Inclusive Course Design – Designing for the Edges with Respect to Academic Background

Abstract

Teaching staff may encounter student groups that are inhomogeneous with respect to the students' academic background. The students may have varying amounts of experience in higher education, different nationalities, different forms of prerequisite knowledge or other differences that affect their learning. Based on the concept of "Designing for the Edges", where the learning environment is designed to dynamically adapt to the individual characteristics of the students, this report explores through a written interview with 12 different teachers at Lund University how inhomogeneity among students is perceived by the teachers, and to which degree the teachers adapt their teaching to account for differences among the individual students. The written interview is accompanied by a literature review, exploring other strategies for teaching diverse student groups. The responses to the written interview reveal that about half of the respondents experience inhomogeneous student groups and use dedicated strategies to adapt their teaching to the students' differences. Strategies ranged from supplying a variety of course material, with respect to format and level of difficulty, to intentionally creating subgroups consisting of students with different nationalities. In conclusion, a large awareness of the need to account for the differences among individual students was present in the responses to the written interview. However, the literature review suggests that there are more strategies that may be applicable, depending on the goals of the specific course, that would make the teaching more dynamic and better accommodate the individual needs of students.