Physically but Not Socially Distant: Promoting Accessibility and Engagement Within a 12-Month Teaching Fellowship

• In Event: Reimagining and Reinventing Health Professions Education in COVID's Environment: Moving From Crisis to Opportunity

Abstract

Purpose: This presentation describes how we used the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in a 12-month teaching fellowship to address challenges and opportunities of meeting community needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Woodruff Health Educators Academy Teaching Fellowship (WHEA-TF) is a 12-month program for health sciences educators who want to advance their teaching skills and offer quality instruction to their learners. The program is open to educators from any Emory University affiliated health sciences schools, centers, programs, or practice sites. The fellowship includes monthly two-hour skills development workshops and monthly online intersession discussion groups. All sessions are organized around three domains: Designing and Planning Learning, Teaching and Facilitating Learning, and Assessment of Learning.

The 2020-21 program was scheduled to start March 2020, coinciding with the time USA started seeing increases in COVID-19 cases. Typically, orientation and workshop sessions are held in-person, however these sessions had to be transitioned to an online platform which resulted in concerns about promoting accessibility and engagement without face-to-face components.

Perspective: UDL is a framework; designed in the 1990s based on research into how humans learn; that can be used to improve and optimize teaching and learning. UDL guidelines have been created based on three key principles: provide multiple means of engagement, provide multiple means of representation, and provide multiple means of action and expression. Adopting these guidelines is believed to result in learners who are purposeful and motivated, resourceful and knowledgeable, and strategic and goal-directed.

Method: Since 2019 we have been using the Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) evaluation model to conduct a longitudinal, formative evaluation of the WHEA-TF program.

Evidence: Data collection occurs at multiple times throughout the program and involves a combination of self-assessments, session evaluations, a 360˚ evaluation, a collection of submitted documents which include curricula vitae (CVs) and a newsletter submission. Due to required changes in teaching-learning modalities, we included additional check-point surveys to explore 2020-21 participants’ perceptions of accessibility and engagement.

Results: Although switching from face-to-face to online synchronous sessions (Zoom) was initially challenging, the opportunity of having a fully online program promoted more accessibility for our fellows to engage with each other as they are typically spread out across different practice sites throughout the city. Another challenge was how to promote continued engagement and collaboration once online. In the spirit of UDL, we found that using (1) pre-assigned small groups [engagement], (2) Box technology (especially developing a shared document for describing capstone project ideas) [representation], and (3) adopting the Ideas, Connections, and Extensions (ICE) framework for structuring our 3 hours/month together [action & expression] have proven beneficial to promoting continued learning, engagement, and collaboration.

Scholarly significance: The application of UDL principles promotes successful learning, engagement, and accessibility. It is even more critical to incorporate these types of strategies as we pivot from our traditional learning spaces.

Authors

• Ulemu Luhanga, Emory University

• Taryn Taylor, Emory University