Delivering Inclusive and Impactful Instruction: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

Bulk discounts available: For details, email [email protected] or visit www.castpublishing.org.

Copyright © 2024 by CAST, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023910779

Paperback ISBN 978-1-943085-04-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-943085-05-7

Published by:

CAST Professional Publishing

an imprint of CAST, Inc.

Lynnfield, Massachusetts, USA

Cover and interior design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

For Malc and Linda.

Without you, I wouldn’t be here.

Preface

This book is about applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in higher education contexts. It is intended primarily for those teaching in higher education, though it will be of use to anyone with an interest in learning, teaching, and assessment at any grade level—or in informal learning settings, for that matter—because the UDL Guidelines and principles apply wherever and whenever learning takes place.

An important part of becoming an expert learner, which is the purpose of UDL, involves achieving mastery over learning. The concept of mastering learning—that is, being able to apply a full range of practical and cognitive skills to learning content—is a central theme of the book. At its heart, this book is a hands-on guide on how to teach. It provides clear-cut, practical advice on how to support learners to master their learning and become expert learners in line with UDL’s key aim.

Since I am based in the United Kingdom, having spent my entire teaching career there, several of the perspectives, ideas, and examples presented are grounded in the UK higher education context. Despite the slightly UK-centric flavor, the ideas and examples presented are universally applicable.

In reality, reading this book alone probably won’t be enough for you to master UDL. Reading it, reflecting on the advice it provides, and then adopting and modifying the guidance and suggestions to your own context may eventually help you to master UDL. Developing mastery will depend, as it always does, on practice, revision, and more practice. It is important to remember that nobody ever arrives at the point of perfection when it comes to teaching. Learning and teaching are constantly evolving, as learners and their expectations change, and particularly as technological changes alter the way in which we engage, interact with, and support learners. Therefore, effective teaching is an ongoing, iterative process that keeps evolving and adapting to ever-changing circumstances and contexts. The advice in this book will help you to become well prepared for maximizing that ongoing, iterative process.

The book is split into four parts. Part I introduces the purpose and place of UDL in higher education, stressing why UDL is so relevant and so important to modern higher education settings. Part II introduces the core, underlying principles related to gaining mastery over learning, placing specific emphasis on how teachers can optimize the time we spend with our learners to support them to become expert learners. Part II also introduces the Cheese Sandwich concept of supporting learning, which essentially provides the vehicle through which mastery over learning can happen. Part III explores the design aspects of supporting learners to become expert learners, placing specific focus on the core components of effective accessible, inclusive, and equitable learning design. Finally, Part IV is about how to put all of the advice in the book together to help you create learning experiences in which learners can be supported to achieve mastery over their learning and subsequently achieve the status of expert learner. This part also includes advice and guidance on how to effectively evaluate teaching practice as part of the ongoing iterative process of effective teaching.

Each chapter closes with a list of references and recommendations for further reading. Where possible, you should consult these resources to support your further learning of UDL, and effective learning and teaching practices more generally. Each chapter also contains various activities, tasks, and resources to get you reflectively thinking about your practice in terms of where it is now and how it can evolve as you continue to develop your skills. I recommend that you complete each activity as you go through the book.

Teaching can be a challenging endeavor. That’s one of the reasons it is so rewarding. I’m not one for using crystal balls to predict the future, but I can confidently predict that you’ll face struggles and make mistakes as you develop your UDL learning and teaching practices. You will find some learners difficult, and you will have days where nothing seems to go right. This is an inevitability, especially if you have been teaching according to a different, less learner-centered methodology, as most of us have at some point in our higher education career. Don’t worry about mistakes or struggles. They are all part of the processes of adapting and improving.

I recognize that much of the information and advice in this book is idealized, making me sound like the perfect teacher, one who has always been able to seamlessly design and deliver effective learning experiences according to the UDL principles, with few challenges. Please understand that I am not the perfect teacher, I never have been, and I never will be—if indeed such things exist. I have faced many challenges and difficulties, and had many times where I wondered if teaching was the vocation for me. Let’s be clear: It’s totally fine to feel like that. Actually, it’s natural to feel like that, especially if you are new to teaching. Please do not think that you will be able to apply every piece of advice and every suggestion in this book and get it perfect at all times in every situation. It is unlikely that you will ever be granted the optimal time and resources to create consistently perfect instructional experiences. Sometimes, you just have to do the best you can with the time and resources you have. As Winston Churchill once said, Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.

