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Stan Skrabut: Well, thanks for taking the time to come out, hang out with me on this beautiful fall day. I know you can be doing other things, you may be doing other things, but you’re also hanging out with me and it certainly means a lot. Last week, I said that we would be talking about mastery quizzes this week. Well, it’s fall, it’s football season. I’m calling an audible and instead I’m going to take a look at this wonderful book called Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design For Learning in Higher Education.
This is a book that I think all educators should be reading. I also need to declare that all my book reviews are tied to affiliate marketing. I do make a couple of pennies if you happen to buy the book through the link that I provide, but you will not have to pay extra. The cool thing about affiliate marketing, it allows me to support all these different projects that I have going on. This book is about universal design for learning. You know how many much that I really enjoy universal design for learning. I have talked about it before.
Matter of fact, episodes 8 through 10 are focused entirely on universal design for learning, and I encourage you to check them out. You can find links to them in the show notes, which I have provided. Universal design for learning or UDL is a way to increase access or inclusion to course content. It doesn’t matter what modality you’re teaching in, face-to-face, online, if it’s blended, it doesn’t matter. The idea is you should be providing access to your content, and this is what the authors Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling noted in their introduction.
The whole book is about increasing access to content. Well, a lot of folks think that universal design for learning is about accessibility, it’s about folks who are disabled and need accommodations, and we need to change that mindset. I’m totally on board with what Tobin and Behling have indicated, that we need to change the mindset where instead of focusing on accessibility, we’re focusing on access. This means we get the content out to more people in the way that they want to receive this content, that you are providing usable content for all your learners.
This is being where the content you are providing access, and that’s where it is. There was one thing that really jumped out at me when I was reading this book, and that was when they said, “By adopting UDL principles in our course design, we greatly reduce the need for specific accommodation requests.” This is huge. Basically, accommodation requests come from poor course design, and we can control that. When you get to the college level, not all accommodations are going to be declared. Not everyone who has a handicap, a disability is going to declare it.
For example, odds are I probably would not declare that I can’t see as well and I can’t hear as well. I’ve simply gotten older and the wheels are falling off, but I’m probably not going to declare that. I’m probably not going to go to disability services and say, “Hey, I need a special accommodation,” but If instructors built their courses correctly and put together their content with making access a focus point, then, I don’t have to declare it because I can get the content in the way that’s going to help me learn. That’s a key part of this book.
One way that you can start approaching this idea of universal design for learning is to do a quality review, especially if you’re doing online courses, you really should do a quality review. This gives other people who happen to specialize in course design to take a look at your course and help you with strategies on making your course content more accessible to everyone, that you can handle this. One of the other reasons that I resonated with that the authors talked about, was this move to mobile learning.
We’ve always heard that there is a digital divide, that some people have computers, other people don’t, some people, they could use these computers to support their learning and other folks couldn’t. Well, this digital divide has gotten narrower because of the smartphone, that if somebody was struggling for dollars, and they had to decide between buying a computer or getting a smartphone, odds are that they’d probably go get the smartphone. That’s because it has more capabilities. It’s going to allow them to make calls, it’s going to allow them to interact with the internet, it’s going to allow them to also get to their course content, maybe.
I say maybe because a lot of the instructional content that I see put into course is not mobile-friendly. It doesn’t take into consideration this idea of mobile learning, but students are busy and they’re going to try to learn any way that they can. They’re going to try to view your course on their mobile devices. You may be able to say, “You can’t. You should look at my course with a computer,” and they are going to push back and say, “I have this mobile device, I need to be able to see your content on this mobile device.” Frankly, the number of people having mobile devices is staggering.
They’re talking over 86% into the 90 percentile that have a smartphone or other mobile device that wants to see your content. You pretty much need to listen to them. If it was the business world and your data said that most of the users come to view your site with a mobile device, you would darn make sure that they could see that content on a mobile device so they can make the sale. Higher education is no different. We need to make sure that our content can be seen on a mobile device.
Have you ever pulled up a phone and you went to a website on your phone, and here you are, you have to stretch the screen in order to be able to read things and you’re sliding the screen back and forth in order to read what’s going on and you get frustrated? That means it’s not mobile-friendly. That means we have work to do. We need to make sure that we look at our content on a mobile device and make sure that it’s ready for those learnables or for those learners. They want information that is snackable. They are very active people.
They have families, they have jobs, they are coming into the classroom with other obligations, but yet they’re trying to squeeze in school at the same time. They are trying to learn in the margins. When they’re sitting there waiting for a dentist, they may be pulling up information on their phone and want to be able to view this content and not disturb everyone around it. Therefore, not only if you’re showing a video, which is great, but you need to also make sure that the video has a closed caption or transcript so the individual can consume that information when they need to also be quiet.
