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It defines the successes of students at UNK, whether in the humanities, sciences, education, or business.
Rich tradition. Bright future.
Curriculum at UNK is designed to be student-centered and intellectually challenging, while preparing students through field and internship experiences.
Taking care of business
We provide value to Nebraska by preparing students to compete in dynamic professional environments and by promoting academic, social, technological and economic development.
The following sessions will be available during the UNK Universal Design for Learning Day.
8:30 am – 10:00 am – NSU Ponderosa Room
By attending this presentation, you will be able to
help your instructor colleagues to incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) elements into their learning spaces;
design/retrofit your existing learning interactions using UDL principles;
implement strategies specific to UNK offerings, especially in programs with heavy practice-based components; and
expand your institution’s use of UDL elements beyond the legally-required minimum in order to save yourself and your students time, effort, and frustration.
This presentation uses active-learning techniques and provides use-them-now resources for participants. Especially by relating UDL to broader access benefits for all learners, this presentation’s activities serve as a model for participants to re-frame accessibility and inclusion conversations.
To help make educational materials and practices inclusive and useful for all learners, this interactive intro-level presentation radically reflects on how instructors and course designers can adopt Universal Design for Learning in order to create learning interactions that provide students with more time for study and practice in their busy days: broaden our focus away from learners with disabilities and toward a larger ease-of-use/general-inclusion framework that respects the ways in which adult and career-focused learners engage with our institutions.
This presentation will introduce you to Universal Design for Learning, especially as newly revised for higher education (CAST, 2014). You will discover how to implement UDL in the design of your course and service interactions across the technology-mediated spectrum, creating spaces for best teaching and support practices to take place—in the classroom and beyond. This is best accomplished through an incremental approach, using a “next 20” series of milestones—achievements that can be attained in the next 20 minutes, 20 days, and 20 months (Tobin & Behling, 2018).
You’ll also find out where to look for help at your institution and in Canvas: recent research from CAST and the Center for Universal Design in Education suggests that institutions whose faculty-support staff members use UDL, too, see better adoption rates and deeper penetration of UDL principles across all courses (CAST, 2014; DO-IT, 2015).
This presentation posits diversity in its most inclusive form: instead of relying solely on providing accommodation services to learners with disabilities—which is most often a last-minute, ad-hoc, reactive process—adopting UDL as part of an institution’s culture of course design, teaching practices, and support services allows all learners to benefit, regardless of their place on the ability spectrum.
You will leave our presentation with practical, hands-on strategies for expanding access to learning and increasing your chance of success in the classroom, hybrid environments, practice-based programs, and in remote teaching—outcomes for which we have 30 years of evidence-based practice and research (Fonosch & Schwab, 1981; Fichten, 1986; Nelson et al., 1990; Houck et al.,1992; Bento, 1996; Benham, 1997; Bigaj et al., 1999; Cook et al., 2009; Murray et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2010; Lombardi & Murray, 2011; Murray et al., 2011).
10:30am - 12:00 pm – NSU Ponderosa Room
Over the years, we’ve had a robust conversation about why accessibility is a noble goal for colleges and colleges (Ableser & More, 2018). Despite our common challenges of fragmented service silos, unclear compliance definitions, limited human and financial resources, and lack of guidance from campus leadership beyond meeting legal mandates, we would be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t think that making content accessible to the broadest possible audience is the right thing to do.
We would also be hard pressed to find many people who are expert in exactly how to make accessibility a reality across campus. Sure, we have laws in place, as well as industry standards and working groups and advocacy efforts. But still, at the end of the day, we also have lawsuits, and our dark secret is that almost none of us feels, deep down, that our institutions are yet fully compliant with the basic legal requirements, let alone ready to say publicly that we are accessible institutions.
Campus leaders seem—almost uniformly—to think about instructors and course offerings when they think about accessibility and inclusive design (Borghans & Golsteyn, 2015): how can professors make classes more accessible? When presidents and provosts think of other aspects, they invariably add the institution’s web site in terms of video captioning and image alt-tagging (Brown, 2018). This low-hanging fruit encompasses only the maintenance tasks performed by the most powerful accessibility players on campus: the staff.
IT, library, and academic support units are in the best position to influence how all college constituents experience systems, processes, content, and tools (Burgstahler & Vinten-Johansen, 2017). We should adopt universal design for learning (UDL) as we design interfaces, procure and purchase staff tools, and support inclusive-design initiatives on our campuses (Bowery & Houston, 2017). We have great language to use in conversations about accessibility (Moriarty, 2018), lofty goals about providing access to education for everyone (Thompson, Jenkins, & Campbell, 2018), and strategy-level milestones to target. But how do we actually do it?
The colleges that are furthest along in their accessibility efforts tend to have staff leaders who share certain practices. They typically chop off the end of the word “accessibility,” focusing their efforts on expanding access, regardless of the ability profiles of their learners. They shift their goals away from making content accessible and look instead at making interactions easier to engage in (Cullen, 2018). And they have largely moved beyond the mental model of universal design (UD) in the physical environment, which is static, bounded, and predictable—instead designing interactions according to UDL, which sees interactions as dynamic, open, and emergent (DeSilva, Nemeroff, & Lopez, 2017).
That’s all advanced-level accessibility, though. What most of us are after are starting points.
Rather than starting with CAST’s neuroscience-based three brain networks and multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression, a more manageable starting point is “plus one” thinking (Tobin, 2019). For now, think of the interactions that your student-support operation offers to people, and think of how they might interact in just one more way than happens now.
This session will take the format of a guided-practice presentation, with the first ten minutes reserved for open idea gathering and experience documentation, the next 50 minutes formatted as information sharing among the facilitator and participants, and the final 30 minutes will be for planning and take-aways.
