Designing and Using Online Discussions to Promote Social Justice and Equity

The online student population continues to grow as students look for convenience and flexibility, which has positive consequences as online courses are often equivalent in quality to face-to-face courses and provide access to higher education for students who otherwise may not attend. However, some groups of students have lower rates of persistence than others, which may be due, at least in part, to issues of equity and inclusion that arise in online courses. In this chapter, we begin by sharing the reasons some groups of students are underrepresented in online courses and why they have lower persistence rates when they do attend. Then we discuss how online discussions differ from face-to-face discussions and their impact on students from underrepresented groups. To improve online student experiences, we outline a plan that builds off student strengths. We emphasize the creation of a welcoming classroom culture, culturally responsive pedagogy, universal design for learning, and transformative learning to create equitable small group online discussions using multi-modal asynchronous and synchronous technologies. Within this plan, we also address barriers related to bandwidth and access to technology.