Online students deserve to have a rich and meaningful higher education experience, and how their online courses are facilitated plays a key role in achieving that goal. When instructors implement evidence-based design approaches that account for student differences and academic needs, those choices help to support all students at each stage of the learning process in an online course. An instructor’s understanding of the deep value of relationships in a virtual classroom and ability to develop and sustain engagement allow students to feel seen and develop a sense of belonging to an academic community that they may never see in person, thereby promoting persistence and success. Leaning into the promise of online education to provide access to a broad group of students—including first-time students, transfer students, the 36.8 million adults in the United States as of July 2022 who have “some college, no credential” and may want to reenroll, and graduate students—creates opportunities for engaged dialogue among individuals who bring a wide variety of life and work experiences to the classroom (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center 2024). In addition, as generative artificial intelligence (GAI) becomes increasingly influential in our age, inclusive online teaching methods emphasize human interaction and connection as integral supports for productive learning. Put most simply, effective online teaching is and must be inclusive because welcoming, valuing, and engaging every learner sets the stage for their success.

The heart of this book is a tool kit of practical online teaching strategies that promote student success across the diverse group enrollees in online courses and programs in US higher education. The authors of this book care deeply about making crucial corrections where misconceptions still exist about online education and online students: that intellectual engagement and learning can be rich and full in an online classroom; that online education can be the optimal modality for many students, not just an alternative to in-person coursework; and that online students have different backgrounds and needs. We also care deeply about providing tools and support for online instructors to be effective in their teaching. Refining online teaching practices with inclusion in mind can be deeply satisfying. Inclusive teaching can promote stronger engagement between instructors and students, foster better participation and dialogue to learn in community, and reduce rates of nonpassing grades and withdrawals. It may even help to address the troubling retention concerns in higher education programs online; many adult learners pause, withdraw, or ultimately do not finish their program of study—at higher rates than more traditional-aged students—and there are ways that they can be supported more effectively along their educational journey (Bohl et al. 2017; Markle 2015). Our goal here is to equip online instructors with the strategies they need to be more effective in their teaching and thereby to positively affect the growing number of students who learn online. Opportunities for reflection are included throughout the book to help readers identify gaps in awareness, offering possible paths forward that will advance inclusion.

Central to this book and its recommended strategies is an ethos of care and compassion. Online students may face a variety of challenges inside and outside of their academic pathway, many of which will be brought to light through examples and student scenarios. Thinking about and anticipating the breadth of barriers an online student may encounter can help surface ideas about how to mitigate these barriers within one’s sphere of influence (as an instructor, as an administrator, as an academic advisor, etc.). Engaging in this thought process and work requires curiosity, reflection, and respect for the fact that learning and meeting academic requirements do not come easy for many students. We also acknowledge that putting empathy at the forefront of work with students may not come easily for all instructors and staff in higher education. Acknowledging that we may not have been permitted to be vulnerable with faculty during our studies or that academic culture still pushes back against us showing up as full, complex human beings in professional life can help reorient our relationships with students to be more honest and open. Treating students with care and compassion is not only possible but also constitutes an ethical approach to educating undergraduate and graduate students; students are a “whole person . . . a whole being whose beingness and spirit is coming into the [online] classroom” (Woodley and Rice 2023). The process of implementing a compassionate lens in teaching is often a process of rethinking, and that involves real effort in service of student success (Denial 2024). We acknowledge that very real labor and also the potential that it offers: it opens up new opportunities to focus on real students, their specific needs, and specific teaching actions that will offer the most benefit.

Throughout the book, we focus on “online learning,” and by that we mean asynchronous online delivery of regular, for-credit courses in higher education. There are particular challenges and considerations that come with never meeting your students during an online course, either in person or by web conference, and we will unpack those in turn and offer strategies for robust and meaningful relationship-building and interaction. Instructors who teach other forms of “online” courses—those that meet remotely via web conference or are hybrid courses with some in-person sessions, for example—will still find valuable frameworks and suggestions to implement for asynchronous portions of their course.

This book primarily focuses on students enrolled in online coursework in US higher education, what educational research often calls “adult learners.” Such students tend to be nontraditional, usually defined as over age 25 and under 65; enrolled part-time; working part-time if not full-time; and often engaged in parenting or other family responsibilities (MacDonald 2018; Carlton et al. 2024; Shatila 2024). Adult students who attend school later than “traditional learners” (aged 18-25) exhibit a unique set of motivations, circumstances, and needs common to their stage of life and career, yet they are diverse in their backgrounds and experiences, career paths, and socioeconomic profiles. The online enrollment of first-generation, multilingual, and low-income student populations is increasing as well (Chandler et al. 2017; Lim 2020; Kim et al. 2024). Importantly, many of these students are choosing online education because it is ideal for their circumstances (Berg et al. 2024). Yet some “traditional” learners take online courses for other reasons, including scheduling conflicts with on-campus offerings, needing flexibility around work or internships, experiencing a chronic medical condition, or needing to travel away from campus while taking classes. Serving students who are likely to be older but who ultimately represent a spectrum of identities, backgrounds, and ages is a challenge for instructors and calls for a distinct set of considerations and instructional responses (Tereshko et al. 2024). In our work of training and supporting online instructors, we saw that they needed a cohesive set of frameworks and recommendations, and that was precisely our call to create a faculty development workshop. Our ongoing reflection and dialogue throughout the facilitation of the workshop led us to write this book in support of others in constructing more equitable online learning experiences for their students.

