Mary F Rice

Online teacher education is experiencing significant growth worldwide. One of the major challenges accompanying this growth is that many teacher educators find themselves underprepared and under pressure to design online teacher education courses that reflect their beliefs about what constitutes high-quality teacher preparation practice. Further, teacher educators in disciplines such as special education face additional challenges in developing understandings about the legalities of writing and implementing disability service plans and performing additional testing. In this self-study of online special education teacher education practice, two collaborators worked to identify strategies and practices for professional community building in a class about teaching reading to students with disabilities. The findings highlight issues of teacher educator authority and presence online against other needs to model collegiality and promote scholarly thinking. Researchers in online teaching may find insight into both the cognitive and contextual concerns as they work to enhance online teacher education while they plan their own investigations.

In this article, I share some observations from my research about leadership support for bringing together technologies and literacies in rural secondary settings. I have been working with rural ELA teachers in many states in the west and Midwest for about four years. I have been excited and intrigued by the leadership support these teachers are providing and receiving as well as their descriptions of what literacy leaders at all levels might do to sustain change. Specifically, I found that teachers benefitted when specific shifts in perspectives were being made by teachers and leaders in tandem.

As more K-12 students with disabilities enroll in online courses, virtual schools and programs are working to make courses accessible through stronger course design. When course designers approach the issue of accessibility, they must comply with legal requirements and mitigate the challenges many students with disabilities face for literacy and learning. These challenges include a lack of vocabulary support and complex text in online course materials. This study describes qualitative research that sought to uncover strategies course designers used to meet accessibility standards and promote literacies online for all students, especially students with disabilities. Three strategies emerged as findings: (1) composing clear articulations of learning objectives, (2) promoting personalized and contextualized learning, and (3) planning for visual and audio representation of concepts. While the course designers displayed emerging understandings of accessibility, they were less adept at addressing the interplay between literacies that promote access and accessibility features that promote literacies.

White paper sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium.

https://olc-wordpress-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2018/06/Access-and-Accessibility-in-Digital-and-Online-Learning-Issues-in-Higher-Education-and-K-12-Contexts.pdf

Accessibility in K-12 and higher education is becoming an increasingly complex terrain to traverse as schools increase online materials and instructional delivery options. This white paper provides an overview of critical terms, legal precedents, and other considerations for course designers, instructors, and administrators as they work to improve the educational experiences of learners with disabilities.
Key questions around accessibility include the following:
1. How do national laws that govern disability access apply to online courses?
2. What case law exists to guide online course design and delivery in various educational
settings?
3. What issues emerge regarding online course access that might be unique to higher
education and to K-12 settings? What issues are shared?
4. What support do online course designers need in order to generate accessible courses for
learners across the life span (from K-12 to higher education)?

We are junior, tenure-line faculty at a research-intensive institution in the Southwestern United States. Most of our responsibilities lie with mentoring and advising graduate students who are practicing teachers in local schools. As such, one of our major goals is to bring together our research interests in New Literacies (New London Group, 1996) into our work as mentors and advisors. We determined that we would benefit from a multimodal method for supporting our thinking together with our teachers, together with each other, and separately. By multimodal, we mean that we were utilizing multiple modes, including image, print text, or spatial arrangement (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) across our work. Even images themselves are multimodal (Duncum, 2014), specifically taking mode of color and spatiality into account (Jewitt and Kress; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Among the strategies we came to use with our students is collage (combining images, words, and other symbols and icons purposely on a page). The purpose of this study was to examine our uses of collage as a multimodal method of supporting graduate student teachers and to reflect on and improve our practice as teacher educators (LaBoskey, 2004). In our state, there are large populations of English learners with Hispanic/Latino and/or Native American/American Indian heritage who need intensive language and literacy support. Teachers in our state are among the lowest paid nationwide making turnover an issue. Graduation rates, although they are improving, are low. Thus, it is critical for our state to improve literacy instruction, but given our context, the work is also challenging. Our literacy program is part of an interdisciplinary department that mostly awards graduate degrees and offers some undergraduate service courses. We want our students who are teaching in schools to see a graduate degree as a way to feel sustained and empowered in their work with children. Collage became one avenue of several we tinkered with for doing and reflecting on our work in this context.

