Equitable Teaching Online is a professional development course that was developed by California Community College administrators, researchers, staff and former faculty to address challenges faculty may have when designing online courses that support diverse students. This professional development module is intended to be used as a foundational framework for examining one’s own online course design. The entire module is calculated to take no more than 15 hours or three hours for 5 days. This brevity of this course is intentional. The designers know educator time is limited, so the course focuses on maximizing each moment used by teaching faculty to work smarter not harder. Comparable courses take as much as 27 hours to complete.

Each lesson was designed to quickly educate faculty about how to comply with diversity standards, such as ADA and LGBTQ inclusiveness, as they create course content. By the end of the course faculty will have assembled the foundations of an online course. 

By the end of Equitable Teaching Online, faculty will have created a complete online course. Each component of those courses will begin with students’ in mind and with the goal of improving outcomes for students. Faculty will have taken ownership of intended goals and student performance by developing culturally relevant curriculum. That curriculum will directly address the long-standing forms of institutionalized marginalization that negatively affect student success and retention.