We’ve talked about this in other episodes, and I will certainly link to them in the show notes. One of the cool things about preparing your content for a mobile learner is you will increase access and inclusion. This is tied very much to universal design for learning. This book, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, it is 325 pages long. It’s arranged in three parts with 11 chapters. Those major parts include Where We Are Now, Reframing UDL, and Adopting UDL on Your Campus. Their purposes for putting out this book, basically they’re trying to achieve three things.
One, they want to reframe how universal design for learning is perceived. I’ve already talked a little bit about that. They’ve outlined strategies for implementing UDL principles in courses. They’ve also shared strategies for implementing this at a larger level, say, across your whole campus. I personally think that these authors achieved their goal. This is a book that I get excited about. That’s why I wanted to get it out to you and talk about this. Let’s talk about reframing UDL. After reading this book, I am more convinced about the power of UDL to improve courses.
If a course cannot reach students, the course is disabled, not the student. The course has the issue, not the student. We need to switch the mindset. If they cannot get to your content, if they cannot understand your content, if they cannot access your content, there’s a problem with your content. Those are things that we can fix. That’s easy. In this book, they provide countless examples where things have broken down or the approach wasn’t as smooth as it could be. I would encourage you to look at all these different case studies and different strategies that they’re talking about, and also where these breakdowns occur. That’s certainly throughout the book.
Basically, if a learner cannot consume your content in a way that is best for them, more needs to be done. We need to go out and make some adjustments. We’ll talk about those in a few seconds because we’re not talking a major overhaul. That’s exhausting, but we’re talking incremental improvements and focusing the improvements on where the need is most important. I’m a huge fan of Pareto’s principle, 20/80 rule. If you have something that’s giving 80% of the problems, fix that. That’s where they’re taking off from. It is also this idea of fixing the item that’s giving the most problems first.
I picked up a lot of strategies while reading this book. I’m pretty savvy about this idea of universal design for learning and how to apply these different strategies in different settings. I still picked up lots of great ideas., lots of different tools that can help me do this idea of plus-one and we’ll talk about that. How to add something new to your course that helps learners see it in just a little different way. Now, I’m not going to kid you, anytime that you are adding something to your course it takes a little bit more time. I won’t kid you about that but you’re going to benefit by the time you save later when your students get it and they are not bothering you with questions.
You’re going to switch this time and be able to use it in a different way. The reason that we’re not jumping on this is there’s a lot of faculty out there that do not see the value of these type of improvements to their course. They believe that what was good for them is good for their students. Most of them haven’t really had any formal instruction in pedagogy or andragogy in the classroom. They just go based on what they learned and how they learned it. What they fail to recognize is that they are not normal. They have a master’s degree. They have a Ph.D. They’re really not normal.
Matter of fact, they’re two, three standard deviations away from normal. They are the exceptions to the rule. The 10% out there that managed to get to that level of education.
That’s not where the average folks are. These average folks are using mobile devices. These average folks haven’t bought into why the discipline is important and why these methods are important. They haven’t bought into this. We have to be out there using these universal design for learning principles to help convince them that the material’s important and how to use the material to go out and excel in that discipline. We need to go there.
How do we implement this? This is the part of the book that really excited me because of all the different strategies that they shared. They’ve really stepped through them pretty cleanly. These are ideas that I will certainly be taking back and trying to implement on my own, but also working with faculty as I move forward. One of the focuses is on providing choice. This is very central to universal design for learning. It’s about choice and support. One of the focuses is on providing choice. To move into that they talk about this faculty four, which is a very simple principle.
With the faculty four, you’re focusing on four different things. One, alternative text. If you put an image in a document, there needs to be an alternative text with that image. If you put an image on a website, there needs to be alternative text to that website, so you have choice. I can see the picture or I can read the description or caption related to that item. It’s not very hard, but you’d be amazed at how we don’t do this well. I was just recently reviewing some websites where this wasn’t done well and it’s a very simple thing to do. We just have to do it. We have to think about it when we are in the moment and so that makes it easy.
Accessible documents. Using Microsoft Word, using Google Docs, we just need to make sure that we use the tools in the right way. That we use the list. That we use headers. That we don’t try to mark the text up with other styles that are trying to illustrate something but a text reader couldn’t see. There’s a simple way of checking this. In Microsoft Word, there’s an accessibility checker. There’s also an accessibility checker available for Google Docs that you can go look at your document really quick and it will tell you what the accessibility is for that and gives you an opportunity to check it. We just need to get in the habit of doing it.
Number three, captions, transcripts, audio descriptions, that we need to go in and spend a little bit of time making sure that there is a closed caption for a video or audio file or a transcript available for those particular files, especially if we don’t own them. It’s not hard to do. Yes, it does take a lot of time. That’s where you need to make a hard decision because what you could do is you can set an audio file, which I do to a service like GoTranscript, and with GoTranscript, they’ll kick back a transcript to you and then you can include it with what you’re doing.