Enjoy the journey!

Part I

UDL and Modern Higher Education

1

The Changing Nature of Higher Education

Changes in Demographics, Policy, and How We See the World

Universal Design for Learning is an especially timely subject for a few reasons. First, the increased participation in higher education of students from varied backgrounds and circumstances—economic, racial, ethnic, and cultural as well as disability status—has changed the way we need to approach the design and delivery of learning experiences. Globally, from 2000 to 2022, participation in higher education has more than doubled from 100 million enrollments to more than 235 million, according to UNESCO (2022).

At the same time, the participation rates in higher education of students with identified disabilities have sharply increased across Western countries. For example, in the United Kingdom, the number of postsecondary learners declaring a disability increased 47 percent between 2015 and 2020 (Hubble & Bolton, 2020). Some of this change is driven by demographic shifts, and some is driven by policy. Countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have strong legal guarantees to protect individuals from discrimination in higher education, including individuals with disabilities. Institutions in these countries have a legal duty to implement reasonable adjustments to ensure that learners with disabilities are not substantially disadvantaged when accessing education compared with nondisabled learners. Furthermore, governments are increasingly recognizing that physical access to the education spaces where learning takes place is only part of the challenge: Learners also need appropriate accommodations for learning, language, and intellectual differences.

Then there are the changes in work and career requirements. Growing skills gaps in the workforce mean that many working professionals are now required to engage, or reengage, with higher education as a means of developing new skills to meet demand. Furthermore, advances in technology and automation mean that many working professionals are required to rethink their careers as their jobs are transformed by technology or in some cases no longer required at all (World Economic Forum, 2020).

Given these changes, teachers can be fairly confident that the learners we teach will come from a range of backgrounds and will likely differ by gender, age, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation, and faith, among other things. They will also arrive at university with a wide range of previous educational experiences and a diverse set of learning needs. They will have differing levels of motivation and learning confidence as well as diverse emotional needs. Such diversity means that the way in which modern learners learn will be subject to extreme variability. Thus, learning, and of course teaching, must account for this variability from the start as part of the way programs, courses, modules or units, and individual teaching sessions are designed and delivered. There is no such thing as a typical higher education learner today.

Then there are student expectations. Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University has written extensively about the iGeneration or iGen, the generation born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s (Twenge, 2017). iGen’ers, as Twenge refers to them, represent the first generation to grow up fully immersed in a world dominated by high-tech developments such as the internet, smartphones, and tablets (Twenge, 2017). iGen’ers are hardwired to the internet as a means of connecting with the world in their own personalized ways (Twenge, 2017). As a result, personalized and customizable experiences are not just a nice to have for iGen’ers but the expected norm.

Many learners from the iGeneration believe that learning experiences should represent a seamless extension of their personal experiences, in which mobile devices play a huge role. As with many aspects of modern life, iGen learners expect learning to be available on demand, an experience that can happen at any time and any place—much like television, music, and shopping—and reflects their individual needs and preferences, with few barriers preventing or reducing their engagement.

As well as wanting personalization and customization, some learners may need to customize their learning experience to reduce or remove barriers. During a fascinating discussion, renowned UDL expert Katie Novak used a lovely café analogy to explain to me the importance of offering choice and enabling customizability to support learning. If a customer of a café or coffee shop wanted a coffee with milk but was lactose intolerant, and the coffee shop did not serve alternative milks such as soy, oat, or coconut milk, then the customer would be excluded from enjoying coffee with milk. A simple example, perhaps, but it clearly illustrates that barriers are environmental and contextual. In this case, the shop’s failure to provide alternative milks raises a barrier that makes the customer unable to enjoy their drink. The customer had a need and there was a clear barrier to that need being met: the absence of alternative milks. Such exclusions can happen in the same way when learners cannot meet their needs in learning situations due to environmental barriers.

This is where UDL comes in. At its heart, Universal Design for Learning (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014; Rose & Meyer, 2002) is a design framework that considers the variable ways in which different learners approach and engage with learning. Accordingly, a critical part of a UDL approach to learning, teaching, and assessment is to have a clear awareness of learner needs, preferences, and any barriers they may face to learning effectively.

