This week I had the good fortune to speak with Nigel Davies, an instructional technology consultant at Appalachian State University. Nigel has been an educator at various levels for more than 30 years in both K-12 and higher education. I had the pleasure of seeing Nigel present at the Lilly Conference in May on Universal Design for Learning and Instruction. In this episode we discuss Nigel's approach to UDLI and the benefits and challenges he's experienced in approaching his teaching in this way. 

Show Notes:

• Practical Implications of UDLI in Higher Education
  
• AACU Employer Survey
• Perry, William G., Jr. (1970), Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston).
  
• Perry, William G., Jr. (1981), "Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The Making of Meaning", in Arthur W. Chickering and Associates, The Modern American College (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass): 76-116.

Years ago when I was teaching high school U.S. History, I had a challenging student in my class – let’s call him “Michael”. I could tell that he was a bright kid, but I couldn’t get him to really engage with the course content, discussions, projects, and especially tests. To make matters worse, he was a natural leader. Unfortunately, because he wasn’t engaged, this meant that his apathy was contagious. It wasn’t until one day that I noticed him doodling on his desk that I was able to reach him. Rather than simple graffiti on the desktop, he had drawn what I would characterize as a very insightful political cartoon, connecting a course topic (I can’t remember what now) with current events. I came to find out that he had a notebook full of similar kinds of doodles.

As time went on, I subtly tried to encourage Michael to continue his drawings and to share them with me. We had several conversations after class about what he found interesting – always with a focus on connecting what we were learning inclass to issues and events that were important to him. By the end of the year, he would regularly share some of his drawings with the rest of the class. He once even gave a mini lecture on a topic he was particularly interested in. What was the difference? He became engaged in the learning process. I was able to tap into his interests and encourage him to make the learning relevant.

As discussed in the initial post in the series, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a framework to help educators consider ways to engage diverse learners with course content and experiences. The UDL Center offers three principles to accomplish this challenging approach: provide multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. In the last two posts in the series, I explored principle 1 and principle 2. In this post, we tackle the final principle – multiple means of engagement.

Increasing student engagement
The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) outlines three strategies for educators to use to provide multiple means of engagement:

• provide options for recruiting interest, including optimizing individual choice and autonomy, optimizing relevance, value and authenticity, and minimizing threats and distractions
  
• provide options for sustaining effort and persistence, including varying the demands and resources to optimize challenge while fostering collaboration and communication
• provide options for self-regulation, including helping students to self-assess, reflect on their work, and develop personal coping skills and strategies
  

You may see connections here with the first two UDL principles. This principle often works in concert with the other principles to not only support, but engage students in their learning. Building on a previous post related to student engagement, the following strategies offer additional means to engage students in their learning.

5 strategies to provide multiple means of action and expression

1. Connect course topics with bigger ideas
   At times, we don’t explicate how specific course topics connect with bigger ideas. This prevents students from seeing the forest for the trees – and may present a barrier to the students engaging in the topic. If we can tie topics to the big ideas, controversies, challenges, and impact areas of our discipline, students will be more likely to buy in.
2. Create ties between the course and the real world
   Similar to the first point, students aren’t always able to see how course topics connect to the real world. Through explicit connections to real world issues and concerns, and more importantly, when we ask students to make these connections in their assignments and projects, they are drawn in to the experience. Problem-based learning, case studies, and service learning experiences are all powerful pedagogical strategies to bring this to life in and outside the classroom.
3. Increase course relevance through student choice
   It is easier to invest in and expend more effort in learning when the learning is personally relevant. The more that we can provide students with choice in their learning, the more engaged they will become. Through choices related to research topics, tools to organize and share their understanding, and the process in which they complete their work, students will find the course more relevant.
4. Leverage self- and peer-assessment
   Not only is self-regulation a key 21st century skill, it can help students to engage with and improve their learning. When students are prompted in structured ways (e.g., using a rubric) to assess their own work, they can begin to identify and work on their weaknesses and capitalize on their strengths. When you add in peer-assessment to the mix, students can be motivated to an even greater extent.
5. Consider badges in your courses to increase active participation
   The gamification of higher education is a controversial idea, but one worth exploring in my opinion. The idea of creating and recognizing achievements in a course or program through digital badges or some other form of recognition can be highly motivating for students. This approach draws on our students’ interests and motivation outside of school to increase engagement and motivation in learning. While challenging to implement, this approach can help students sustain effort and persistence over time.

While engagement is clearly important, the specific strategies can be harder to put your arms around. These guidelines from the UDL framework can help to provide some concrete directions to draw more of the “Michael’s” of the world into the learning experience.

How do you try to draw students into the learning experience in your courses?
Please post your comments below.

