In the marketplace we call our society, where you can buy 37 different types of yogurt, toothbrushes for anyone from infants to budgies, where scanning and shopping and choosing can actually overwhelm us, and where we consistently feel the pressure to stand out from the crowd, any suggestion of providing options can feel that same…
This week’s blog post is dedicated to the assumptions we make when we are planning our courses and designing our activities. A pivotal feature of Universal Design for Learning is ANTICIPATING VARIABILITY. We try to anticipate variability so that we can design for the margins (the folks who would otherwise struggle to access learning opportunities)….
This week’s blog post is about scaffolding, one of my favourite topics, favourite ways to support instruction, favourite puzzles, and favourite way to work some magic. And now that I am a UDLer at KPU, I get to talk about scaffolding from a course design perspective, which frankly, is where this discussion belongs. When people…
How was my summer? My summer was great because I got to travel to and through Singapore. Since I travelled to see and stay with a very best best friend (my heart, walking around outside my body) I got treated to special and secret places. We scooted down fragrant paths in Tiong Bahru, walked over…
The first level of a Universal Design for Learning framework is the access level and that makes sense; learning can’t happen if you can’t see, hear, pay attention to, read, or speak. The roots of UDL trace, in large part, back to neuroscience research (Reid Lyon, 1985; Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014) on students with…
“We were never meant to be squares. We are circles and circles with Creation.” It was a member of the audience who, with soft urgency, reminded everyone in the room whose heads had swiveled. I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2019 conference for CACUSS (Canadian Association for College and University Student Services) in…
by: Dr. Seanna Takacs Let us say that you have heard of UDL and have an interest in making some modifications to your curriculum. You may have students whose learning needs have confounded you. They may be language learners or may have accommodation plans that you struggle to implement. You might have had a class…
by: Dr. Seanna Takacs When I begin to explain Universal Design for Learning to any audience, it is often received as paradigms and theories are: with quiet reservation until the audience can see where the rubber hits the road. What does this mean for my teaching? What does this mean for my time? How will…