WCET’s Equity Principles

As a part of its historical mission of expanding educational access and opportunity, WCET values equity and strives for inclusivity and diversity. We believe that this commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion enables our members to better serve their students and expand access to high-quality digital learning educational opportunities to all students, especially minoritized students and students from other historically underserved communities. As a team, we are committed to equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice but we know that such a commitment requires ongoing collaborations; we need to do more as an organization.

• We will evaluate our internal culture and practices to make sure we are doing all we can to identify and address our own unconscious biases, be a more inclusive workplace, and are living our values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice. We know that we will make mistakes, but we commit to consistently reflect on our biases and positionalities and hold ourselves accountable for improvement.
• We will work with members to improve our external culture and practices in seeking out, welcoming, and serving diverse populations. We understand that equity is a continuous process and requires consistent reflection on our services, resources, membership recruitment, and leadership opportunities. We are committed to creating spaces where all members are able to bring their diverse experiences and perspectives to bear on improving higher education.
• We believe that the pursuit of equity requires us to ask ourselves and each other hard questions about the ways in which systems, structures, cultures, policies, and practices work together to create and reinforce inequities and injustice. We are committed to finding ways to address these inequities and injustice and change the conditions in higher education that marginalize students, especially Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander students, female identifying students, members of the LGBTQIA community, students with disabilities, and poverty-affected students.
• We will undertake, contextualize, and amplify research that will help higher education in general, but digital learning leaders more specifically, understand the intersections between race, gender, economics, ability/disability, and sexuality and educational equity, especially in online and blended education. As a part of this work, we also promise to disaggregate data to the finest point possible and resist the erasure of Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander students.

We expect that the process outlined above will uncover both opportunities to accelerate our progress and challenges that will require reflection and innovation to overcome, at both the individual and organizational levels. However, in either case we intend to serve our members by placing what we learn in a context that highlights how colleges and universities can continually improve their policy and practice to better serve their respective student populations in ways that are equitable and just, and in ways that meet members where they are. WCET has always believed that the promise of digital learning for higher education is the expansion of access and opportunity for anyone interested in pursuing postsecondary education. The progress that we make as a community will help to ensure that every student who participates in a WCET member organization – be it physically, virtually, or somewhere in between – can expect a full and equal opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a postsecondary education.