Watching the presentation “accessibility and inclusion in digital learning” by Marie Leijon

I was super excited to get the notification that a recording of the presentation “Accessibility and inclusion in digital learning” by Marie Leijon had been uploaded to our Learning Management System! When Marie presented in the LU “Accessibility Tuesday” series last year, she provoked a lot of thoughts in me — many about the room, but some also about digital spaces. What do we want to signal by using (or not using) digital backgrounds in video calls?

So this time, the whole presentation was about digital learning spaces. Of course, most of our learning spaces are digital learning spaces these days, because we use digital tools all the time (the Powerpoint presentation on the projector, the Learning Management System where we share readings as pdfs, digital calendar invitations and reminders, etc). So how can we make them accessible and inclusive?

Marie’s definition of inclusion is as an approach to our work: all students have something to contribute, we meet everybody with respect, and we develop teaching in a way that it gives everybody the opportunity to develop their full potential. And this is, of course, a huge challenge! One way one might approach the challenge is to collaborate with students and staff “to create more accessible, meaningful and globally-relevant curricula at all levels of the institution“, as Hughes et al. (2019) describe for their “Student Curriculum Consultant Programme” in the UK. They describe several observed achievement gaps — based on which neighbourhoods students come from, their age, and their ethnicity — and instead of approaching them as student deficits, they set out to “adopt[…] curricula that better reflect, embrace and celebrate the backgrounds of all students in their classrooms” by bringing in the student consultants to review courses. I love the idea of inviting not only critical friends, but a panel of students/participants to review my teaching in that way! Maybe that is something we can try here at LU? Marie suggests to ask ourselves whether we are inviting people to shape the environment (even digital) with us, and clearly I can do better there!

But back to teaching online. It has of course a lot of advantages, mostly that it makes it easier to include learning in “the puzzle of life”. For example, this presentation being recorded and uploaded means that I can re-watch it now, while I missed the meeting when it happened due to other commitments. Online meetings also have the advantage that everybody can adjust the volume, the size the presentation or the presenter, for many (me!) it might be easier to focus in own space when they don’t have to be aware of lots of other people in the open space office around them… But of course, there is a certain loss of personal contact that we used to be used to before the pandemic, which many teachers describe as problematic because it sucks to be standing in front of a mostly empty room, which we then interpret as people not being interested in what we have to say. From Samuelsson et al. (2025)’s study, we know that students are super strategic about their learning, and that they measure learning in time spent, so attending online or watching a recording is just a lot more efficient in that sense, especially for students who don’t care about missing social interactions in in-person settings, or even prefer not having to do the small-talk (me!!). And also those students do just as well as those that attend in person. But anyway, during the pandemic and lockdown in Germany, we created digital meeting spaces to make up for the missing social connections (for example, I taught a lot of 1-hour evening courses and had a monthly social media meeting, where people obviously also came to get some new input and inspiration, but mostly, I suspect, for the community). Now that we are back in “business as usual” (except with more digital stuff on the side), most of those offers are gone. And of course, people are also a lot more busy when they can go back to their sports or orchestras or what have you, so maybe there is no need for that kind of offer any more. Or maybe there is, but it isn’t as obvious now because technically everybody has the opportunity to find in-person community now, so we forget about those that would prefer to connect in other ways?

Then there is always the option to offer courses in hybrid mode — partly online, partly in-person. Marie asks us to consider if there is any additional pedagogical benefit other that it makes things more flexible? Sometimes meeting in person might be good for relationship building and a sense of belonging, even in mostly digital courses. But then there might be people who cannot or do not want to attend the in-person parts, and will they feel even more disconnected when everybody else has created this in-person connection and carries that back into the virtual space?

It is also important to consider the digital divide. Access is not distributed equally for many reasons (Marie describes that their library was open all the time to provide internet access and computers. If students have to do everything on their phones, it’s difficult to impossible for them to write, draw on shared whitebaords, engage, etc in the way that we would typically encourage teachers to teach online in order to actively include students). One example of a (very temporary and completely irrelevant in the big scheme of things) missing access that is still fresh on my mind is that I had counted on having a power outlet by my seat on a recent trainride, which then I did not, so instead of being able to work on my laptop as planned, I “had to” listen to podcasts on my phone instead. Which was lovely, but good thing that I had not planned to do anything urgent that day! (And of course I could also have made sure that my laptop was fully charged before leaving that morning, hindsight is 20/20)

Then there is also a second digital divide: Access and engagement in a digital space can be difficult also for other reasons, like for example disability.

We can think about these gaps as the

• access gap (“have and have not” of hardware / wifi / power / quiet spaces to use the technology in / …)
• use gap (Skills and knowledge of digital technologies — can you actually easily do what you need to do, or is there a threshold introduced by the technology?)
• outcome gap (the consequences, outcomes and benefits of tech usage; how well students succeed in using digital resources in their studies. Did we actually train them to do the videos or podcasts that we expect as alternative assessment formats?)

In a nutshell, it is a big challenge to switch from writing on a blackboard (main classical teaching tip: don’t talk with your back to the classroom) to teaching online. But it’s not a binary switch, it is a continuum. Marie shared a graph that mapped different ways to use a digital learning space on the axes “degree of mix between environments” vs “degree of student interaction” (which reminded me if our co-creation ladder — you can go from a lecture that students attend (mostly) passively by adding for example quizzes, to letting people discuss in breakout rooms, to full-on co-creation, but you don’t have to do it in one step). Which is, maybe, the main message (as always): look for opportunities to make the space more accessible and inclusive, and then take baby steps in the right direction!

Hughes, A. L., Michener, C., Mohamed, K., & McDuff, N. (2019). Curriculum co-creation as a transformative strategy to address differential student outcomes: the example of Kingston University’s Student Curriculum Consultant Programme. In Compass (Vol. 12, No. 1). University of Greenwich, Educational Development Unit.

Featured image: My favourite view of Hamburg (if I had to pick one) right before reaching the central train station. I loved it even when it was part of my daily commute, but even more so now when it is a special treat (and I totally don’t care that people are always a bit surprised that I suddenly get up, walk to the other side of the train, get my phone ready in anticipation of the view)