The Triple Imperatives of Online Teaching: Equity, Inclusion, and Effectiveness

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with campuses closing the world over in a bid to contain the virus, online teaching has taken center stage. However, due to the hurried nature of the transition as well as its enormity, educators, as well as students, are struggling with the break in routine. In particular, educators are torn between different goals such as effectiveness (i.e., trying to emulate in-person classes online and cover the same material), inclusiveness (i.e., no student is excluded from the learning process) and equity (i.e., trying to ensure that no students are left behind). Matters are made more serious by the fact that we are in the midst of the worst pandemic in the last 100 years due to which the students are locked inside their homes with their siblings and family members in stressful situations (which makes paying attention and engaging in learning very difficult). In this paper, we highlight the importance of keeping a learner-centric focus in which there is an explicit effort on the triple imperatives of online learning—i.e., to develop online classrooms that are at the same time, equitable, inclusive, and effective.