Experts in course design, by contrast, have reported that they feel their work is to design a template of curriculum materials for a general population of students, but that teachers, parents, and on-site mentors must be the ones to individualize for students with special needs, even when other personalization features are embedded in the course (Rice, Mellard, Pace, & Carter, 2016). Thus, while online learning, with its promise of flexibility, holds potential to mitigate multiple dilemmas in providing high quality education to large numbers of students, new challenges are also introduced. One challenge is that taking a course online requires new or alternatively applied instructional design and delivery practices (Dick & Carey, 2005). Course materials would then be accessible and easier for all teachers and all students to use (Archambault & Crippen, 2009; Picciano & Seaman, 2008).
With these understandings in mind, the purpose of this inquiry was to examine the practices around accessibility of two teams of course designers as they wrote Algebra II courses in a large virtual school program. During the study, specific attention was given to barriers that course designers encountered for making content accessible and the strategies that members of the team employed as they worked. This technical report is intended to support the work of course design where instructional materials are made with attention to disability.

Most fully online school placement decisions are made by parents who have determined the traditional school is no longer meeting the needs of their child (Werrell, 2014). For parents of students with disabilities, a primary factor in selecting the fully online school was due to the social demands of the traditional brick-and-mortar building (Smith, Burdette, Cheatham, & Harvey, 2016). In this study, parents reported concerns in their child’s inability to address the social skill demands of their school environment. Challenges with the social demands of the learning environment led parents to seek alternatives. With the growth in online learning options, parents sought to remove their child to a “safer” environment to support their child’s learning considering the unique and individualized education experience special education seeks to provide. The purpose of this current study was to further understand the level of social skill development provided within the fully online K-12 environment. Through parent interviews, we sought to determine if the social competency needs of students with disabilities were being met in the fully online environment.

Students with disabilities who qualify for related services in a traditional school environment receive those services during the day as part of their regular routine. However, as more students with disabilities enter online learning environments, access to related services, especially therapies, have become more complicated to provide. The purpose of this article is to describe the ways in which teletherapy practices function as part of in virtual schools and courses. Phenomenological interviews were the primary method of data collection for this study. Findings emerged as descriptions of the ways in which teletherapists established a virtual presence with clients, attended to the expectations of their school contexts, and integrated technological skill and comfort into therapeutic tasks. The findings of this study have implications for the development and evaluation of teletherapy programs in K-12 schools— both virtual and traditional.

Online teacher professional development (oTPD) researchers have been concerned with design features, teacher change in practice, and student learning, as well as establishing guidelines for directing funding support. Even so, previous work suggests that high-quality instructional support for all students with disabilities is still on the horizon. As a response to the need for better instruction, professional development for SWD has emerged in all settings, including teachers who are not just receiving oTPD, but who are online teachers themselves. The purpose of this study was to use online teachers' descriptions of their oTPD for SWD to learn about the professional learning opportunities available to teachers around serving SWD and their families. Teachers and administrators from various online/virtual learning schools around the country participated in this study. Even though teachers had SWD in their courses and were directly responsible for SWD, most teachers and administrators described few professional development opportunities for learning to teach SWD in the online learning environment beyond giving and receiving information about legal compliance. Findings also raise concerns about the tensions between macro-and micro-development opportunities available to teachers and whether they are positioned to take advantage of these to build strong professional networks. Rice, M. F. (2017). Few and far between: Describing K-12 online teachers' online professional development opportunities for students with disabilities.

—While the number of English Learners (ELs) in the United States is steadily growing in most states, teacher preparation for working with ELs is far from universal. It fact, it is contested terrain as to whether information about topics like Second Language Acquisition (SLA) are helpful generally, and if so, what theories teachers are willing to adopt. The purpose of this study was to learn whether teachers in an SLA theory course would declare intentions to change their notions about SLA and express them as desire to shift practice. We also wondered if there were differences in pre-service versus in-service and international versus domestic students. The results confirmed that the participants were willing to change their initial theories because of participating in a second language acquisition course that presented information about SLA theories at a Completely Different or Somewhat Different level by the end of the course.

Online education is being adopted at an ever-increasing rate and its prevalence has various implications
for the field of special education.
. The purpose of this article is to present and discuss the results of a state and territorial policy scan that
investigated special education online learning policies across the United States.
. This policy scan found that more policy and guidance is needed to support parents and professionals
serving students with disabilities in online settings.
. The article discusses implications and provides some suggestions for state and local education leaders as
they consider the implementation of online learning.

This chapter is based on a formal study 1 of one community's familial curriculum (Huber, Murphy, & Clandinin, 2011) in the context of Shakespeare. The families that participated in this narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) discussed how Shakespeare's work influenced their family life. The findings from this study are used to discuss what is considered by some to be a dichotomy of curriculum in school and home. The author also uses this study to explore notions of nationalized or common curriculum.

