Last week’s Teaching Note discussed ways to support students who receive academic accommodations for a learning disability, sensory, or physical disability or other impairment. This week’s Teaching Note introduces Universal Design for Learning, a framework that helps you structure
all your class sessions to be inclusive of
all students, without having to make significant numbers of accommodations for individual students (recognizing that you will, of course, need to follow all approved accommodations as well).
The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework is designed to ensure that all learners can participate in meaningful and challenging learning opportunities. The UDL guidelines provide concrete suggestions for how to offer multiple options for engagement and knowledge demonstration, how to provide alternatives for visual or auditory information, and how to provide graphic organizers, templates, and note-taking guides to help students keep information organized. An updated set of guidelines (version 3.0) was released in July 2024. Broadly, this iteration ensures that UDL is recognized as an asset based pedagogy and emphasizes the need to address barriers that are rooted in biased systems of exclusion.
Here are a few UDL aligned suggestions that are especially helpful for students needing academic accommodations:
- Be flexible in assignment due dates, when possible. Do assignments need to be turned in within a date range, or is it crucial for students to turn in assignments on the day specified? Timelines help students scaffold their learning, so consider how to encourage timely submissions without drastic penalties for work submitted shortly after the due date.
- Provide checklists or templates to help students focus on the learning. Checklists or assignment templates can help free up some of students’ cognitive load in order to focus on the important stuff.
- Use Closed Captioning on all videos and use PowerPoint’s “Real-Time Subtitles” option when you are lecturing in person. For virtual classes, ensure that you turn on the captioning (live transcription) option in your virtual platform. Here is an introduction for how to start automated captioning in Zoom.
- Use the “Accessibility Checker” in Canvas to make sure that your Word documents are accessible and use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program to ensure that images of text in your PDFs are machine readable. All of these are helpful for individuals who use screen readers.
- For students who have limited mobility, ensure that there are multiple ways to participate in the interactive components of your class. Use a peer coach or observer role that doesn’t require being highly mobile. Assign peer coach or observer roles to several students, so the student with limited mobility isn’t singled out for their inability to participate in a particular manner.
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When making these changes, consider where you can get the most benefit for your work: about what parts of your course do students always….
- ask questions about the content,
- get things wrong on tests and exams, or
- ask for alternative explanations?
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You can also identify where to start by asking your students: where do they get stuck? What kind of options would increase their motivation and deepen their understanding?
Contributor:
Lorien Carter, MSW
Professor of Practice (Social Work)
Director, Instructional Coaching and Faculty Training
Faculty Fellow in Inclusive Pedagogies and Equitable Learning
Office of the Provost
Washington University in St. Louis