A Workshop, Then a Book

The notion of Inclusive Excellence (IE) was central to our thinking about what tools instructors need to be more effective educators in their online classrooms. Rooted in theories of multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy,^[1] the framework was previously applied to national as well as institution-specific programs funded through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. These programs shared a focus on closing achievement gaps in science fields, but the principles of conducting evidence-based classroom research to identify and mitigate those gaps, and also of taking equity-minded approaches to teaching, have wide applicability to other fields. Oregon State University’s work with Inclusive Excellence programs in the late 2010s emphasized improving on-campus learning, with somewhat less attention to online learning. As our institution developed more science and engineering courses and programs for online delivery, Ecampus staff—course development and training professionals who support distance education—started thinking about how IE efforts might translate to online teaching and learning across disciplines.

At the same time, online instructors were approaching Ecampus staff with a request for more support in teaching courses with complex and sensitive topics. Some had not designed the courses that they were teaching online but instead were teaching a course that a colleague had developed. We fielded requests for help revising discussion assignments to be less controversial and less challenging for students, and instructors expressed concerns about how to handle situations where a problematic discussion post made the rest of the class discussion go in unanticipated and concerning directions. We wanted to redirect the focus of that request with practical, effective tools that would allow them to continue facilitating open, inclusive, and intellectually rigorous conversations with their online students.

Accordingly, we took a deep dive into the research, looking for modality-specific resources that would be accessible and easily implementable for any teaching faculty member. Many bodies of research in online teaching and learning contribute to student-centered design and teaching methods, but we found no single book, resource, or workshop that could introduce teaching faculty to this constellation of theories and to evidence-based, practical applications for inclusive online teaching. Looking at literature on inclusive teaching in higher education specifically, we saw much more research and application devoted to in-person teaching than to asynchronous online teaching, and much of it was not directly applicable to online classrooms. For example, the oft-repeated advice to “Learn your students’ names and how to pronounce them” was important for the on-campus classroom, but in an online course, getting to know students, helping to foster community, and creating space for student–instructor connection requires intentional planning and a different set of strategies. We also wanted to demonstrate how the recommendations we were making could suit the increasingly diverse online student audience that our classes were drawing.

In the spirit of IE work, we set out to develop our own set of resources that would be deeply rooted in evidence-based approaches and also practical enough that instructors could go apply what they learned right away in their online classrooms. First, we developed an intensive workshop for instructors to explore the complexity of instructor self-introductions in an online classroom setting, barriers that online students face, and key facilitation methods for supporting the diverse needs of online students. This workshop, called Inclusive Teaching Online (ITO), has been available through Ecampus since early 2020 and has run alongside a research project in which the workshop facilitators (Katherine McAlvage and Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez) have endeavored to better design and support faculty development and help instructors apply what they learned after completing the workshop. (Chapter 7 includes a detailed discussion of the workshop and its outcomes.)

This text is the second major phase of our work and represents an expansion of the content covered in the workshop. While we have built upon key elements like student scenarios and examples, reflection questions, and practical suggestions, the book delves more deeply into inclusive learning design frameworks and how those influence inclusive facilitation choices, with expanded discussions of student profiles and applied examples. Additionally, it shares outcomes from our research—namely, what strategies have most resonated with instructors and how the workshop helped them to improve their online teaching practices.

Finally, part of the impetus to share this book as an open text is to make it available to anyone who teaches online. Throughout the text, we have made an effort to connect the approaches that we recommend in this text to frameworks, scholarship, and language that is less politically contested in the current sociopolitical environment in the US and yet also reflects the goals of effective teaching and supporting all students, such as “student success” and “Universal Design for Learning.” The writing team is privileged to be supported by our respective institutions in advancing this work openly, and we want to acknowledge and support our colleagues who are not.

Our Assumptions

We make four key assumptions in this text that are central to our thinking and action about inclusive online teaching and that we recommend to our readers.

