Title: Universal Design for Learning
Course: Digivisio - DEMO course template > Section: Accessibility

The easiest way to have accessible materials is to create them accessible to begin with. When designing materials, one good starting point is the Universal Design for All (UDL) principle.

UDL consists of three main principles:

1. Representation
2. Action & Expression
3. Engagement

Representation

Educational institutions, especially universities, often give out learning materials as text, which can be challenging for many learners for different reasons. In addition to text, there should be other formats for materials, such as images, videos, audio files and so on. In general, each topic should have more than one way of representing it. A relatively easy way to make a longer text accessible is to make sure it also works with a screen reader, which means the learner can listen to the text if they need to (and the teacher does not have to read it out loud themselves). Videos should have subtitles, or the learners should be given a script to read.

If possible, learners should be encouraged to actively connect the new things with what they have already learned through e.g. reflection tasks, as well as to encourage sharing their knowledge with others.

Action and Expression

When receiving the learners’ assignments, it would be good to have several different ways as well. Essay is a traditional way to show competences, but its importance has decreased rapidly with the rise of the generative AIs. The more ways a learner has to show their competences, the better – but of course the teacher’s workload must be considered here, too!

Instead of an essay, could a learner demonstrate what they have learned through a podcast, video lecture, group task, poster (paper or digital), learning event for the other learners, handbook etc?

You should also vary the ways you give feedback: instead of/in addition to written feedback, video/audio feedback would be useful for the learners who struggle with reading. This can be very time consuming if done individually, but giving an entire group video feedback instead of text adds variety and does not take very long.

Engagement

As we all know, learners learn better when they are engaged with learning. It is important to make it clear to the learners why they are studying or practicing a certain topic. How is this connected to what they are studying or their future careers? It is also good to give learners options, within limits, of course. Once the learners know the learning goals, they most likely have several ways of reaching them. Can they choose here? They should also be encouraged to continuously reflect so that they can connect what they already know with what they have just learned, and sharing these reflections with the other learners is also useful. Although learners sometimes complain about group work, group also has strength and working as a member of a group will part of nearly every learners’ profession.

Universal design for learning