Online Teaching: The Affordances of PowerPoint and YouTube for a More Inclusive Approach

Abstract

Online education, even when planned, has a number of challenges including availability and affordability of technology (Palvia et al., 2018), students’ learning differences (Jacobs, 2013; Kebritchi et al., 2017), and tech-literacy of instructors and learners (Jacobs, 2013). In emergency situations witnessed in spring 2020, one of the keys to successful online education might be collaboration among instructors as recommended by Fish and Wickersham (2010). The present paper is a move in that direction and shares techniques that can help address two of the challenges mentioned above: (1) the availability and affordability of technology, and (2) students’ learning differences. The latter point is particularly relevant to those teaching multilingual learners in that it relates to one of the solutions suggested by Zamel and Pack (2006) in addressing multilingual students’ academic challenges; that is, providing handouts to facilitate comprehension of the content being presented. Keywords: teaching, PowerPoint, YouTube, Inclusion, ESOL, technology, media