First, the current US educational ecosystem is neither equal nor meritocratic; it rewards students for more than their progress in learning (Rose 2015; Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017; Markovitz 2020; Sandel 2020). Students who have greater access to resources and more fluency with educational systems tend to accomplish more than those who do not. The Opportunity Atlas provides a way to see these distinctions relative to specific US geographic location, which can confer a distinct advantage for many aspects of social mobility and success. Consequently, zip code and family income are still strong predictors of college admission (Chakrabarti et al. 2020). That grades, standardized test scores, reference letters, and application packages cannot provide an accurate picture of a prospective college student’s capacity to learn or be successful in college comes down to the fact that “measures of merit are hard to disentangle from economic advantage” (Sandel 2020, 9). In some ways, higher education further perpetuates these inequalities among students.

Second, a misunderstanding persists about the relationship between inclusion and instructional rigor. Inclusion and rigor are not at odds; we should have high expectations of our students paired with flexible thinking about how students might reach achievement, how achievement is demonstrated, and what reasonable supports we could provide them along the way. Earning an undergraduate or graduate degree online should be challenging intellectually, not a challenge to manage alongside a full-time job and raising a family, or because the institution lacks resources for nontraditional distance students. Adult students may experience the online learning environment differently than traditional-aged college students, or they may have different cognitive load capacities because of other demands on their time, or they may not have strong digital skills (Riggs and Ouellett 2023), but those differences are not reflective of their capacity to learn and to succeed. Our response to these pervasive inequities is to promote equity-minded approaches in all areas of online teaching: in course design choices, in course policy development, and in course facilitation work. (If the distinction between equality and equity is unfamiliar to you, we highly recommend Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal? for an excellent introduction to these opposing frames of thinking about power and resource distribution in our culture.) These approaches usually emphasize high standards for students paired with support (Artze-Vega et al. 2023).

Third, we posit that it is the responsibility of higher education instructors, advisors, and administrators to wrestle with and challenge these inequities within their spheres of influence. In practice, this means taking the onus of barrier management off of students and proactively improving online education by understanding and appreciating students’ differences, anticipating their needs, and actively engaging with them to support their learning. The spirit of this commitment is centered in critical pedagogy, described by Stommel et al. (2020) as “an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (thus implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures)” (2) and rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks. We temper the ideological nature of the critical pedagogy (and critical digital pedagogy) tradition with pragmatism, aiming to offer to all instructors practical and easily implementable inroads to the work of inclusive teaching while emphasizing student agency and empowerment. To support all students, one must engage in three essential practices—reflection, dialogue, and action—to make truly transformational changes in ways that are achievable within one’s own roles and contexts (Freire 1970). Reflection can help us to think deeply about our identities, strengths, biases, and social memberships to be critical of the systems and structures that present barriers to some and opportunities to others; dialogue allows us to be vulnerable and challenged in our belief systems, share perspectives, and be open to learning from others; and action enables us to intervene and devise strategies to remove barriers and empower students for success. The interconnection of these three practices can lead to more empathetic online teaching strategies where all students have the support and resources they need.

Fourth, the broader work of discussing and implementing inclusive teaching practices runs the risk of putting a kinder, gentler face on colonization and systemic problems in our nation. (Our guest authors will address this concern more deeply in chapter 6.) Inclusive Excellence helps explain the origins of our work, but the term itself has been rightly scrutinized to expose where language fails. IE has been critiqued for its relationship to privilege and hierarchy because “it implies that there is a group who (i) has the power to control access to excellence by deciding who is included, (ii) has ownership of what defines excellence, and (iii) requires that others must be invited to be part of this group in order to achieve excellence” (McNair et al. 2020, 5). Throughout this book, we are careful to not reproduce these hierarchies in our language and in how we represent others’ ideas, while acknowledging that limits of language, understanding, and even scholarship prevent us from fully capturing what it means to truly welcome and support each student that we teach. We also want to be transparent that implementing the strategies that we offer in this book will not fix broken systems in our nation. Our primary goal here is to help online instructors identify and adopt course design and teaching practices that can begin to mitigate the harms of systemic oppression within their own spheres of influence. The value of these strategies is that they can be immediately implemented, even by busy and overworked instructors, and that all online students, but especially those most marginalized in higher education, will benefit from those changes.

How to Use This Book

While the text is primarily aimed at online instructors in US higher education, other educators may find it of interest. Below we provide a map for specific audiences.

Instructional Faculty

We recommend that instructional faculty—of any rank or type, including teaching assistants—proceed through the book in sequential order. Chapter 1 discusses a curated set of inclusive course design frameworks that provide a foundation for effective design choices. A base knowledge of these frameworks is helpful for those who design or are able to amend their courses, as well as those who teach predesigned courses and need to analyze how the course was designed in order to facilitate it well. Chapter 2 addresses barriers that online students face so that they can be considered as instructors plan and revise their approaches. Chapters 3 through 5 provide the “tool kit” for inclusive online teaching. Instructors who teach social justice themes will find recommendations specific to online facilitation of that content in chapter 6. Lastly, instructors who are interested in learning about what colleagues at Oregon State University (OSU) have implemented to improve their online teaching after taking the ITO workshop will find instructor survey data and reflections shared in chapter 7.

