We asked our faculty and staff at the University of Limerick to give us examples of how they have implemented Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In this example, Dr Yvonne Cleary, School of English, Irish and Communication, discusses how she gave her learners choice in assessment, and the effect it had on her and her students.
"For the students this really has been a really positive change because it means that those who maybe find writing more difficult have other ways of showing that they've learned and yet they're still stretching themselves and they're still meeting the learning outcomes."
Transcription:
I teach Technical Communication and Instructional Design and a big part of technical communication is about accessibility so actually, we already do a lot of work to make sure that our materials are accessible. We would have closed captions and write in plain language and add alternative text to images and so on.
So when I did the UDL badge I thought I guess that I knew most things and that I was really just getting accreditation for my skills but I discovered as I was learning more and more that actually I had a lot of changes still to make on my modules.
The one change that I made and that really worked for me was to enable alternative means of expressing learning so prior to doing the badge I had always expected all students to do exactly the same assessment and I thought that that was fair and reasonable but actually as I went through the materials and learned more I realized that it's not really fair to expect everyone to express their understanding in the same ways.
A good change would be to enable the peers in their groups to give each other feedback either through recorded feedback or through text which I had been previously only enabling so now students can record their feedback in audio and the discussion forum as well as or instead of typing their text and this is really intuitive for some students so it's a really good way for them to give feedback. So that was one change that I made enabling alternative means of expression that really worked.
The impact has been minimal in one sense in that I haven't had to make any changes to my materials, I just enable students to give an alternative means of of expressing their learning or an alternative mode of assignment so it hasn't added any extra work for me.
I guess the pleasure in having multiple means of expression is that you get to review different types of assignments and as a teacher that makes the prospect of grading more interesting so that's been a positive impact for me personally and for the students.
I've gone on to implement this particular change in several modules so sometimes students would previously have had to write an essay, now they can write a blog post or they can maybe do an online presentation instead.
For the students this really has been a really positive change because it means that those who maybe find writing more difficult have other ways of showing that they've learned and yet they're still stretching themselves and they're still meeting the learning outcomes.
So it's still really working as a learning experience and activity for them and I think most of all what's positive about these changes is that because students choose what means of assessment they're going to to take for any given assignment they really have more ownership of their learning and I think that they're happier with the experience.