This session will provide multiple ways to keep participants engaged (solo, collaborative, and interactive), multiple ways to present information (slide visuals, video sharing, text-chat, spoken audio), and multiple ways to join the conversation and show skills (video, text chat, self-guided reflection). We will use active-learning techniques and provide use-them-now resources for participants. Especially by relating UDL to broader access benefits for all learners, this session’s activities serve as a model for participants to re-frame accessibility and inclusion conversations.
1:00pm – 2:30 pm – NSU Ponderosa Room
Based on 30+ years of evidence-based practice and research, this leadership-focused session provides department, unit, and campus leaders with core-business reasons to adopt the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework in order to increase student persistence, retention, and satisfaction. Providing learners with even 20 more minutes for study and interaction during their busy day can be the difference between struggle and success.
By attending this session, participants will be able to
define how UDL considerations change at the institutional and system-level scales;
create action plans for UDL along three strategic pillars of access, inclusion, and predictability; and
attract funding, resources, and time for systemic UDL application and assessment.
Most of us know how to implement universal design for learning (UDL) in individual activities, courses, and service interactions. But how do we go from having a few people who know a lot about inclusive design to helping everyone to know and practice a few keystone practices based on the UDL framework?
In this interactive session, you will learn how the principles and checkpoints in the UDL framework translate into action plans for UDL along three strategic pillars of access, inclusion, and predictability. You will take away models for attracting funding, resources, and time for systemic UDL application.
Our session will begin by situating UDL in the neuroscience of how humans learn. Because UDL is couched in social-emotional learning research, it is a useful “middle ground” between a rigid curriculum and differentiated instruction. In individual interactions, the three principles of multiple means of engagement, representation, and action & expression lead to the 31 checkpoints of access options (recruiting interest, perception, physical action), building options (effort & persistence, language & symbols, expression & communication), and internalization options (self-regulation, comprehension, executive functions).
At scale, the broad goals of UDL remain: creating expert learners who are purposeful, motivated, resourceful, knowledgeable, strategic, and goal-directed. However, instead of thinking in more granular terms, system UDL addresses fewer, broader, more strategic goals: learner persistence, retention, and satisfaction. As focus shifts from individual applications to systemic practices, UDL leverages the power of defaults and applications move beyond the classroom and formal teaching-and-learning interactions. We will examine how UDL creates tension between individual academic freedom and countervailing benefits of access and predictability.
Implementation of UDL at large scale requires re-framing, so that practitioners know the core values and strategies to implement, and can exercise flexibility in doing so. The strategic pillars of access, inclusion, and predictability tie back to UDL’s broad goals.
Access to interactions is a foundation-level pillar that supports diverse, and equitable systems. The pillar of inclusion focuses on sharing the benefits of teaching, research, and scholarship throughout institutional service areas and beyond our traditional borders to enhance the holistic development of learners by combining learning in and beyond the classroom that is steeped in the values of the institution. And the pillar of predictability strengthens ethical practices, educational outcomes, career development, and the learning experience for all learners, while strengthening financial performance, growing revenue, and delivering innovative ways to invest in strategic priorities.
In our interactive session, we’ll make time to reflect, construct, and collaborate on five UDL-at-scale key practices.
Adopt UDL principles and goals in the institution’s vision and strategic plan.
Define core UDL applications to be implemented institution-wide, along with milestones for measuring success—like the Basic Four (Cameron, 2016).
Get campus leaders to direct funding, time, and people toward the development, assessment, growth, and maintenance of core UDL implementations.
Provide options within and beyond campus-wide levels of implementation.
Create faculty-development programming, staff-development programming, IT-level changes, and media-services enhancements that expand the culture and practices of the entire institution.
3:00pm – 4:30pm – NSU Ponderosa Room
In this session, we will examine the linked concepts of learner variability and construct relevance. From cultural and linguistic proficiencies, to unbridled enthusiasm for study, to anxiety about the challenges ahead, students vary. Reducing cognitive, linguistic, executive, and affective barriers is of vital importance as students negotiate college expectations differently, according to their widely ranging background experiences.
The purpose of assessment in post-secondary courses varies, as well. Assessments are often designed to gather student data that will yield information about accountability, student progress, and instruction.
Accountability: Assessing student performance with respect to job preparation, prerequisites, and college or college program goals
Student Progress: Assessing changes in student performance over time as a result of instruction (assessment of learning)
Instruction: Probing student responses to instruction in order to optimize the course of learning (assessment for learning)
Assessment is used in courses to determine how well students are meeting goals that have been set (e.g., goals around job performance, goals around changes in knowledge). Measurable outcomes from assessments should be comparable with or benchmarked against set course goals. Assessment outcomes, in turn, should inform further instruction.
In this session, you will practice how to make interactions and documents more accessible—not just for people with disabilities, but for learners who are using the time, devices, and methods that their circumstances often dictate. You will craft an assignment for one of your courses that increases student choices about how they demonstrate their skills, without changing the criteria by which you grade the assignment. You’ll also learn to spot (and get rid of) barriers to learner proficiency that don’t apply to what you’re actually grading, making it easier for students to focus on what they know, while maintaining the academic rigor of your course.
You will also learn where to focus your design attention for maximum results. We can often see the scope of what we think we need to accomplish and then suffer from “analysis paralysis,” where we don’t even start at all because the obstacle is too big. In this session, you’ll learn ways to
identify and reduce access challenges down to a manageable set of tasks for yourself and your student,
experiment with different access methods in just a few key parts of your course’s interactions,
determine where some UDL thinking can save you (and your students) time and effort, and
talk with your students to help them get started with UDL in the work they create, too.
New breakthroughs
The power of imagination
Rich tradition. Bright future.
Taking care of business
