Best Practices for Creating E-learning Courses for Diverse Adult Audiences
This paper explores the various considerations and best practices that instructional designers should take into account when designing e-learning for a diverse group of learners. Diverse adult audiences, for the purpose of this paper, may be composed of varying racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds, as well as varying languages, socio-economic status, abilities, or learning style preferences.
This research paper was written for course EDUC605 of UMBC's Masters in Instructional Systems Development.
Skills and Technologies
Adult Learning; Research; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Universal Design for Learning; Accessibility
Context
When designing any course, instructional designers are told to analyze their audience and create a course that speaks to their needs. But what is an instructional designer to do when an e-learning course is set to be publicly available, and as such the diversity of the audience is practically limitless? There is a significant amount of research on designing for accessibility, as well as research on culturally and linguistically diverse audiences. However, there is little work that pulls all of this together.
Action
With this paper, I wanted to compile the wealth of research in order to provide direction on how instructional designers can approach course design for widely diverse audiences.
Results
Best practices for creating e-learning for diverse adult learners are outlined. Course design considerations and recommendations are also proposed.