There is significant research that suggests race, class, and gender play a role in student success. Acknowledging the role these persistent social issues play is an important step in addressing inequity in college classrooms--even in online classes where the myth of a level-playing field abounds.

These are deep issues, and we don't want to even begin to suggest that we can address them adequately in this introductory course, but we do want to put them on your radar and begin a conversation.

Students do best when they feel they are mentored, legitimately represented in the course material, and heard. We urge you to carefully consider imagery in your course, the language you use, and the number of ways that students can communicate with you and with each other.

Intersectionality: race, class, gender, religion, age, language, sexuality, ethnicity, heritage, education and history

Raising Awareness

As we saw in the PPIC report, online students are not as successful as students in traditional classes--the achievement gap is even greater when disaggregated by ethnicity. To help you better understand your student population and the unconscious bias students might face, it is important for you to be aware of the racial diversity of your campus--we strongly suggest you look at your campus Student Success Scorecard. To view the stats from our campus, select the link, then select your course from the drop-down menu.

There is much work to be done to help us design and build online courses that support diversity. Here are three specific issues we feel are important for new online instructors. The first two issues deal with language. In online courses, much of content of the course is textual. Unlike verbal message, written text lacks vocal intonation--it is easy to misread or misinterpret written text, especially when the text is written very formally. Let take a look at the issues:

Deficit Language

As we grapple with the achievement gap, it is important to note there are a lot of well-intentioned ideas that seem to miss the mark. One contributing factor is a deeply held mindset that influences how we perceive the problem, and thus affects how to propose to fix the problem. This mindset is based on a deficit model--the belief that certain populations are somehow lacking a skill or knowledge set they need to be successful. As Ashley Griffin (2014) notes in "Questioning the Deficit," this mindset "creates negative narratives about students of color and low-income students and sends the message that students are the problem."

Deficit language may creep into your courses in many ways, especially when you are creating rubrics or sending feedback to students. We might set up a rubric, for instance, that groups student work into three categories--excellent, passing, and failing. In the descriptions of work, we might write, "the submission fails to..." or "the submission DOES NOT include..." When we think about our students, we may see them as cheating rather than struggling to understand citation, as slacking rather than confused about expectations.

Keeping an eye out for deficit language in our course and feedback can help us create an environment that is more supportive of learners.

Gendered Language

There's also been significant research that has found that our gender identity is impacted by the language we use, and our perceptions about the appropriate roles and actions of others is affected by related notions of gender. Unpacking our gender bias takes time and effort, but one place to start is ensuring that we are:

addressing students by the pronoun of their choice;
providing examples using a variety of pronouns, instead of defaulting to a "generic" masculine pronoun;
providing images that represent a range of ethnicities and genders.

Interested in reading more about gender bias in language? Here's a comprehensive article: Gender Bias and Sexism in Language.

Socio-Economic Awareness

Though it would be great if every US student was supported in the ways students are supported in Denmark (students get paid!), the reality is that many of our CCC students are also working and taking care of their families, and many rely on financial aid.

Many students report they have to choose between textbooks and food. Online courses, however, are making it more and more possible to use no-cost Open Educational Resources as viable alternatives to high-cost textbooks. We urge you to explore the wide variety of free internet resources. You can start with Cool4Ed, a collaboration between the CCCs, CSUs, and the UCs.

Cultivating Hope

Recent data collected from the CVC-OEI demonstrates a remarkable trend: Students who successfully complete an online course, are more likely to be successful in their next set of courses. A thoughtfully designed course coupled with supportive teaching practices may have a significant positive impact on your students.