Higher Education Administrators

Administrators who are not online instructors will find value in chapter 2, which provides insight into online students. While that content is presented in the context of teaching-related behaviors and responses, there are many clear parallels to policy-level work and to understanding the kinds of academic support and wraparound resources that distance students need to be successful. Administrators who supervise and support instructors may be interested in some of the more challenging aspects of online teaching, and we discuss and provide recommendations in chapter 5 (discussion facilitation) and chapter 6 (teaching social justice themes online). Administrators may also be interested in chapter 7, where we share instructor data from the ITO workshop and discuss what strategies instructors have found to be effective when implemented in their online courses.

Faculty Developers and Instructional Designers

Staff who work in faculty development or support—in teaching centers, distance learning offices, academic technology units, libraries, and the like—will find helpful information in each chapter of this book, since these individuals typically provide support to instructional faculty in all aspects of online teaching. Instructional designers, in particular, might get ideas on how to help instructors make inclusive choices in both design and facilitation that are mutually complementary and support online students more effectively. Individuals who provide consultations or workshops related to online teaching will find detailed information about our workshop and research outcomes in chapter 7 useful in starting up new faculty development opportunities or revising existing offerings.

Student Affairs and Advising Staff

Staff who support online students through advising, campus services, and other resources will find most value in chapter 2, which unpacks assumptions about online students that may persist beyond the classroom and helps student-facing staff understand some of the barriers that online students may face in their coursework. Staff who regularly interact with online students in an asynchronous capacity (through a learning management system site, through email, etc.) may also want to explore chapter 3, where we discuss self-representation and how to build relationships with online students, as well as chapter 5, where we discuss how to facilitate online dialogue and present a framework for responding to contentious conversations.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1, “Learning Frameworks for Inclusive Design (and Teaching),” highlights select learning frameworks that support online course design for diverse adult students as well as the course facilitation strategies discussed in subsequent chapters. Design frameworks are presented first in the book to support instructors who may be designing or revising an online course through the lens of inclusion or who are teaching a course predesigned by someone else to analyze the design choices that were made. Important to this chapter is the idea that course design and facilitation approaches are always intertwined and mutually dependent, and that choices made during the facilitation of the course should complement inclusive design methods that were used in the development of the course.

Chapter 2, “Oversights about Online Students and the Barriers They Face,” highlights six common oversights about online students that lead to misalignment in learning design, course policies, and facilitation choices. We debunk these oversights to help readers better understand online students and how to serve them, and provide a basis for planning or revising inclusive teaching applications in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 concludes with a careful examination of online teaching behaviors that can create barriers for students; we aim to help instructors avoid such behaviors and share more effective approaches for interaction with students.

Chapter 3, “Instructor Self-Introduction and Setting the Tone for the Course,” examines the process of socialization and social group membership to unpack choices about instructor self introduction and setting the tone for a course through policies and other syllabus language. We also provide guidance and examples for writing an inclusion statement for the course syllabus to articulate these ideas to students in an instructor- and course-specific way.

Chapter 4, “The Inclusive Online Teaching Tool Kit,” provides the central set of practical, inclusive teaching tactics for online instructors to implement in support of the diverse online student body throughout the course. These recommendations include actions intended for the whole class (e.g., early surveys, providing transparent directions) as well as interventions to equitably support individual students or small groups of students (e.g., outreach to students who are struggling).

Chapter 5, “The Art of Facilitating Inclusive Online Discussions,” extends the practical approach of chapter 4 but focuses specifically on facilitating online discussions. A specific protocol for responding to problematic student posts—which can also be a helpful approach to communication in other charged situations—is introduced, along with a case study and example instructor responses.

Chapter 6, “Teaching Social Justice Themes Online,” outlines considerations for designing and facilitating courses that include or focus on social justice content. It highlights the importance of building community to enable students to discuss complex themes as well as ways to mitigate student resistance. It emphasizes the importance of instructor reflexivity and acknowledges the emotional labor involved in this work, with insights from instructional faculty who teach these courses.

Chapter 7, “Guiding Instructional Faculty along Their Inclusive Teaching Journey,” describes the Inclusive Teaching Online workshop at OSU Ecampus in more detail as well as the results of our research on faculty development. This chapter will be of interest to instructors who want to learn more about what other colleagues have tried and experienced while implementing inclusive online teaching practices. It is also useful for instructional designers and other faculty development personnel who support instructors in learning about and implementing inclusive teaching practices in asynchronous online courses.