Universal Design for Learning

This section offers suggestions to help you meet the needs of a variety of diverse student learners through Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices.

What is Universal Design for Learning?

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a pedagogical framework developed to enhance accessible learning and create more equitable opportunities for academic success. While accommodations processes in higher education are typically based on a medical model of individualized adaptations, UDL is informed by a social model of disability, which identifies and challenges ways in which the design of the learning environment itself can be disabling (Rose, Harbour, Johnston, Daley, & Abarbanell, 2006; Hills, Overend, Hildebrant, 2022). At the course level, UDL provides guidance for instructors to address barriers to learning by assuming variability among learners as “the rule.” As such, UDL promotes inclusive practices by multiplying the ways in which students access materials, engage with learning, and express skills and knowledge. (UDLonCampus, CAST). By taking a proactive approach, UDL strategies may work with or reduce the need for retrofitted individualized student accommodations.

UDL has been applied to diverse disciplines, course contexts, international cases, and can readily connect to goals and practices of other inclusive pedagogical approaches that consider a range of diverse social identities (Laist, Sheehan, and Brewer 2022; Shea Sanger 2020; Novak and Bracken 2019). Research on UDL implementation at the course level, shows that strategies can increase students’ sense of empowerment and enhanced success (Kumar and Wideman 2014).

If the learning experiences in higher education are “not designed to meet the needs of all students, without the need for adaptation, then our institutions, classrooms, our curriculum, and our teaching are disabling.” (Novak and Bracken 2019).

Developed by researchers at CAST, the UDL approach is not a checklist of strategies but has guiding principles that act as a “blueprint for creating instructional goals, assessments, and materials that work for the widest possible range of learners.” (UDLonCampus, CAST). The guiding principles of Universal Design for Learning suggest that instructors are firm with the learning goals but create flexibility for diverse learners through multiplying the paths to achievement. In implementing UDL, researchers suggest that faculty can try a “Plus One” approach, that provides one more way for a learning interaction to happen, rather than trying to adopt everything at once (Tobin and Behling 2018). Faculty are advised to start with where students ask the most questions, have the greatest challenges, or request the most support (Tobin 2021). In reviewing the guidelines below, instructors may recognize that they already implement some of the strategies in their own teaching approach and may find additional ways to develop their UDL practice.

The three guiding principles of the UDL framework are:

1. Multiply the means of Engagement

Engagement in a UDL framework is about creating multiple ways to connect with “The Why of Learning”, that is, enhancing how diverse students relate to the purpose of learning and sustain motivation in the course. Strategies include:

Creating a welcoming environment by posting encouraging messages on MyLS throughout the term
Selecting materials and connect lessons with diverse cultural or career relevance for students
Offering students a choice of topics on readings, essays, or presentations
Providing students with a choice of assessment dates (complete 3 of 4 quizzes, tutorials, or reflections)
Increasing opportunities for feedback cycles to encourage achievement

2. Multiply the means of Representation

Representation in the UDL framework involves increasing the ways to access the “The What of Learning”, that is, presenting the information or disciplinary content in a variety of formats. The intention to ensure that all learners have equitable access to the same information. Strategies include:

Selecting learning materials or create lessons with video, audio, or reading options
Providing captioning on presentations (turn on captions in virtual settings or subtitles in in-person PowerPoint presentations)
Providing video, audio, or transcripts of lectures
Creating a Discussion Board, where students sign up for a week to share their class notes on MyLS
Sharing slide decks in advance of class

3. Multiply the means of Action and Expression

Action and Expression in a UDL framework refers to offering options for students to express “The How of Learning”, that is, designing assessments so that students can demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. Strategies include:

Providing students with a choice of live or recorded presentations
Providing students with a choice of assessment format, such as podcast, infographic or factsheet.
Making extra time for completion of tests or assignments for all students, where time is not relevant to the learning outcome.
Offering students an opportunity to choose the number of people to express learning on an activity or assignment (alone, pair, or group)

Explore the complete CAST UDL Guidelines

How can Universal Design strategies support students in notetaking and study skills?

Notetaking is an important activity in The Study Cycle which distributes and reinforces learning over the term. In the Study Cycle, students engage in a process that instructs them to prepare for a lecture or class with a preview of the materials, followed by highlighting and organizing information during the class through notetaking, and then to reconstruct, review, and make further connections post-class to enhance recall for future assessments.

