Know Your Online Learner to Support Academic Success

Breakout Room B

The global pandemic forced educational institutions to provide accessible online classrooms for their students, which rapidly altered the notions of classroom instruction, student engagement, collaborative learning, and fair assessment. This discourse will consider the experiences of students and parents who have been participating in online learning in virtual classrooms during the past year. To help teachers to promote academic success in the online classroom, this summary will identify and describe practical tips that use a socially just approach to providing online instruction to students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. These findings are a compilation of success strategies shared from a teacher interview and the personal experiences amalgamated during first-hand remote classroom teacher and student experiences. The main takeaway purports that the critical need to create a culturally inclusive classroom in the distance learning environment is perhaps even more important than in the bricks and mortar setting. This suggests that when designing lessons, educators must ensure that ample time is built in throughout the course for the sustainable development of an inclusive, equitable and safe, online, community learning space where differentiated learning and fair assessments can still take place.