Xiaoying Zhang is a UDL Student Facilitator who works closely with the UDL Fellows Program, sharing her perspective as a student. Here, she discusses many of the learning challenges that arise at larger academic institutions and how UDL can be an important step in alleviating them.
What motivated you to become interested in UDL and apply for this position with the program?
My undergraduate institution was about 1/30th of the size of UBC, so we had better resources and smaller ratios of faculty to students. The classes were designed to be more flexible and accommodating for different types of learners already, so when I started at UBC, the scarcity of resources and accessibility support became pretty obvious.
For example, in my undergrad, when registering for courses you could use filters to see if a class was going to be speaking, writing, or reading heavy. Whether you wanted to avoid a type of course because of a barrier or strengthen a certain aspect of learning, you had the option to know what you were getting into, which is not an option at UBC. I think because UBC has so many students, they also tend to weigh finals a lot heavier than everything else and I was used to smaller weights spread out throughout the semester so that the stake of one assessment was not as high. Sometimes I find that a little difficult, especially for courses that are really content heavy, to direct all your resources to studying at the end of the semester, especially when you’re taking multiple classes that also have heavy finals.
I didn’t need extra accessibility measures to learn during undergrad because the courses were designed better and the professors were more available. But at UBC, I had to register with the Center for Accessibility, which has a long admin process that I’m still in the middle of. When I saw that the UDL program looking for student facilitators, I thought, “OK, this is a good idea and I have some experience in this area and some good examples from my undergrad that can be easily adopted.” Also, I’m a Masters of Public Health student and accessibility, inclusion, and disability are all important public health issues in education. I thought UDL would be a great way to apply my knowledge in that field as well.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed, in your own experience or in the experiences of your UBC student colleagues? How does UDL help address these barriers?
I have two examples:
One is very straightforward, I think all classes, regardless of the learners, should have more movement breaks, especially classes that last over an hour. For graduate studies, most of our classes are three to four hours long and sometimes there’s only one break. For four hours, that really isn’t enough. Sometimes, they say that you can step outside if you need a break, but then everybody else will be still learning and you have to sacrifice that content if you choose to step out. I think that universally, there should be a break for every hour – It’s such an easy thing to implement and it benefits everyone in the long term. This way people with chronic pain or spinal cord injuries who cannot sit for a significant amount of time don’t have to ask to be accommodated and feel vulnerable.
The other example is from a geology course that provided alternatives for students with colour blindness. I think that’s remarkable and a very specific principle that should be applied because when colour is so important for a discipline and you have students experiencing barriers with it, it really requires effort to make sure that these students are not just cut off from the learning. The good thing is, once you have the measures built into the course, they can always be there, and the barrier won’t exist anymore. UDL is a brilliant idea for enabling more learners regardless of the barriers.
Why do you think the UBC community, particularly instructors, need to use UDL? How is it benefiting all students?
I think the significance of UDL at UBC comes down to the size of our classes. I’ve looked into the undergrad courses and sometimes I’m completely astonished when a course has 1000 students. That’s half the size of my entire undergrad institution! I see why instructors might have their concerns about changing one tiny detail in their curriculum when that detail affects thousands of students. But also, if you have thousands of students, that means a lot of them would have barriers that would benefit from changing something that may not even take you a significant amount of effort. Undergrad is such a formative time for most students, and if they grow a passion for maybe just one lecture in one class, they may change their life entirely.
I think instructors should try not to let those learning barriers defeat someone’s passion or potential love for a subject.
The course can still be academically rigorous while being inclusive to everyone. I know professors have a lot of students and a lot of accommodation requests to fill, but if the UDL principles are already built in within the curriculum, then a lot of the students wouldn’t be needing those accommodations anymore. It reduces the instructor’s workload in the end too.