INTRODUCTION. As online learning increases, making text comprehensible to all learners
presents challenges online course designers and teachers. The purpose of this study was to
determine the cohesion properties of text from English language arts courses from three large
online learning vendors. METHODS. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to determine
congruence between the environments with respect to the five indices in the Coh Metrix 3.0 text
measurement tool (Narrativity, Syntactic Simplicity, Word Concreteness, Referential Cohesion,
and Deep Cohesion). RESULTS. Vendors may have calibrated their text using traditional tools
like the Flesh-Kincaid scale. However, each of the courses had aspects of cohesion that needed
improvement to provide an optimal advantage to students with disabilities or who have reading
comprehension difficulties. Further, the two biggest factors that explained the variance in this
study were Word Concreteness (the degree to which the words can be pictured) and Deep Cohesion
(whether the connectives support inference). Importantly, these are also two aspects of texts
that present the most challenges for students with disabilities. DISCUSSION. If all students are
going to be successful with online courses, then vendors should move beyond simple reading
level as a measure of text difficulty and plan course texts for students with more and different
kinds of support for students who have reading difficulties that affect comprehension. Future
research should perform similar analyses on content areas such as social studies and science.
Additional studies should also look carefully and qualitatively at the complexity of the content
itself and not just the text. Finally, additional research might look at how students with various
reading challenges engage with online course texts using multiple data collection and analysis
techniques.
Keywords: Online learning, Students with disabilities, Text complexity, Cohesion, Online reading
comprehension, Online English language arts courses.

When a child changes enrollment from a brick-and-mortar setting to a fully online one, the educational experience is quite different for the child and his or her parents/guardians. Among the most important differences involves the parent’s role in instructional activities. As part of the transition to online education from traditional settings, parents must determine what having their child complete coursework at home or another non-school location means for their parental roles and responsibilities. This situation is especially true considering the potentially conflicting messages parents may receive about what their role is from a variety of sources, including the school, the curriculum vendor, and even other online parents (Rice, 2015). On the one hand, schools like parents to be physically present as children work and to ensure that the children are logging on and working steadily. On the other hand, the schools are adamant that they are in charge of curriculum and assessment. The result is that instruction and who provides that instruction becomes a point of controversy.

The contents of this manuscript, Parents’ Perceptions of Special Education Service Delivery When their Children Move to Fully Online Learning, was developed under a grant from the US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) Cooperative Agreement #H327U110011 with the University of Kansas and member organizations, the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), and the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE). However, the contents of this paper do not necessarily represent the policy of the US Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

ABSTRACT
While there have been growing concerns about technological access and its connection to the development of student literacies in classes such as English language arts (ELA), this attention has become more acute in the wake of the renewal process for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA). Even though the ESSA declared rural access to technology as a top priority, the decontextualized nature of existing studies has not provided sufficient information about the ways in which rural access to technologies informs teachers’ curriculum-making; an essential component of the educational process Increasing knowledge surrounding this issue has the potential to provide understandings to inform the implementation of the ESSA in rural schools and to support rural teachers generally in their work in integrating technologies.
The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a formal phenomenological inquiry into the technological curriculum-making. I interviewed four rural teachers from four different rural settings with four different technological initiatives to develop greater understandings about the experience of teaching ELA in rural settings amid policy shifts that bear on teacher technology integration work.
The findings of this study suggest the importance of considering the needs of rural ELA teachers differently, although not necessarily in opposition to those of urban teachers. It also suggests a need to develop teacher preparation and in-service support programs that consider teacher thinking and identity formation in relationship to technology. Further, this preparation might occur alongside the curriculum-making process, rather than separately from it.

The current study drew on evolving theories of transfer, with a
particular interest in studying writing-related transfer. Major
theories of transfer come from several perspectives: behaviorist,
cognitive, dispositional, curricular, and sociocultural. Each of
these perspectives has made a contribution to the concept of
transfer and the terminology used to describe it in the teaching of
writing. The terminology is important to consider because when
learning composition skills, students also have to learn to translate
the academic jargon embedded in the description of the task in
order to determine how to approach it (Nelms and Dively 215).
The terms are clues to the worldview of the scholars involved in
constructing a given conception of writing.

