(Week 7) Follow-Up Reflection: Deepening My Understanding of Openness and Inclusive Design
https://unsplash.com/s/photos/diversity-and-inclusion
Coming back to the ideas of openness and inclusive design after some time gave me a chance to look at them with fresh eyes. When I first explored these concepts in my earlier reflection, I understood them mostly at the surface level — flexible access, open resources, and creating learning spaces where more people can participate. But after revisiting the topic and reading new research, I started to see how openness is more than a design choice. It’s a mindset and a long-term responsibility.
Re-thinking Openness
One idea that really made sense to me is that “open” does not just mean giving people access to content. It also means inviting participation, supporting different backgrounds, and giving learners the freedom to contribute, remix ideas, and build knowledge together. Cronin (2017) explains that open educational practices grow when learners not only consume information but also share, collaborate, and sometimes even co-create materials. This made me rethink how openness works in real learning environments — it’s not only about what teachers provide but also about how learners shape the space.
As a computer science student, this feels very close to how open-source communities function. People build, test, revise, and share code in ways that benefit everyone. It’s not perfect, but the openness invites improvement. I am beginning to see education in the same way — something shaped by community effort, not just top-down design.
Inclusion as a Design Commitment
Another thing that stood out to me was how inclusion needs to be built intentionally into design. A study on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in online education found that accessibility improves when courses offer flexible formats, simplified navigation, and multiple ways for learners to interact with content (Al-Azawei et al., 2017). This reinforced something I learned earlier: even if a course is “open,” it can still unintentionally exclude people if accessibility isn’t considered from the start.
This made me reflect on my own learning projects. Whether I’m designing a small prototype, documenting something on GitHub, or working on a personal project, I realize now that accessibility isn’t an “extra feature.” It’s part of good design. The choices I make — like color contrast, clear wording, captioned videos, or simple navigation — can change whether others feel included.
Where This Leaves Me
Revisiting this topic helped me understand openness as both a technical and human practice. It’s about sharing, accessibility, transparency, and thinking about the people who will interact with what we create. Moving forward, I want to bring more of these ideas into my projects — even outside this course. Whether I’m writing documentation, developing tools, or creating content, I want to design with inclusion in mind and be more intentional about how I share my work.
References
Al-Azawei, A., Serenelli, F., & Lundqvist, K. (2016). Universal Design for Learning (UDL): A content analysis of peer-reviewed journal papers from 2012 to 2015. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(3), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v16i3.19295
Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5), 15–34. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3096