UDL... and You!

Universal Design for Learning: Make Your Life Easier!

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Meetings to go to, articles to write, research to analyze, lectures to prepare, projects to grade—so many faculty feel overwhelmed by work that the National Education Association (NEA). Higher Education Advocate devotes most of the current issue to the "overload epidemic," offering advice from Douglas Reimondo Robertson, author of Making Time, Making Change. It's not surprising, then, that as much as we are committed to our teaching, we eye any new program warily, and are doubly chary of programs like Universal Design for Learning (Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which ask us to rethink our pedagogy and redesign our courses.

What maybe surprising, though, is that UDL suggests some of the same techniques that the NEA identifies as time savers.

For his first principle, efficiency, Robertson recommends using course management systems like iLearn to their full extent. UDL values these systems because the internet is the great leveler. Users can make the type smaller or larger, or have the computer read the text for them. (And while text readers are essential for blind students, they've been shown to enhance learning for some sighted students as well.) Students who find it difficult to keep track of papers or dates can get what they need from iLearn without troubling the teacher.

Even if you've never used a course management system before, you can begin to take advantage of iLearn almost immediately. Academic Technology offers quick guides and short workshops on iLearn and we have developed simple procedures for making your documents and PowerPoint shows accessible.

We can also make our lives easier, Robertson says, by sharing responsibility, including student dyads and small group work. UDL practitioners have found that that "study buddies" and small groups help engage students and deepen their learning. With information on tutoring, Disability Resources and other support services on the syllabus and iLearn site, students will be able to find their own help.

A few other UDL techniques take no extra time but pay off with increased accessibility and learning. Captioned videos, a necessity for deaf students, make it easier for many other students—non-native speakers of English, those with minor hearing loss—and may help all students if the film includes people with unfamiliar accents. Just facing students and speaking loudly enough increases comprehension.

These techniques provide a good start, but won't make your course completely accessible, so rely on values clarification, another of Robertson's principles, to identify where to start and how to allocate your course time. What concepts are most important to the course? Which of these do students have the most difficulty with? Which do you have to cover over and over again? Turn to UDL strategies to find new ways to approach these key concepts. Teaching them effectively the first time will prevent frustration, and should in the end save you time.

Still don't think you have time? Of course, we do make time when we have to. Under the old approach to disability, we accommodated students as the need arose. The first week of class, you might find that you have a deaf student, so you'd have to scramble for a captioned copy of the movie you always show, and prepare written notes on your lecture so that the interpreters can keep up. With UDL, you won't have that last minute scramble and you'll be helping all of your students ... and yourself, too.

Amy Love is a CTFD Faculty Associate, member of the Ensuring Access through Collaboration and Technology (EnACT) Faculty Learning Community, Lecturer in the English Department, and the co-author of Changing Society: Readings for the Engaged Writer, available this fall from Pearson Prentice Hall.

This article originally appeared in The Garden Volume II, Issue 2: March 2008

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