To support quality notetaking, instructors can share one or more notetaking formats or templates from which students can develop their notes in diverse ways. By having different options through which students can share their notes, including via drawings or audio recordings, students are invited to represent and communicate information they are learning in varied ways that can help to create an inclusive learning environment for all students. Examples include:

Instructor-designed skeleton notes or handouts with prompts for students to develop in further detail.
Templates that organize the information using the Cornell method, to quickly capture and reinforce main ideas, or a T-chart to list advantages or disadvantages or opposing perspectives.
Visual approaches such as Venn diagrams, to focus students on similarities and differences between 2 or more ideas or theorists; mindmaps or concepts maps to show relationships between concepts, causes, impacts; or more creative approaches, like sketchnotes.
Audio recordings with transcripts that summarize lectures or class discussions.
Students can use digital tools with templates from Office365 like Whiteboard or PowerPoint, or use Word for writing or audio recording with transcription functions, or can handwrite notes and take a picture to share with others on MyLS.

Instructors can share Student Success supports available to students to further develop their approaches to notetaking skills, for example, the Academic Skills (ASk) Certificate includes a workshop on Notetaking 101 and Review: The Study Cycle. Invite your students to learn more from resources about the Forgetting Curve and study cycle.

Notetaking is often considered an individual activity left to students to develop their approach on their own. This individualized approach is also commonly applied to notetaking accommodations. Adopting a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) lens to evaluate and reconceive of notetaking approaches at a class-wide level can help instructors address barriers in the learning environment and support all students through proactive steps to maximize equitable access to academic success (CAST 2024). UDL approaches to notetaking can also help support students through unanticipated short-term absences that arise based on students’ diverse circumstances.

With UDL, class-wide notetaking approaches can become a part of the design and practice of the course itself, supporting students by enhancing accessibility and inclusion, developing important academic skills, or building the learning community.

Regardless of the approach taken, by talking to students and informing them of the class-wide approaches you are taking to notetaking as a part of their study cycle, students can better understand that notetaking is not about capturing every word to store in their files for a future review (with an imagined period of unlimited available time!) but a skill for synthesis and evaluation that can deepen their learning and ultimately their academic success.

Instructor-led approaches to Notetaking

In these approaches, instructors offer one or more additional ways to represent the learning of the lecture to all of the students in the class in the study cycle. For example:

Preview: Posting and sharing the PowerPoint Slides and/or key questions connected to the readings or materials in advance
During Class: Providing guided lecture notes that include an outline, blank spaces for completion, or a series of questions to be answered throughout the lecture
Review: Providing video, audio, or transcripts of lectures on MyLS post-class to fill in gaps from live class notetaking and making connections across the term

Student-led approaches to Notetaking

With student-led class-wide approaches to notetaking, students are encouraged to take part in quality notetaking practices that reinforce student learning, offer diverse representations and expressions of in-class learning, and create interdependence and mutual support for success, (i.e. “I create notes and contribute to learning for peers as they will also do for me”). By making these approaches to notetaking a part of the learning outcomes, activities, and assessment strategies, students can develop and value the academic skills involved in notetaking, participate in collaborative learning, and can more readily engage in a study cycle that prepares them for success.

Rotating Notetaker or Class note Sharing

This approach is also called the “rotating notetaker assignment’ (Maier 2016; Gravett 2021). Students sign up for a week where they take the responsibility of a class notetaker who then shares their notes with the entire class, in an effort to build community, accountability, and peer learning through comparison. The number of notetakers in any given class will depend on the number of students in the class but consider a minimum of 2 in order to have more than one set of notes for each class. For larger classes, this could be organized by tutorial sections or alphabetical by last name. Instructors may also set up a maximum to ensure a relatively equal number of notetakers each week.

On MyLS, the instructor sets up a Discussion Board Topic called “Class Note-Sharing” and organizes the threads by date (Week 2, Week 3, etc.) Students are then able to upload their notes into their assigned date, making them available to all students in the class.
In the first week, instructors ask students to sign up using a shared Excel sheet through OneDrive. To share the Excel sheet with students, follow the sharing instructions in the Strategies and Technologies section of this page.
Share any notetaking templates or formats that you would like students to take and will expect as a part of the assignment.
Consider setting a timeframe such as 24-48hrs after the class to submit the notes.
Assign a grade (for example 2%). This could be as a part of their larger class engagement grade (2 of a total 10% for example) based on their contributions to peer learning. You could also set quality expectations to earn the grade, for example, notes that are uploaded and are simply a reproduction of information on the slide alone does not achieve the assessment goal.