My high school English teachers helped me build confidence in my writing. While handling course material in my undergraduate program challenged me, I was at least confident and proficient in my ability to express my ideas in writing. For many students, however, written work may not allow students to accurately convey their mastery of course content. With the increasing availability of digital tools that enable students to create content in multiple forms, why not expand the means by which students can present their work?

As discussed in the initial post in the series, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a framework to help educators consider ways to engage diverse learners with course content and experiences. The UDL Center offers three principles to accomplish this challenging approach: provide multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. In the second post in the series, I explored principle 1. In this post, we tackle principle 2 – multiple means of action and expression.

Flexibility in engagement and production

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) outlines three strategies for educators to use to provide multiple means of action and expression:

• provide options for physical action, including multiple ways to interact with course materials (adding annotations, hyperlinked navigation, etc.
  
• provide options for expression and communication, including different mediums for students to present their ideas (writing, blogging, video, concept maps, artwork, etc.)
  
• provide options for executive functions, including strategies for students to monitor their own work and metacognition

Used in isolation or combination, these three strategies can remove potential barriers for students and help them understand new ideas more clearly.

5 strategies to provide multiple means of action and expression

1. Provide students with divergent opportunities to explore concepts
   In my own teaching, I have a tendency to think of myself as the sole curator of course content. My selection of texts and readings guides student work. In reality, though, students often find very interesting and rich resources on their own. Why not build in the expectation that students will be more active in exploring course concepts on their own? Perhaps by requiring students to not only read the required materials in the syllabus in preparation for class, they can also identify a complementary reading, video, or other resource that they could either contribute to the class or at least summarize. This active exploration both encourages students’ ownership of their learning, but also helps them to develop those critical lateral thinking skills.
2. Video
   Young adults are creating, sharing, remixing and commenting on video in their personal and social lives at an amazing rate (reference). Why not leverage this natural interest in the service of learning? Perhaps rather than writing a persuasive essay or report, students could have the option to convey their understanding through a video that they create? The work could be assessed using the same standards for written work (e.g., quality of evidence, clarity of thinking, etc.) but would serve to open up an option that students might find more engaging or compelling. The ability to share their work online can provide significant additional motivation for producing high quality work.
3. Challenge students to create non-linguistic representations
   Images, charts, and diagrams can all provide rich and divergent ways for students to express their understanding. This can be done in pen and ink, but also in a digital format. 
   Concept maps provide opportunities for students to illuminate how concepts are organized or connected. As I noted in the last post, one of my favorite Web-based tools to create concept maps is Mindmeister which enables the collaborative development of concept maps. These concept maps can be printed or submitted electronically through a learning management system.
4. Guided research support
   Research is a critical skill in any discipline. And while students are often engaged in research projects beginning in elementary school, they are often so structured and supported before they arrive in college that they may not have confidence in planning, organizing, and seeing their work through to completion. One strategy that can be very effective to help students develop these critical self-regulation skills is in what I would call guided research support. I’ll go more in depth with this in a future post, but the core idea is to give students broad guidelines, but have them wrestle with fleshing out the detailed process. Along the way I provide them with guidance to help them clarify their thinking. Rather than providing them a clear blueprint, though, I give them nudges as they struggle to make sense of the process for themselves. Shared OneNote notebooks can be a really efficient and effective process for this two-way dialogue on process.
5. Learning logs
   Learning logs are a less structured way for students to monitor their thinking, capture questions as they attend lectures or complete course readings. It’s important that the students choose the format, tools and approach to this kind of learning diary. They have to enjoy the process to get the most out of it. It might be in a nice Moleskine notebook, through a Web log or even an audio recorder on their phone. The important thing is that they learn to process their thinking in the learning process. 

There is nearly no limit to ways that students can express their understanding and learning to monitor their own thinking and work. The ideas expressed here merely scratch the surface. I hope, though, that they get you thinking about what might work to support the students in your courses. 

What strategies do you use to provide students with multiple ways to express their understanding or take control of their learning?
Please post your comments below.

How is course content typically offered for students in college courses? At the risk of oversimplifying, text and lecture come to mind. This is a common pattern in both K-12 and university classrooms. This singular view of sharing course content is both unnecessarily limiting and can create barriers from many students. As we better understand the science of learning, we recognize that offering new information in multiple formats can be helpful for students. How then can we operationalize this idea systematically in our teaching? 

As discussed in the initial post in the series, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a framework to help educators consider ways to engage diverse learners with course content and experiences. The UDL Center offers three principles to accomplish this challenging approach: provide multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. In this post, we tackle principle 1 – multiple means of representation.

One Message – Multiple Means

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) outlines three strategies for educators to use to provide multiple access points to course content:

• provide options for perception, including the use of graphics, animations, and video to make course concepts more clear
  
• provide options for language, mathematical expressions and symbols, including providing specific supports to introduce new vocabulary, connections to previous understanding, and access to content in multiple languages where possible
  
• provide options for comprehension, including “highlighting patterns, big ideas and critical features of course content”

Used in isolation or combination, these three strategies can remove potential barriers for students and help them understand new ideas more clearly.

