Teach Anywhere

Teaching Guidelines for Making Courses Accessible

Workshops

Live sessions (via Zoom)

Live sessions will be captioned via Zoom’s auto-captioning feature. If different accommodations are needed, please contact ITG at itg@emerson.edu or (617) 824-8090.

Follow the link in session name to register and receive the Zoom link. See our Session Descriptions page for a summary of each session.

ITG-led courses

Online Teaching

This 3 week, asynchronous course shares the wisdom that ITG has gained over 10 years of working with faculty on their transition to asynchronous online courses. 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 May 11 - Sunday May 31, 2026
  • Monday September 28 - Sunday October 18, 2026

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 Technology Group 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 by ITG.

The ITG 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 ITG's Course Plan template to map out your course prior to the start of the training.

Upcoming sessions:

  • Monday March 30 - Sunday April 26, 2026
  • Monday June 1 - Sunday June 28, 2026
  • Monday October 19 - November 15, 2026

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)

Self-guided courses

Getting Your Materials Online

This course will walk you through how to meet Emerson's accessibility guidelines! It covers the process of acquiring and creating course materials, fair use decision-making, and the basics of creating accessible content for online learning.

Advanced Canvas

All the materials from the live course for you to read at your leisure. Go beyond the basics! This self-guided course is for faculty who want to know more about Canvas notifications and announcements, the Gradebook, the Scheduler, holding virtual office hours, the Teacher App, Groups, and Peer Review.

UDL for International and Multilingual Learners

This self-guided course covers various strategies and technical tips for designing online courses with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in mind, including illustrating your course content via multiple media, scaffolding assessments to provide low-stakes opportunities for practice, and inviting students to showcase the skills and knowledge they bring in online spaces. Note: This covers UDL Guidelines 2.2, not 3.

Guides  

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