Book Review: Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education

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Book Review: Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education
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Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a powerful strategy for increasing access and inclusion in the classroom. The classroom can be face-to-face or online. In the book, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling shared a way for individual instructors to adopt UDL principles as well as a way to increase adoption across campus.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is 325 pages long. The authors have arranged the eleven chapters into three main sections:

  • Where We Are Now
  • Reframing UDL
  • Adopt UDL on Your Campus

Where We Are Now

The first section of the book focused on the current status of UDL. The authors pointed out that UDL is an adaptation of the universal design strategy that we all benefit from. When the doors automatically open for us as we enter a store, we have to thank universal design. We can also thank universal design when we don’t have to fight with curbs. By making intentional tweaks to how we create instructional content, we are creating content that more people can access. We are increasing inclusion.

“By adopting UDL principles in our course design, we greatly reduce the need for specific accommodation requests” (Tobin & Behling, 2018, p. 5).

The authors added that requests for accommodation are a result of poor course design.

Not only is making your course more accessible a good thing, but it is also the law. However, that should not be the reason that you improve access to your course content. You would think that you would want everyone in your course to learn and benefit from the content that you have curated.

Reframing UDL

Tobin and Behling began this section by focusing on mobile learners. They shared that the digital divide is narrowing due to the number of mobile devices found in the hands of students. The problem is that instructors may not have designed course content with mobile devices in mind. Have you ever gone to a page on your phone and had to stretch the page in order to view it? Then you can understand this problem. We need to design with mobile users in mind. This is not wasted energy because, fortunately, mobile users will consume instructional content if it is designed well.

The authors shared countless strategies for designing content that caters to digital learners. One of the concepts is easy to learn and will take care of a majority of accessibility issues. This concept is called the Faculty Four:

  • Alternative text
  • Captioning and transcripts
  • Document formatting
  • Accessible resources

If you implement these strategies, you will clean up most of your accessibility issues and reduce requests for accommodations.

Another idea that I really liked was the “20, 20, and 20.” What could you do to improve your course with UDL principles in 20 minutes, 20 days, and 20 months? The authors provided many different strategies. Two that stood out to me included finding “pinch points” and providing supports and choice to mitigate them. The other was to audit your course to see if there was a text-only path through your course as well as a multimedia path through the course.

“UDL is not about making learners cycle through variety but, rather, about providing choices so learners can decide how they want to experience interactions” (Tobin & Behling, 2018, p. 125).

At the end of each chapter, the authors shared a thought exercise. Most of the exercises encouraged readers to put what they were learning into practice.

Adopt UDL on Your Campus

The last section of the book focused on how to increase the use of UDL across the curriculum. While I really appreciated the ideas to help individual instructors, I was more interested in how to scale this across the campus.

Tobin and Behling put together a strategy that I am going to attempt to put into action. The plan is scalable starting with forming a small team and later expanding this to a train the trainer model. They also look to incrementally expand from one assignment to one course to a full program. They also extended their approach to one teaching modality—online, before going campuswide.

Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone provided me with a wealth of ideas and resources that I can use to help my faculty. I am looking to take my efforts to the next level. If you are an instructional technologist, you need to pick up a copy of this book. You will come away with a better understanding of how to implement UDL.

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Additional Reading

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

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