Teach Anywhere

Teaching Guidelines for Making Courses Accessible

Online Training

Online Teaching

This 3 week, asynchronous course looks at the unique aspects of online education, and will reinforce the best practices of the modality. Specifically, the course will cover:

  • basic instructional design concepts
  • structuring weekly modules to maximize student learning
  • online presence
  • engaging students in an online asynchronous course

Upcoming sessions:

  • Monday 9/28/26 - Sunday 10/18/26
  • Tuesday 1/19/27 - Sunday 2/7/27
  • Monday 3/8/27 - Sunday 3/28/27
  • Monday 5/10/27 - Sunday 5/30/27

The format of the course is asynchronous with weekly due dates. (Faculty have appreciated the opportunity to experience an asynchronous course in Canvas from a student perspective.) The weekly learning activities take 2-4 hours per week. By the end of Online Teaching you will have completed your course map and will be on your way to having a completed course at the end of Accessible Design. 

Application is required. Please note that this course is reserved for faculty who are scheduled to teach an asynchronous online course.

Accessible Design: UDL for your Emerson Course

In this 4-week experience, you’ll work with the instructional designers and a group of your colleagues to build a new course or redesign an existing course using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), with a focus on digital accessibility. After the four weeks, you will be required to have a fully-built course that will then be reviewed and remediated.

The design team will conduct an accessibility sweep of your course, checking all videos and PDFs for accessibility and remediating as needed. We will also review your course for common pitfalls and areas to improve. This will kickstart your course for a smooth student experience, but we’ll also provide you with the tools to maintain peak accessibility.

Prerequisites:

A course map is necessary to begin this training. If you are new to online teaching at Emerson, you will be required to take the Online Teaching course where you will build a course map. However, if you've already completed Online Teaching for a different course, you can use the Course Plan template to map out your course prior to the start of the training.

Upcoming sessions:

  • Monday 10/19/26 - Sunday 11/15/26
  • Monday 2/8/27 - Sunday 3/7/27
  • Monday 3/29/27 - Sunday 4/25/27
  • Monday 5/31/27 - Sunday 6/27/27

The format of this session is mostly asynchronous with one individual, synchronous check-in meeting to be determined once the course begins. Spots are limited and application is required. The weekly learning activities are a 2-4 hour time commitment per week, not including time spent building your course. The time it takes to build your course varies, but it can take up to 20 hour per week if you are building a brand new course.

Accessible Design can fill up! We enroll faculty based on the following priority level:

  1. the asynchronous class is being offered next semester
  2. It's a grad class in an entirely asynchronous program
  3. the asynchronous class is being offered the semester after next
  4. anyone else teaching online (synchronous classes or asynchronous further in the future)

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