 One of the thorny problems that we encounter when we design e-learning and in e-learning context is that the learner is not in front of us. In fact, none of the learners are in front of us and we don't exactly know who they are. This problem of course gets enhanced a lot because of the context that it's not a face-to-face situation and it also this challenges looms when we have diverse learners. Now if the e-learning context, suppose it's a part of a blended course where you frequently meet your learners, maybe this problem is not so daunting. For example, if you're designing e-learning for your seven standard students where you meet them every day and the e-learning is supplementary, it may not be such a big problem. But if you're teaching an online course for example or if you have adult learners from a variety of fields that you don't that you're not very familiar with, then this problem becomes this challenge becomes difficult to address. So in this learning dialogue, let's look at the issue of addressing diversity in our learners in an e-learning context. Before we move ahead, let's pause at a reflection spot. Think of a face-to-face class that you have participated in either as a student or as a teacher and think of the various types of students that you have interacted with in that class. What are the different characteristics of the learners in that class? In what ways were they different? Can you categorize them in any way? And especially if you were a teacher, how did you address these differences and how did most importantly, how did you ensure that they all learned? So think of a more familiar face-to-face context and please write down some of the points to these questions. When you're done, you can resume. You may have thought of diversity along various dimensions. Some of them are apparent like age, gender, maybe the culture from which students come from. That may not be so apparent, but perhaps you know about it. Maybe their socio-economic background, again these have certain implications. Now the other thing as a teacher or as a fellow student you may have paid attention to is the varied background, varied backgrounds of the various learners in the face-to-face class. The various interests because of which students may be present in the class. Teachers would definitely have paid attention to the idea, to the fact that some learners need support in the prerequisites whereas others are more advanced or fast and they want to move ahead. Now these differences have implications on learning and on engagement. They make because of these differences students may learn differently. In this in the rest of this learning dialogue, let's see how to address these differences in an e-learning context. Let's look at the various ways in which learners are different in which there is a diversity among our learners in an e-learning context. If it's an online course like a MOOC for example, there are differences in the time zones from which people log in. This is something that we can't think of in a more familiar face-to-face setting. There may be differences in language and location of learners. Are they in urban areas, remote areas, which country they're from. Then if you move to their professional background, it may be college students, full-time college students or part-time students. It may be professionals or home-based workers. The backgrounds may be different in terms of prerequisites versus advanced topics like in the face-to-face context. Students may enroll in an online course because of various reasons. Some of them may do it out of personal interest. For some it may be required at their jobs and yet others may do it because of the certification. So there are differences along all these dimensions when we come to an e-learning context. Why should we address this diversity? We know that different learners have differentiated needs and this problem gets amplified in an e-learning context also because of the transactional distance. It is also known that when we address the individual needs of a learner, then learning is improved, engagement is enhanced and at least there is support for continuous learning within this medium. Also it's important to acknowledge this diversity when we say that we are designing using a learner-centered approach. So we do know that we have to address this individuality but now the question is how do we do it especially in this medium where the numbers may be large or the diversity may be extremely varied and we may not know who these learners are. When we come to the issue of how to address this diversity, the first thing we need to do as instructional designers of e-learning is to try to figure out who our learners are and then see which ones we really want to address first and next. We can prioritize. It's great if we want to address all our learners but it's fine if we say that our priority are these learners but before we are able to do any of those we need to know who they are. So often in e-learning courses and online learning there is an entry survey. You would have encountered it even in this course. It may be about demographics, it may be about background, personal interests, why do you enroll in this course. So that helps the instructional team learn the cohorts, the groups of learners present within their e-learning context. One of the recommendations that you may have heard often to address diversity is to provide a variety of resources. Now what do we mean by variety? It could be learning resources in different formats such as videos, websites, text. So this is just the medium, the format in which the resources provided. So you can provide a variety of those. You can provide learning resources and learning activities to support prerequisites for some learners as well as to encourage advanced learners to learn more. So that's why knowing who the cohorts are, what the cohorts are is important. You may feel you may learn that there are maybe three different types of learners in terms of the backgrounds and provide a set of activities for each of them. One of the recommendations that you may have often heard of to address diversity is to provide a variety of learning resources and learning activities. Now what does a variety, what does variety mean here? In what ways can we provide these various resources? So if we think of the dimensions one of the things we can do is to provide resources in different formats or different media like videos, websites, text, pictures. It could be similar content or related content but we can vary the medium and include activities and resources in different media within the same course. To address diversity especially in terms of background is to make sure that we support the needs, the prerequisite needs of some learners as well as encourage the advanced needs of other learners. We can borrow from the scratch terminology here and talk of designing for low floor, high ceiling and wide walls. We can also provide examples and applications in various contexts and if we know that our learners come with different interests, this is something we should do that when we give examples or when we give our students to work on applications of a particular concept. We vary the context in which the application happens. We can also support learners in terms of their varied language needs if that is an important criterion within your learners. While it's great to provide a variety of resources, it's known from studies as well as our personal experiences teachers that it's not enough to simply provide resources. The additional reading, the references, we know that many a time students just don't access them or maybe they'll look at it in a cursory fashion. So we have to find a way to ensure that learners actually access this variety of resources and gain from it. One solution here is that of learning extension trajectories which you would have experienced in this course itself. So the way we design learning extension trajectories is to provide resources for different needs of learners with where it's deliberately designed and then we allow learners to access the resource of their choice or do the activity of their choice and we close the learning loop by giving a short activity. In this case we call it an assimilation quiz to ensure that they have actually read the text or watch the video and assimilated the learning from it. Another technique that people use is multiple representations in STEM disciplines where the same concept is presented in different formats such as graphs, equations, text, diagrams and here in fact this is not only for diversity, multiple representations and having learners translate back and forth, interpret various representations is also known to be effective for deeper conceptual understanding. If you are designing learning materials for an online course you know where it's on a platform like this NPTEL course, one important recommendation is to go blended at least to some extent. So this means that don't limit yourself only to the online medium have some ways at least a few where there may be a synchronous interaction either face-to-face if you can if that situation is possible or via video conferencing in this course we are using Google Hangouts, you can do Facebook live. So inserting a few of these synchronous interactions where there is at least some face-to-face contact it could be a VC medium that is again known to be beneficial to address diversity as well as the transactional distance and this improves what's known as learner connect. However different each learner is here she feels that yes I am part of the course. As we design e-learning using a learner centric approach some of the recommendations that we have to keep in mind are one that we should become aware that there may be a diverse range of learners who will be accessing who will be experiencing the content that we have created. Then we have to try to identify this diversity and entry surveys were one way of doing so. If you want at this point we can prioritize the learners who we will primarily address then we include a variety of learning activities and resources addressing the needs of each identified cohort. We can represent the content in different ways using different formats, different media and all this is important to enhance learner connect. So we include some please some or many if possible face-to-face sessions using various options available. Thank you.