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Hello, everyone. I’m Tom Tobin, your host for this OneHE course, Shifting from Systems to Interactions with UDL.
As you are thinking about the technologies that you use at your organization to mediate or host interactions with your learners, consider that technology both overcomes barriers and creates new ones.
In face-to-face learning interactions, we all have to be in the same place at the same time, or we can’t collaborate and explore together.
Enter remote and online technology that allows us to be physically distant but connecting in real time (like video-conferencing software), or allows us to be truly asynchronous (kind of like the materials, interactions, and video content in this course, actually).
But the affordances that allow us to shift away from place-bound and time-bound learning also create new access barriers: now we must all have sufficient Internet bandwidth, as well as devices that can handle the materials and tools that we adopt.
To help reduce these new barriers, we can adopt an interaction-based mindset and design our content and interactions to be as tool-agnostic as possible.
I’m talking about the principles of universal design for learning, or UDL, which are to provide learners with multiple means of:
- engagement (the ‘why’ of learning),
- representation (the ‘what’ of learning), and
- action and expression (the ‘how’ of learning).
By adopting UDL, we are designing for people who are at the margins in terms of access, so that nearly everyone can take part in the interactions that we create without having to ask for special considerations, accommodations, or supports.
And UDL reaches far beyond just lowering barriers for learners with disability barriers in their environments it helps us to reach those learners on their mobile phones using the free wi-fi at their local cafe, too.
In this course, your big take-away should be that while our technology systems and tools may be more or less accessibly designed, that accessibility, by itself, is not enough to lower access barriers for learners and for us.
We must intentionally examine how we use our systems to support more inclusive engagement, information, and agency for our learners.