Flexibility Accommodations

Course Planning

Successful course planning includes clearly articulated learning outcomes and alignment of all course components (outcomes, content, assessments, activities, and resources). The workload is appropriate for the assigned credit hours and clearly communicated to students. Instruction is flexible, with faculty providing accommodations to support student success, and ongoing student feedback is actively collected and used to enhance the learning experience.

Recommendation 1.4: Flexibility & Accommodations

Provide clear policies regarding how you will offer flexibility and accommodations.

Background Information

What is this?

Accommodations broadly describe changes or additions to content or interactions for one person in order to lower or address barriers to full participation.

Why is this important?

Accommodations are an essential component of equity and inclusivity in instruction. In addition, building in a measure of flexibility in how students can fulfill the learning outcomes of the course benefits learning for all students (including and beyond students with individual accommodations for disabilities) by activating their sense of agency as learners.

How to implement

Accommodations are typically discussed in a syllabus statement regarding formal accommodation plans registered with the Disability Resource Center (DRC). But broader discussion of this topic can appear throughout the course, especially if you understand it to encompass equity-minded policies and practices designed to help all students learn.

Synopsis from Self-Review

Understand the requirements and resources available to help you make individual accommodations. Communicate these policies and practices of accommodation clearly in a syllabus statement or other course document. Identify where your course offers—or where you might consider offering—flexibility around how students learn.

How to Put into Practice

UWSP is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive learning environment in all modalities and circumstances. Student accommodations may need to be adapted or adjusted for online and hybrid environments, and will depend on your course content and assessments. Be in touch with students to discuss updated accommodation plans for your course.

Accommodations

Accommodations are changes made for individual learners to address a specific need. All approved accommodations that have been requested through the Disability Resource Center (DRC) should be implemented by instructors as long as they are timely and reasonable.

Accessibility

Accessibility is proactive and strives to remove barriers during the design stage of an event, program, or service.

Accessibility and flexibility are broader practices and design principles that expand access to learning, including and beyond students with formal accommodation plans (see Accessibility vs Accommodations). Offering flexibility in a course does not mean any and all student behaviors are acceptable. Instead, providing points of flexibility activates students’ sense of agency as learners—encouraging them to apply self-directed thought as to how they learn best and should best organize their workload. This mindset benefits learning for all students.

Accommodation Ideas

Set a welcoming tone in your statements regarding accommodations.

Explicitly connect the ability to have one’s needs for learning met to the ability to succeed in the course. Statements like the following help build trust and lay the groundwork for having positive interactions with students around their learning in the course.

  • Use a syllabus statement (such as the syllabus statement in the UWSP Syllabus Template) to highlight campus resources and accommodations available to students with disabilities. Remind students about these resources periodically.
  • Consider extending an invitation to talk about individual learning needs to all students. Such an invitation could be included on the syllabus or folded into your communications about office hours and what topics and questions are welcome in office hours.
Offer communication channels.

Offer communication channels around course requirements that require advance arrangements. For example, before an exam date approaches, send a quick online survey for students to confirm whether they have scheduling conflicts or accommodation needs around the exam. Opening a communication channel in advance preempts the frustration of receiving last-minute emails.

Support students in time management.
Student-managed extension policy.

Instead of considering requests for paper extensions on a case-by-case basis or docking points per day late, one might offer a student-managed extension policy. This might look like offering an automatic extension of a predetermined time duration for one paper per semester if the student takes responsibility for notifying the instructor about the new due date they are opting for and subsequently fulfills their commitment to submitting by that new due date.

Scaffolded assignments.

Scaffolded assignments—larger assignments broken up into a sequence of activities—operate as a form of accommodation. So does sharing transparent grading criteria and having students work through a sample graded assignment or peer review activity to help them apply the grading criteria to their own work.

Working ahead.

Allow students to work ahead by releasing assignments and readings ahead of time. This can empower students to take ownership of their time management.

Trial runs.

Allow students to have trial runs when using high-stakes technology tools. If using online proctoring for your exams, offer one or more practice quizzes with the proctor to troubleshoot issues and prepare students for what to expect on the day of the exam.

Flexibility.

Offering flexibility around how students access and engage with course material or communicate what they have learned. Compared to the above areas for potential accommodations, this is likely much more labor-intensive on your part. Depending on your context, course learning outcomes, and your students’ learning environments (e.g., students with low internet bandwidth, noisy children, or siblings at home), options for accessibility like being able to either view a lecture video or read a text-based transcript or outline can make a substantial difference.

Additional Resources:

  • The Universal Design for Learning framework “offer(s) a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.”