206

wb10

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

//Rathi Krishnan, Kaplan University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, rkrishnan@kaplan.edu//
 * A Salad Bowl: Embracing Diversity in Online Learning**

The twenty-first century online learning community consists of students from diverse backgrounds and from different continents. Students need to express acceptance of each other’s gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and spirituality/religion, and political orientation. It is not uncommon to find a mix of students: the recently returned veteran from Iraq, to the young mother in Ohio, to the sixty-year old grandmother in Alabama. There has to be the casting aside of stereotypes and the bonding and integration of the student body. This paper explores strategies for integration in the online learning community to enable students to readily accept and embrace each other gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and spirituality/religion, and political orientation. The paper discusses approaches to facilitation that help foster diversity through readings, discussion board management, and feedback.

Novice