Making Assumptions

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)….

Scaffolding

Scaffolding

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…

Informing as A Starter Step in UDL: Lessons From Singapore

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…

Access

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…

Circles

“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…