Equity – The Center for Transformative Teaching

Regular readers of this blog will know that EvCC, like many community colleges across the country, continues to engage with knotty, challenging questions of equity in higher education. Conversations about equity have been central to Guided Pathways efforts at the college (and long before), and they’re also part of our work at the Center for Transformative Teaching. A few months ago, I wrote on this blog about my initial investigation of potential equity gaps in online course enrollments, and I’ve continued to think about this problem since then.

Equity in online, hybrid/blended, and technology-enhanced learning environments is in many ways a classic manifestation of the digital divide — inequalities in “access to, use of, or impact of information and communication technologies” (Wikipedia). The heart of the problem, in my mind, lies in the final part of that definition: the impact of technologies on the people using them. While we tend to be pretty good about asking important questions related to students’ access to technologies, all too often we overlook an even more significant question. Once we’ve ensured all students have access to learning technologies (for instance, through low-cost laptop rentals — a service we provide to students here at EvCC) what are we doing to ensure that the use of those technologies is providing the same advantages to all students? Are we inadvertently perpetuating inequities by assuming that the beneficial effects of educational technologies are evenly distributed and available to all?

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As EvCC has continued its Guided Pathways efforts over the past year, equity has been frequently discussed as essential to helping students make informed decisions about their education and future careers. In a post on the Guided Pathways blog last spring, Samantha Reed discussed some of the ways that increased awareness of equity considerations can help programs identify gaps in outcomes, thereby creating openings for change that will help us “make sure our institution serves all our students equitably.” More recently, Director of Institutional Research Sean Gehrke has been posting on using data to identify equity gaps. Equity was also a topic of discussion at the summer meeting of our system’s eLearning Council, where we noted as a clear priority the need for more research on “equity gaps in applying technology to learning” and “structural barriers to access to technology-mediated instruction.”

Prompted by some of these ongoing conversations, I decided to do a little initial investigating of my own to see where there might be obvious equity gaps in the context of eLearning at EvCC. The real work of examining equity is difficult and potentially requires multiple types of data in order to get meaningful analytical purchase on its many dimensions. So as a somewhat easier starting point, I posed a fairly simple question: “Are there significant differences between student populations in face-to-face and online courses at EvCC?” Granted, that’s probably a diversity question rather than an equity question–but it creates necessary space for considering those more challenging equity issues in online learning. Once we have a better sense of who might be missing from online courses, we can take up the questions of why they’re missing and how their absence may by symptomatic of systemic inequities.

To answer my question, I turned to our institutional Enrollment, Headcounts, and FTE Tableau dashboard (thank you, Sean!) and starting crunching some numbers.

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Tag: Equity

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