I do this for all my videos. I make sure that I have that transcript available because it’s important. When folks are trying to watch your video and they happen to be on a bus because they’re going to a sporting event, but yet they want to do their homework, having that closed caption is important to them. We talked about closed captions and their importance in other episodes, it’s just something you have to do.
Accessible third party resources, that’s the fourth one. Going out and getting the voluntary product accessibility template. Making sure that if you are having a product in your class, that everybody can use the product. Otherwise, you’re going to retrofit your class. You’re going to have to find a different way and that’s just going to be harder. Taking the time upfront to make sure that everybody can use the product is really important. That’s the faculty four.
Then they started talking about the 20-minute UDL strategies and this is pretty simple. You are looking for opportunities to make an improvement to your course that only takes a couple of minutes to do. Where you can find this is, number one, pinch points. What is a pinch point? Well, if students are coming up to you after you give a lecture and asking you questions because they didn’t understand something, that’s a pinch point. If you’re getting e-mails from students asking for clarification, that’s a pinch point. If you’re reviewing a test and you’re seeing the majority of your students are getting something wrong, that’s a pinch point.
What you need to do is go improve that content. You can improve the content by rewriting it, add additional information. You can also create maybe another modality, that you create a video or you created an audio file to talk about that pinch point and add clarity to it. Another place to look is single streams. A single stream is, you’re looking at, say, your online course and you notice that all you do is add text content. Well, you can also look for alternative ways that described the same information. Perhaps a video or an audio file that you include in your course.
Now you don’t have to create all these, the internet is, there’s all kinds of content out there. You just need to find the right content. You can also have your students create content for you. Make it an assignment. We’ll talk about assignments a little later, but they could create a video talking about one specific thing. You can have a list of all the videos you need created and then put them out as assignments and have students create that. That’s another way of doing this.
Now, in addition to the 20-minute section, they also have 20 days. With 20 days, you would do this a little more formally. You would map out your course and look at how information is being displayed and look for alternative ways to add content, to add clarity. Then they go into 20 months. That they extend this out to 20 months and basically then, you’re going back and looking at the data. What content was used? Why weren’t some things used and other things were? Are there still pinch points? All this you’re going to look at it in the 20 months. Those are definitely a couple of strategies that you can use. We’ve talked about this 20-minute strategy.
Another strategy is plus-one approach. The authors of the book emphasize over and over throughout the book, you do not have to go in and do a massive overhaul on your course, it will kill you. You will not have a pleasant experience, so just don’t do it. Instead, look for these opportunities to tweak what’s broken. Look for these pinch points. Look for areas where you can make an improvement by adding a different modality. Where are the learners stuck, and how can you help them better understand this content? Look for opportunities to explain something in a different way.
Another strategy that they also talked about was expanding the assignment or the one assignment. If you have an assignment, and a lot of assignments are, “Write a paper” because you want to see what they know on a specific topic. Why do they have to write a paper? Could they make a video? Could they create a presentation? Could they create a play? Could they create a podcast? Why would it have to be a paper? That’s taking that narrow thought of it has to be in this mode or this modality, instead, you think about what are the other ways that they could do it?
You can create a single rubric to grade multiple different ways that it’s being turned in. You could create a rubric that not only grades a paper but also grades a video and grades a presentation and grades a podcast if you’re asking for them to demonstrate their knowledge on a topic. There’s nothing magical saying it has to be turned in on paper unless it’s for a specific type of course where the writing of the paper is essential, but I’m confident that for a lot of courses, there’s other ways that they can turn this content in to you, and it makes it more entertaining for you.
Those were different strategies they talked about at length about how to implement this into your course. For the latter part of the book, they talked about how to expand the UDL to the rest of the campus. Different ways they’re talking about it is actually pulling together people who are interested in this. Building a UDL team where you’re constantly adding new faculty to this and increasing the membership over time in order to teach these principles. Part of that is using that team and providing training to that team. Once again, just use them as train-the-trainers and just keep layering on faculty and keep giving this training out.
Another strategy that they also had in there was going from enhancing a course or parts of a course to a full course and then maybe to entire program, then possibly entire departments, and the entire campus. Those were some of the strategies they talked about there. They talked about them at length, but I was more excited about just how do I implement this at an instructor level, at a course level? That’s the focus where I want to go with this. As far as recommending this book, I will keep this book by my side and refer to it certainly often as I help faculty improve their courses.
I think it’s a natural extension to the quality review processes we are currently using. Those will be in the show notes also. Without reservation, I would recommend this book to other educators. It talks about universal design for learning in higher education. I think they hit the mark. I’m really excited about this book. You definitely should check out Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, from Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling. Speaking of books, here’s a plug for my book, Read to Succeed.