5 strategies to provide multiple means of representation

1. Highlight key features with annotated documents
   One key difference between expert and novice learners is their ability to identify the “big ideas” in course readings (I remember as an undergraduate history major highlighting every other line of text in course readings). Through long training and experience, faculty are able to pick out what is essential from a reading much more efficiently than students. We can help to train students to identify these key features by modeling our thinking by occasionally providing annotated readings. I do this with research studies in my doctoral courses. With a “marked up” article that I’ve analyzed, students can see what key elements an “expert” looks for in critiquing a study. This can be easily accomplished with hand-written notes either photocopied or displayed on a document camera, or via a Word or PDF document using annotation features. 
2. Emphasizing key points in lectures
   Similarly, it can be difficult for students to identify the most critical points of a lecture. When I use slides, I often use key colors or bold or underlined fonts to draw attention to key concepts. The same can be accomplished by writing key words or pictures on the whiteboard as well.
3. Utilize concept maps to identify patterns
   One of the most helpful ways for students to see patterns and connections among and between course concepts is to offer them (or encourage them to create) graphical representations of how ideas connect. Concept maps, either hand drawn or created with specialized software, can visually represent complex systems and connections. One of my favorite Web-based tools to create concept maps is Mindmeister, which enables individual or collaborative development of concept maps.
4. Leverage digital and audio books
   All students read differently. While many students still prefer traditional printed books for college courses, digital versions of books allow for customization of font size and style, the ability to look up unfamiliar words as they read, and the ability to highlight and add notes to the text. For other students, audio versions of books may help them both understand and retain the information more effectively. 
5. Consider open educational resources
   Open educational resources are Web-based resources that are freely accessible and open for use in educational settings. OER can include a wide range of digital media related to course content including video, audio, interactives, and animations. Through a Creative Commons License, many of these resources are available to embed in courses requiring only attribution. 

These ideas are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. Many of these strategies are probably not new to you. I hope, though, that the organizing framework of UDL will help you to more strategically and systematically provide multiple means to offer course content. 

What strategies like these do you use in your teaching?
Please post your comments below.

Students in our classrooms today are increasingly diverse – in all senses of the word. In terms of age, professional experience, cultural and linguistic background, socioeconomic level, and even in their rationale for obtaining a university degree – students vary in many important ways. Add to this demographic diversity the fact that every student has a unique profile of learning styles, preferences, abilities, and challenges. I’m not sure it has ever been more challenging to be an educator at any level. That said, this challenge can be invigorating as well. When we acknowledge and work to capitalize on this diversity in our classroom, we are challenged to reconsider how we teach in ways that will require us to be creative and innovative in our teaching practice. But where do we begin?

It can be daunting to consider the magnitude of this challenge. Fortunately, as with 21st Century Skills and the 21CLD framework, CAST and the National Center on Universal Design for Learning provide numerous resources on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to help educators at all levels to address student diversity in the classroom. This approach to planning learning experiences encourages educators to plan in advance for different learning styles and preferences to meet the broadest range of learner needs possible in the classroom. The framework is centered on three core principles:

1. Provide multiple means of representation
   
2. Provide multiple means of action and expression
   
3.  Provide multiple means of engagement

UDL Guidelines from CAST.org (2009)

CAST provides a handy interactive chart to explore these three principles. They essentially challenge educators to consider how they might present content in multiple modes and formats to students (e.g., lecture, video, animations, simulations, etc.), provide students with multiple ways to express their understanding of course content (e.g., papers, performances, presentations, community outreach), and multiple ways to engage them in the learning process (e.g., to connect course concepts to current events in the community). It is not necessary (or perhaps even possible) to include all this variation in each class session, but the more diversity in learning and assessment during the course of the semester, the more likely you will tap into each students’ individual strengths, while simultaneously challenging them to stretch themselves in other ways.

While initially developed for K-12 education, UDL has been implemented effectively in higher education as well. In recognition of the unique opportunities and challenges of UDL in higher education, CAST has created the UDL on Campus portal for higher ed faculty. There you will find resources on assessment options, policies and legal information, selecting media and technology, course planning, and teaching strategies.

In the next three posts on Luminaris, I’ll explore each of the three UDL principles (provide multiple means of representing the content, multiple means of expressing understanding, multiple means of engagement). In each post, I will go more in depth on the principle, strategies for implementation, and how digital tools and resources can help you to implement them more efficiently and effectively in your classroom. This is a work in progress for me, but something I’m committed to exploring – both to improve my teaching and my students’ learning.

If you have any experience with or questions about UDL in the classroom, please leave a comment to start a conversation.