Online learning environments present new challenges for reading, particularly for students with disabilities. This article is based on research using text from online learning courses aimed at middle/high school students. The authors discuss the elements of text complexity and cohesion and then demonstrate ways to modify text that attends to various elements.

As increasing numbers of students with disabilities enter online learning, it
becomes increasingly necessary to ensure that online teachers are prepared with
the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to provide legally mandated services and
generally work effectively. Although the Individuals with Disabilities in
Education Act (IDEA) is still leveraged to ensure the inclusion and success of
students, working online presents unique challenges for teachers who may not
see or interact with the young people over whom they have stewardship on a
regular basis. Even so, little is known about what teacher preparation programs
are able to do to attend to both online teaching and working with students with
disabilities. With these notions in mind, researchers from the Center on Online
Learning and Students with Disabilities attempted to identify and then gather
together a group of special education teacher educators to talk about teacher
preparation for online learning and students with disabilities.

The Center on Online Learning and Students with
Disabilities (COLSD) has released the 2016 version of
its annual publication Equity Matters: Digital and Online
Learning for Students with Disabilities. This year’s publication focuses on promising practices for addressing the
needs of students with disabilities in full-time virtual,
blended, and supplemental online settings. The publication
summarizes state and territorial policies related to students
with disabilities, research on students with disabilities in
online settings, the shifting roles of parents and teachers
in K-12 virtual education, and state educational agency
responsibilities.
This publication includes six chapters focused on research
compiled and published in the previous year. It provides
field-based reviews and monitors current practice in
the delivery of K-12 online education for students with
disabilities. Chapter 1 contextualizes the report’s focus
on the link between the online learning environment and
learner variability, and factors associated with the critical
issue of the sustainability of K-12 online teaching. Chapters
2-5 provide findings from the Center’s research. Chapter
6 recaps COLSD’s five-year history and specifies critical
questions that remain for researchers and other stakeholders. The primary audience for this publication includes
educators, education leaders, teacher education faculty,
parents, policy makers, researchers, and digital curriculum
developers.

This article describes a study of online educators' use of technology as part of the accommodations they provided to students with disabilities at their school. Specifically, research focused on four teachers who were members of an interdisciplinary team in a large virtual school program, in a state with established policies regarding online education, and online course work as a requirement for graduation. Data were collected over 4 months in a series of weekly interviews and through a content analysis of stipulated accommodations and modifications in student Individualized Education Program (IEP) documents. The findings of this study indicated (1) providing technologically grounded accommodations and modifications required intensive collaboration with students, parents, and other special education support staff at the virtual school, (2) online teachers struggled to keep up with all of the possible means and methods of enhancing the learning experience and providing accommodations that were stipulated in the IEP while also remaining sensitive to practices and supports that they could provide (using technology that were not mandated), and as a result (3) technology use as part of accommodation was most often relegated to what naturally exists in an online learning environment and is available to all students. The implications of this work are that transferring disability service plans, and IEPs in particular, is no simple matter, and that moving to a technological environment (and the notion that the online environment is inherently accommodating) needs interrogation at every level (practice, research, and policy). The purpose of this study was to describe online administra-tors' use of technology as part of the accommodations they supervised for students with disabilities at their school. Specifically , we focused on three administrators who were assigned to support an interdisciplinary team of special education–certi-fied teachers in a large virtual school program in a state with established policies regarding online education and a requirement for online coursework as part of graduation. Data were collected over 4 months in a series of weekly interviews and through a content analysis of stipulated accommodations and modifications in student Individualized Education Program (IEP) documents. The findings of this study revolve around collaboration with students, parents, and other special education support staff at a virtual school and the struggle to maintain anchored to technology and which resulted in technology use as part of accommodation being relegated to what naturally exists in an online learning environment and was available to all students. The implications of this work are that transferring disability service plans, and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) in particular, is no simple matter and that moving to technological environment and the notion that the online environment is inherently accommodating needs interrogation at every level (practice, research, and policy).

—Second Language Acquisition (SLA) knowledge is necessary in order to increase the likelihood that teachers will engage in sound practices. The purpose of this study was to discursively examine the evolving SLA knowledge as part of living educational theories in course assignments of 29 teachers in an SLA theory class. This study offers several valuable additional insights about teachers living educational theories of SLA. Specifically, preservice teachers exhibited more willingness to change their practice in the future than inservice teachers, yet preservice teachers still expressed both a confirmation of original beliefs and personal validation for extant beliefs.

