2016 Annual Conference

As distance education instructors face increasingly diverse students with disabilities, language barriers, and significant skill deficiencies, traditional behavioristic methods, such as multiple choice assessments, do not effectively capitalize on their differences. Universal Design for Learning provides a way of reimagining the teaching/learning process to increase success for all students.

The target audience is distance education practitioners, instructional designers, doctoral and post-doctoral students, and educators with concerns about increasing accessibility. Practitioners with diverse learners who are interested in developing ways to meet the specific needs of all students within one educational setting will develop an understanding of a meta-instructional approach. Instructional designers revising or creating online courses will find a foundational approach for incorporating an array of methods to include varied learning styles. Doctoral students, post-doctoral students, and educators focused on inclusivity will gain insight into an inclusive approach to instruction for future teaching and research.

While students have become increasingly diverse in terms of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and disability, the type of education delivered has not significantly changed. Individual accommodations have been applied, but the structure and culture of higher education, and the nature of what constitutes knowledge, its acquisition, and its expression in practice, have not responded to the increased diversity. By emphasizing human variability, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), effectively offers multiple means of representation that give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge, multiple means of engagement that tap into learners' interests, challenging and motivating them, and multiple means of expression that provide learners with alternatives for demonstrating what they know (CAST, 2015). Race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and disability should not be viewed from a deficit orientation that provides accommodations to meet socially constructed norms or that imposes a one-size-fits-all methodology; we need to reimagine how knowledge is defined, obtained and expressed in a way that embraces difference (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014), and we need to recognize that we are alike in that we all have limitations (Shakespeare & Watson, 2002). Content, interface, and interaction can be varied to meet all learners’ needs.