Collaborative Notetaking

Collaborative notetaking coordinates groups or pairs of students to work together to create a set of notes that is made available for the whole class. In the shared document, assigned peers develop the notes by enhancing details and examples, through correction or addressing any gaps, or contributing to organization of essential information, including identifying key connections or creating summary points. Through this approach, students have a structured opportunity to benefit from the value of collaborative learning with peers while developing foundational study skills for academic success (Laal and Ghodsi 2012).

As an assessment, this activity can be connected to a learning outcome that involves a synthesis of the lecture topic, including identifying main ideas, relevant examples, and making comparisons or connections within the class or across classes. Student participation in this approach can be limited to one class or week in a semester, expanded to a choice of weeks (4x in a semester), or as a practice and demonstration of engagement in every class.

Collaborative Notetaking is most effectively implemented when instructors explicitly discuss expectations, roles, and purposes of the collaborative notetaking approach (Harbin 2020) and create pauses in lectures for students to review and make revisions with their partners (Luo, Kiewra, Samuelson 2016). This approach can provide an effective alternative to recorded lectures, particularly for virtual synchronous courses, and offer instructors a valuable opportunity to gain insights into student learning during the course (Patson 2021; Harbin 2020). Instructors can:

Incorporate any templates, skeleton notes, or charts that provide students a starting guide.

Advise students to consider different roles to begin the notes before they begin revisions and additions. In a group of three for example, one student may focus on the instructor; another on student comments or examples (where necessary); the other on organization and formatting.
Post copies of completed notes or link to completed notes to MyLS for all students to use.
Use the notes documents to check for student understanding of material, what is identified as most significant and where examples have resonated.
Turn on track changes in the Review tab in Word so that they can view the authors of the contributions.

Setting Up Collaborative Documents for Notetaking and Sharing

To share links to Microsoft documents with students from your OneDrive create or save the document in your OneDrive folder. Open the document and click the coloured Share box at the top right of the toolbar. You can either share with individual students by pasting their emails from MyLS or the whole class.

To share with the whole class:

Open the document and click Share in the top right corner of the toolbar.
Next to the words “Copy Link”, click the Settings “Gear” Icon.
Choose “People at Wilfrid Laurier with the link” from the options and then at the choose between “Can View” and “Can Edit” in the More Settings at the bottom of the box. Click Apply and copy the link.

To share with groups of students:

Insert student emails from class list into the sharing text box. You can copy and paste student emails from MyLS classlists.
Next to the box you pasted the student email into, change from “Can View” (eye icon) to “Can Edit” (pencil icon) from the drop-down menu to the right of the emails. The link will be copied to your clipboard and ready to paste however you’re sharing it.
The instructor shares the link with class on the MyLS Discussion Board also organized by class session.

Creating Accessible Notes and Documents

While diversity of notetaking methods can be valuable to demonstrate ways in which students represent learning and information, introducing students to accessible formatting and practices (such as headings, alt-text, or audio transcripts) can support a range of learners’ engagement with their notes. Encourage students to use accessible document guidelines and turn on Microsoft’s built-in accessibility checker while they work to resolve accessibility issues in documents in real time.

The top four ways documents can be made accessible are:

using the style headings and subheadings
making links accessible
Creating accessible lists to organize information
adding alt-text to images, tables and graphs, and using equation editor for math.

Find more Laurier resources about making documents accessible.

How Can I Apply Universal Design Principles to Make My Course Content More Meaningful for All Learners?

Including Information in Formats that Can Be Easily Adjusted by Students

Providing students with content in Word or PDF format allows them to adjust the size of the document to improve its legibility. Even when you have created a narrated PowerPoint recording, also providing students with a link to the original PowerPoint file means that they can change colours and font sizes in ways that support their learning or vision needs. Ensuring that images, charts, and graphs are high-resolution so that they don’t pixelate when blown up is also helpful.

Resource

Customizing how Information is Displayed

Offer a Variety of Formats

Where possible, make an effort to provide your content to students in multiple formats so they can rely on the formats that work best for them. For instance, if you make a video for your course, ensuring that the video is captioned and is accompanied by a text transcript will allow students to engage with the content through a variety of means. Zoom can be leveraged to record asynchronous course material with automated transcripts and captions. Whether you’re delivering course content, providing a demonstration or technical instruction, or interviewing a guest speaker, anything you record can be quickly published to students in that course and be fully accessible with an automatic transcript and captions.

Microsoft introduced automated live captioning functionality to PowerPoint shows, which you can turn on while you’re lecturing synchronously to automatically live caption your classes. Look for the “Subtitle” options in the Slide Show settings, and find more information in this guide from Microsoft.

