Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles for curriculum development that gives all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone—not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.

 

Instructors have the opportunity to empower online learners to be more independent by incorporating UDL in their online course designs. Working proactively to ensure content is readily available to learners can save instructors time and effort for more relational and academic content interactions. Read more about UDL guidelines and see specific examples of how to start incorporating this approach in the following module content.

 

When students enter our course, they have differing abilities. Sometimes this is referred to as a "jagged profile." If we think about ourselves, we can identify things that we do academically that take little cognitive effort, while other things are really consuming. All people have this. With these differences come differences in the way that the students get information, the way that they connect with content, and the way that they show what they know. However, many times in classrooms, those needs and differences are disregarded, and all students are expected to learn the same way, produce the same things, and have the same background knowledge. UDL as a framework can help us develop curricula, select materials, and create learning environments that take into account the wide variability of learners. In some cases, it can be easier to implement UDL online because there are many different digital tools that can easily be built into the framework of the course that may be harder to integrate into a face-to-face setting.