This course is called ‘Shifting from Systems to Interactions with UDL’. UDL stands for Universal Design for Learning, and it is a framework for creating interactions that provide learners with more ways to get (and stay) engaged, more ways to take in information, and more ways that they can take action, express their knowledge, and have greater agency and control over how they learn.
Before we can make changes that lower technology-access barriers, we need to understand where our online learners perceive those barriers, and how to think through what an effective response might look like. UDL helps us to do just that. Although it began as a set of strategies for the face-to-face classroom, UDL becomes a powerful approach especially when we are designing our offerings for people who will use technology to support, mediate, or facilitate their learning.
In this course, you will learn what UDL is and practice how to use its principles to address access gaps across the various technology tools and systems that we use for online teaching, training, and interactions.
Learning Outcomes
The goal of this course is to examine the systems that we all rely on in online teaching and training to identify the barriers that everyone who uses them encounters regularly. As a result of participating in this course, you will be able to
- define the three principles of universal design for learning (UDL) and
- analyze your organization’s information-technology (IT) systems for opportunities to apply universal design for learning (UDL) principles.
Who Should Take This Course
‘Shifting from Systems to Interactions with UDL’ is intended for instructors, designers, and administrators who teach online or use technology as a part of their learning environments.
Get Involved And Share Your Learning
- Share your perspective. Throughout this course, you will see discussion prompts at the end of each lesson inviting you to share your thoughts and experience. We encourage you to respond to these discussion questions and read those of other educators to benefit from theirs. When you see a comment you agree with or find helpful, hit the ‘Like’ button to help other educators find it. You can also reply to any comments from other members that you find interesting.
- Ask a question. You can ask questions of experts and other educators in the discussion threads in courses.
- Pick up your course badges. To earn your Course Completion Badges make sure you mark all lessons as ‘Mark Complete’ once you have completed a lesson. At the end of the course, click ‘Mark Complete’ and you will be asked a few multiple-choice questions to earn a Course Completion badge. Once you’ve had a chance to apply your learning, come back to complete an Impact Badges by applying what you have learned in the courses and answering a short survey.