UDL and Higher Education

This book has been influenced by and will hopefully build upon the growing literature on the application of UDL in higher education settings. In recent years, important contributions and resources in this area have helped support our understanding of UDL in college or university settings. Some of these works have focused on the strategies, tactics, and resources required for gaining institutional buy-in for UDL, as well as its strategic adoption and implementation (Black & Moore, 2019; Fovet, 2020; Fovet, 2021).

Similar work has sought to demonstrate best practices in UDL implementation in international settings, drawing on worldwide research to provide strategies for enhancing accessibility, engagement, and learning outcomes through flexible approaches to learning and teaching (Bracken & Novak, 2019). Other works have raised awareness of the universality of UDL, showing clearly how UDL benefits all learners, not just learners with disabilities (Tobin & Behling, 2018), and providing practical guidance for educators to apply UDL to their learning and teaching approaches. Other publications have focused on the perception of UDL among college and university staff and students in a variety of settings (Black, Weinberg, & Brodwin, 2015; Kennette & Wilson, 2019; Merry, 2023), with several works demonstrating the effectiveness of UDL in higher education settings (Davies, Schelly, & Spooner, 2013; Schelly, Davies, & Spooner, 2011; Smith, 2012). Furthermore, some excellent web-based resources, such as CAST’s UDL on Campus website (http://udloncampus.cast.org/home), have further advanced our understanding of how to apply UDL in higher education settings in terms of curriculum design, media, materials, and policy. This book assimilates all the knowledge and understanding from those resources, as well as that gained from many more sources, but with a focus on instructional design and delivery. This is a how to teach book that dissects the major parts of the instructional experience and reinterprets them through a UDL lens.

One note about terms: Throughout this book, you will encounter the terms program, course, module, and unit. For the purposes of this book, the latter three are used interchangeably. Each represents a unit of teaching that covers an individual subject for which learners experience a fixed schedule of classes or sessions typically lasting a term or semester. Learners must successfully complete an entire collection of courses, modules, or units to achieve an academic degree, which in this book is known as a program.

PAUSE AND THINK Without thinking too long or too hard about it, can you identify any potential barriers in the learning environments you create for your learners? Is there anything that forms part of the learning environment that could exclude any of your learners or prevent them from learning in the most effective way?

2

Universal Design for Learning

As described previously, the UDL (Rose & Meyer, 2002) design framework considers the variable ways in which different learners approach and engage with learning. A UDL approach to learning, teaching, and assessment requires a clear awareness of learner needs, preferences, and any barriers they may face to learning effectively.

The ultimate purpose of UDL is to support learners to become expert learners (Meyer et al., 2014). An expert learner can be defined as one who not only is able to master learning content by applying a full range of cognitive and practical skills to it, but also is aware of their own personal approach to achieving that mastery (as summarized in Figure 2-1). It is important to keep in mind that the UDL approach calls for separating the goals of learning from the means of achieving them. Therefore, if the goal of learning is to achieve mastery over content, then different learners will have a different means of achieving that mastery, which is why a UDL approach to instructional design embraces personalization and customization, as discussed in Chapter 1. (Note that this book uses the terms goals and learning goals interchangeably with the terms outcomes and learning outcomes. These terms all represent the same concept—the things learners must know or be able to do as a result of their learning.)

Figure 2-1. Two prongs of expert learning

A second important characteristic of UDL and its aim of supporting learners to become expert learners is the role of metacognition as an inherent part of the learning process and experience. Becoming aware of one’s own personal approach to achieving mastery over learning content is effectively about learning to learn, a critical skill in becoming an expert learner as well as a required skill for lifelong learning. Hence, UDL supports learners to learn effectively not only in the here and now on the units and programs they take as part of their higher education experience, but also in their endeavors beyond higher education.

Although UDL originates in neuroscience, because this is a how to teach book I’ll keep the neuroscience light. Becoming an expert learner is related to three connected, interdependent neural networks in the brain: the strategic, recognition, and affective networks (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Thinking about the three broad networks can be helpful when designing instructional experiences. UDL recognizes that no two brains will be identical with respect to the three networks, and intentionally targets the variability within each network.

Specifically, the UDL framework recognizes variability in engagement, or the why of learning (affective network), which is related to learner interest, motivation, persistence,