Reflect on your experiences with your students. Think of a situation in which online education may have been a preferable option for one of your special needs students or a student with an extenuating circumstance. If you do not have an example of a situation you have had as an educator, you may want to extend your thinking to your own experiences as a student, your own child’s experience, or choose a specific disability or special needs population you learned about earlier in this course.
Although I have not had a special needs student in an online classroom, I did have many while being an art educator in an on-site school. This was my initial experience with a special needs population. This aided me in learning the legalities while becoming aware of and implementing individualized instruction.
Describe student’s disability, special need and/or the extenuating circumstance, without including personally identifiable information.
At the beginning of the semester of an online graphic design course, a fellow student posted his concern about succeeding due to having Dyslexia. This was part of his introduction and I admired his honesty. His primary worry was being able to fulfill course requirements in making presentations while explaining his work, plus book and article reports.
Identify at least three specific aspects of the online environment you feel would be beneficial for this student’s situation or disability.
The instructor acknowledged his concerns and immediately provided him online resources, which was a great way to set the tone for the semester while also providing a confidence boost. What I noticed following that was during our synchronous sessions, the instructor made a point to highlight key points, simplifying large amounts of text. Additionally many readings were provided to the entire class as recordings and alternative forms for book reports was given as an option.
Explain why each aspect of the online environment you identified above would be advantageous to your student, using specific examples.
Providing digital versions of class content, simplifying presentation content (decreasing paragraphs to be “chunks” of information) and providing visuals/graphic are among the advantages of the online environment. These were effective examples of teacher implemented accommodations. Another specific memorable effort of the teacher was providing the entire class articles about artists, designers and other creatives in history that had Dyslexia or other similar learning disabilities. This was empowering. Obviously the dynamic in this class was different because the student openly discussed his situation, while the classes I currently teach likely won’t be like that and accommodations may be one-on-one rather than options provided to the entire class.
What challenges do you suspect the student may encounter in the online environment?
Aside from difficulty with reading and retaining information additional challenges likely included attention span and self-confidence related to course-specific requirements.