To set up a Panopto space to use to record vidoes: Laurier instructors can record right in their browser and get their videos captioned and share with students using Panopto in MyLS. Look for access in your MyLS course or visit Laurier's SSO Panopto portal to get started.

To set up a Zoom space to use to record vidoes: Schedule the meeting you’ll use to create the recording through the Zoom Meetings tab in MyLS, but make it a private meeting with no one in it so you can record on your own. You’ll be able to be seen, heard, share your screen, annotate content, and draw on the digital whiteboard and everything will be captured in the Zoom recording. When you’re finished recording, simply stop the recording and Zoom will start automatically transcribing your video. So long as your Recording settings in Zoom on the web are set to create “audio transcript”, everything you record in Zoom will be transcribed.

Include Multiple Ways to Access Information

If there are different opportunities for students to access the same information, providing multiple options reinforces what’s important and allows students to choose what works best for them. For instance, you might offer students an article, video, and infographic as different approaches to understanding the same concept.

Resource

Illustrating through Multiple Media

How Can I apply Universal Design Principles to Make My Assessment More Meaningful for All Learners?

Give Students Some Control Over the Format of their Work

We often default to particular assignment types in our classes and expect that all students will show what they know in the same way. Allowing students more options to show what they know allows them to demonstrate their knowledge in a way that works well for them. For instance, if the focus is to have students plan a process, allow them the flexibility to choose to write a paper, develop a presentation, make a video, create a poster, or design an infographic to deliver their process, so they can demonstrate what they know in a format that works for them. The fundamental focus on developing a process is the same, but students have choice in how they demonstrate it.

Resources

Multiple Tools for Construction and Composition
Universal Design Resource: Multiple Media for Communication

Give Students Some Control Over the Topic of their Work

When possible, allow students to choose how they focus their work to help them build a sense of ownership and increase their interest and engagement. If the focus of an assignment is on a particular kind of output (such as writing a report or creating a business plan), allowing students to choose a topic of interest for the report or a kind of business they might want to start one day can give them more control while still demonstrating that they can do the necessary work.

Resource

Individual Choice and Autonomy

Give Students Some Control Over the Timing of their Work

When possible, allowing students to choose the timing of their work can help them to build effective plans around the timing of their various courses and develop skills around time management. If the focus of your assessment is a large project or piece of writing you could offer a few potential hand-in dates based on different content points through the term. With smaller pieces of work, like quizzes or discussion posts, you can use the strategy of “best 5-of-7,” for example, to build some flexibility for your students so that they can manage their course load around other commitments.

Use UDL Rubrics for Grading

Assignments that offer multiple ways of completing the work can be graded using UDL rubrics. These rubrics focus on assessment points that apply to a variety of assignments, such as:

The quality and innovativeness of the idea;
Clarity of expression or presentation;
Relevance to course concepts; and
Depth of evaluation or application.

This section was modified from Niagara College’s Centre for Academic Excellence, Design, Develop and Deliver: A Guide to Effective Online Teaching, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.

Resources

UDL Graphic Organizer: Multiple means of Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression
Watch TEI's Universal Design for Learning Playlist for recordings and panel discussions about strategies to implement UDL principles in your course.

References

CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org
CAST (n.d.) UDL on Campus: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. www.udloncampus.cast.org.
Bracken, S., & Novak, K. (Eds.). (2019). Transforming Higher Education Through Universal Design for Learning: An International Perspective (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351132077
Hills, M., Overend, A., & Hildebrandt, S. (2022). Faculty Perspectives on UDL: Exploring Bridges and Barriers for Broader Adoption in Higher Education. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotlrcacea.2022.1.13588
Kumar, K. L. & M. Wideman. (2014). Accessible by Design: Applying UDL Principles in a First Year Undergraduate Course. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 44(1):125-147. http://DOI:10.47678/cjhe.v44i1.183704
Laist, R., Sheehan, D. & N. Brewer (2022) UDL University: Designing for Variability Across the Postsecondary Curriculum. CAST publishing.
Rose, D. H., Harbour, W. S., Johnston, C. S., Daley, S. G., & Abarbanell, L. (2006). Universal design for learning in postsecondary education: Reflections on principles and their application. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 19(2), 17.
Shea Sanger, C. (2021). Inclusive Pedagogy and Universal Design: Approaches for Diverse Learning Environments. In C. Shea Sanger & N. W. Gleason (Eds.) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education: Lessons from Across Asia. Springer Singapore Pte. Limited. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1628-3
Tobin, T. (2021) UDL Plus-One. Youtube video. UDL plus-one - Thomas Tobin (youtube.com)
Tobin, Thomas J., and Kirsten T. Behling. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press.

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