate how increasing and decreasing
budgets affected the North and the South in the
US Civil War, you can require the students to fill in the
annual budget numbers themselves and then to create a
graph. This strategy accommodates visual-verbal (textbased)
learners, visual-nonverbal (graphic-based) learners
and tactile/kinesthetic learners.
Perception
Sensory learners prefer fact-based activities and resources.
These resources are easier to provide, as most
disciplines from the humanities to the sciences have
some facts or details related to the topics within. The easiest
resources to provide might be references to the textbook,
or links to related websites. More in-depth resources
could include optional readings, such as advanced
articles that apply the concepts discussed in class.
Intuitive learners like reflective activities and resources
that require imagination. If you have a topic that
requires students to memorize facts to lay a foundation
for later application, provide additional, optional resources
that introduce the theories related to the facts.
You can also encourage students to seek their own connections
between theory and facts using an optional
activity, such as a discussion forum devoted to a discovery
learning approach.
Organization
Inductive learners prefer beginning with meaningful
examples before extrapolating the main concepts or
theories. In the online environment, you can accommodate
inductive learners in both passive and active ways.
You can provide a number of examples in a recorded
lecturette before describing the concept that they exemplify.
In a more active learning activity, you can provide
a number of examples and require the students to create
a generalization from them by defining patterns. The
Biology Success! Project (see the Final Resources section
for details) encourages instructors to consider that while
inductive activities have been proven to help students
with learning disabilities, “it is essential that the instructor
create clear guidelines for behavior, provide
explicit directions from the outset of the activity, and be
prepared to offer extra guidance as necessary.”
Deductive learners prefer starting with more structure,
deriving consequences and applications from the
concepts and theories. These learners benefit from demonstrations
and opportunities to practise what they have
learned. Online “lab” experiences can further strengthen
or confirm the learning by deductive learners.
To accommodate both inductive and deductive
learners, you can provide case studies, results from previous
experiments, and other inductive examples alongside
descriptions of the general concepts and theories for
the deductive learners. You can assign both in whichever
order the students prefer, or alternate the order for
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