Mental Health and UDL
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Mental Health and UDL

BySeanna Takacs

According to this report, students are confiding in Faculty about mental health struggles, particularly in the last year around COVID, and questions continue to arise around how to help students who have. In my discussions with Faculty around both UDL and accommodation planning, mental health disabilities come up frequently. Absences, episodic symptoms that see students…

Building an openly-licensed “course in a box” in a month
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Building an openly-licensed “course in a box” in a month

By, Arley Cruthers, John Grant, Seanna Takacs and Peg Fong

A group of KPU’s Applied Communications & Public Relations (ACPR) instructors and Dr. Seanna Takacs, Educational Consultant for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in KPU’s Teaching & Learning Commons and Accessibility Services, teamed up this summer to respond to a unique Call for Proposals issued by BCcampus: to develop an open online course (OOC) within four…

Belonging

Belonging

BySeanna Takacs

One day, during my work in The Commons, our effervescent and eternally helpful communication and events specialist, Kathy Leung asked me if I ever stop thinking about inclusion. And the answer is probably no, never. There are a bunch of reasons for that. Some are private, some public, and many political. I thought I’d share…

An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

BySeanna Takacs and Lilach Marom

Three Ideas Intro Like many of you, our last few months were jam-packed with learning new teaching tools, attending webinars, and designing online courses. It was and is still a time of societal and educational crisis that demands learning on-the-go. We are appreciative of the leap of faith that KPU faculty and administrators took in…

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Engagement is Not a Drive-Through

Bylmccannell and Seanna Takacs

This week, Lesley and Seanna have teamed up to share some new thoughts on engagement. In the right hands, amazing things can be done with online activities, discussions, and assessments. The BIG DEAL though: yours are not the only hands. Engagement is grown by everyone in the class by taking our time in knowing and…

Compassion

Compassion

BySeanna Takacs

When pandemic planning hit and things shifted online, I started paying attention to words. I have a deep, if narrow interest in historical ontology – the way we generate kinds of people as we devise classifications (Hacking, 1996). For instance, I started my career in remediating students with dyslexia. That term morphed into language-based learning…

UDL Myths

BySeanna Takacs

It’s been ten months since Universal Design for Learning hit the streets at KPU (at least in a formal sense whereby an individual with the requisite skills, knowledge, and experience was hired as an Educational Consultant in UDL in the Teaching and Learning Commons). A lot of solid, interesting work has already been done in…