This self-study follows my work on three professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996). It was an effort at revealing both my knowledge-in-practice and knowledge-of-practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2004) in order to uncover understandings about my own use advocacy as a classroom teacher, a new teacher mentor, and a teacher educator on a university campus. Through the course of the study, my attention turned toward my own use of advocacy as a classroom teacher, a new teacher mentor, and a teacher educator on a university campus—the places where tensions occurred. Advocacy experiences in all three of these roles tended to be dependent on maintaining a delicate balance of positioning between myself, the student, the new teacher, or mentee, and another school official. I was also able to see the ways my personal practical knowledge was lived in and out in the various situations.

... We thank them for their considerable assistance and support. We also thank several people who read and made helpful comments on drafts of chapters, including Margaret Burchett, Caroline Coffin, Kay O'Halloran, Clare Painter and Katina Zammit. ...

This latest post comes from Mary Frances Rice (mary.rice@ku.edu), a Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas. Rice explains the intersection of online environments and disability.

I look forward to posting more, and as always, contact me at dev.k.bose@gmail.com if you’re interested in being a guest blogger for the site, or would like to joint the DS-Rhet listserv. —Dev

http://disabilityrhetoric.com/2015/12/21/online-learning-and-students-with-disabilities/

As participation in online learning grows, so do concerns around the ways in which students with disabilities are served in virtual school programs, both full and part-time. At the crux of this struggle is the way in which federal and state laws (many of which were incepted before online learning existed or gained traction as an educational option) are interpreted by educators and translated into policies at the school level. Further, administrators, special education case managers, and teachers all interpret school level policies and answer to directives from a hierarchy of supervisors. The interpretations of these policies and the understandings educators use to guide their thinking have not been well-researched. In the present study, teachers, special education case managers, school level special education administrators, and regional directors were interviewed about their roles in developing, supporting, and implementing accommodations and other forms of support for students with disabilities in online courses. Findings from this work focus on the role conceptions of various types of educators in virtual schools and the tensions they experience as they work to support each other in positioning students with disabilities for success.

Purpose
This chapter attends to the fact that research has revealed
much about the importance of parents in this process, especially their
increased instructional roles when their children undertake online
courses. However, little is known about how online curriculum vendors
construct the parents of their potential enrollees in order to make online
learning an appealing option.
Approach
This research examined what these testimonials revealed
about how such companies conceptualize the beliefs parents of potential
students. Inductive narrative theme analysis was used to analyze the
testimonials.

This outtake highlights several ethical dilemmas of studying curriculum in
online learning environments. These dilemmas emerge in the spaces of (a)
accessing the content of online or virtual curriculum products, (b) capturing
the content strategically, and (c) analyzing it using appropriate methods.
The author discusses some approaches to mitigating these dilemmas, but
also proposes that they will remain somewhat intractable without more
scholarly conversation about studying curriculum in virtual settings.

This webinar highlights recent scholarly inquiry into the experiences of educators in fully online schools as they work to serve students with disabilities; issues in instruction, supervision, relationship building/collaboration, and IEP compliance are major topics.

Rice, M., & Dykman, B. (2018). The emerging research base for online learning and students with disabilities. In R. Ferdig and K. Kennedy (Eds.) Handbook of research on K-12 online and blended learning (pp. 189-206). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. 

Students served under federal civil rights laws (i.e., IDEA, Section 504) are entitled to enroll in the full range of online
learning environments and receive mandated services. Attending to these students’ needs has presented challenges for
educators in online schools, but research that would inform decision-making and planning has been scarce. This chapter
provides some context for serving students with disabilities online and summarizes previous research reviews this topic.
In addition, this chapter updates research findings from an original chapter in the first Handbook of K12 Online and
Blended Learning Research. New findings suggest that students with disabilities are enrolling in online courses, but gaps
in understandings about student outcomes, accommodation and service delivery, and educator preparation and support
persist. The chapter ends with suggestions for applying research to practice, engaging in additional research, and forming
policies ensuring students with disabilities receive services.

For the special education teacher, the online course environment represents challenges and opportunities that are different from those experienced in the traditional face-to-face setting. This chapter presents practical and research-based applications to guide special educators in the exciting and sometimes complex online environment. The chapter is framed around six questions that address issues of placement into fully online or blended learning environments, the development and implementation of Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), curriculum making and the timing of instructional delivery, facilitating learner independence and self-determination, communication with learners and their families, and collaboration with families and colleagues to build relationships that support student learning.  The chapter ends by turning readers back to thinking about the practical as it applies to teacher and learners successful transition to online learning.