Universal Design for Learning

Redesigning your course with UDL is an iterative process. That leaves you wondering where to begin when there seems so much to do. To get some direction, ask yourself these questions:

Where do students seem to always ask questions?
Where do they consistently get things wrong on tests and assignments?
Where do they ask for additional or alternate explanations than the ones you provide? (Tobin & Behling, 2018, p. 134)

NOTE: Canvas has analytic tools incorporated into the Gradebook. With a few clicks you can see which questions your students miss on any test delivered through Canvas. If you are using Canvas rubrics to grade assignments, you can also generate reports that will help identify where your students are struggling.

Once you have the points of contention identified, you can consider how best to add one way for students engage with that material. Let’s consider the lecture for the Plus-One treatment.

Make your slides available so that your students can take notes on them while you lecture
Break your lecture up into short videos, focusing on the topics you’ve identified as problematic
Add subtitles to your video mini-lectures
Provide transcripts of your video mini-lecture
Record a podcast of your mini-lectures (this is especially valuable to commuting students)
Insert quizzes into your videos to ensure they grasp what has been presented before moving on (You can do this with Panopto and have the results fed to the Canvas Gradebook)

Remember, this is Plus-One NOT plus ALL. Choose just one of these options to apply to your lecture only where the data suggests your students are struggling. You may not get it right the first time, but Plus-One is iterative improvement and not a massive course overhaul.

Students engage with course material not only during the intake process, but also when they demonstrate their mastery of course content – the output. Assessments commonly take the form of a written assignment, an exam, or a presentation as determined by the instructor. But what if you left the form of the assessment up to the students? This accomplishes two things. First it lets the students engage with the material and demonstrate their learning in a method with which they are most comfortable. Second, and equally important, it assures that you are not assessing skills that are not relevant to the material.

For example, a formal term paper is routinely a course capstone assessment. Rubrics for these assessments include criteria for page length, proper citation format, spelling, and grammar as well as a demonstration of content knowledge. While basic writing skills and citing sources are important in any writing, is proper citation format, spelling and grammar really what you want to assess in a capstone assignment? Could your students demonstrate their mastery of course content by preparing a PowerPoint or video presentation? Would an exam consisting of multiple essay questions work just as well? Undoubtedly assuring equivalency for multiple assessments might be challenging, but by giving your students the option to choose their assessment format you increase their engagement with the content.

This sort of reflection about your course assessments also gives you an opportunity to evaluate whether or not you are measuring what your course is intended to teach.