From the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, Patricia Hingston, an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Food, Nutrition and Health, participated in the 2023 UDL Fellows program. Here, she shares all of the ways she incorporated UDL into her practice and how many of her students have responded positively to the changes.
Please describe how you have applied UDL principles in your course or practice/service area.
I offer multiple means of representation in my courses.
- In my laboratory courses, students can read the lab manual, watch laboratory videos on YouTube, and refer to laboratory flow charts available in their lab manual in order to better understand how to conduct laboratory experiments. The lab manual was also formatted using UDL principles such as using dyslexia
- In both my laboratory and large enrolment (225 students) food microbiology course, I added figure captions to all of the photos used on my slides and created study guides for each lesson that help students organize the information they have learned in different ways.
I have incorporated many different ways to engage students including the following:
- Engaging question prompts used at the start of each in-person session that relates to the topic of the lesson (e.g. What % of seafood in Vancouver is incorrectly labelled? What is a food that recently spoiled in your fridge? What is your favourite fermented food?)
- Lots of real-world examples and activities that have students apply concepts learned from class to their everyday lives
- Lots of reflection activities that have students reflect on how much they have learned, thus helping motivate them to continue to learn
- Allowing students to choose the topics of their presentations and assignments
- My Canvas homepages are designed to be both engaging (aesthetically pleasing) and easy to navigate
Lastly, I offer a great deal of flexibility in my courses to offer students multiple means of expression, and to accommodate different learning needs. Examples include:
- Multi-access course delivery where students can choose to participate in-person, online synchronously, or online asynchronously on any given day
- Recorded lectures made readily available
- 5 bi-weekly quizzes with unlimited attempts (but new questions each attempt) replace high stakes midterms
- Lowest grade of 5 quizzes and 3 discussion posts dropped
- Two late tokens provided to each student per term, allowing them to submit an assignment up to 3 days late without penalty
What motivated you to initiate this work in your course or practice?
Following the pandemic, I recognized the need to continue to offer virtual class attendance to prevent the spread of disease in the classroom while also allowing students to not miss class and fall behind in their courses. This led me to offer multi-access courses. Once I saw how many other benefits this course delivery style offered students besides preventing the spread of disease, I sought out to discover what else I could do to support students with diverse learning needs in my courses.
What challenges did you face when implementing UDL, and how did you overcome them?
Offering flexibility in large enrolment courses specifically, can cause challenges for teaching assistants. For example, in all of my assignments in my large enrolment course, students choose different topics but this means that my TA’s need to grade 225 different assignments and this is far more taxing than grading similar assignments. I also do not offer late tokens in this course as it would be challenging to keep track of so many. Instead, I offer unlimited attempts on quizzes and drop their lowest quiz grade and discussion post grade.
Another challenge is updating my laboratory videos and flow charts. Students were originally hired to create the videos and flowcharts but now I am left to update them every time I make a change to a laboratory protocol and this is very time consuming and also requires a broad skill set.
How have students/your participants/your colleagues benefited from the UDL strategies you implemented?
I frequently survey students in all of my courses and have found the following:
- All students refer to the flow charts in the lab manual
- Most students watch the laboratory videos
- All students find my Canvas homepages aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate
- 75% of students took advantage of synchronous virtual participation
- 97% of students reported that multi-access course delivery improved their learning stating reasons such as not needing to miss class, being able to watch lecture recordings at their own pace, and using lecture recordings to review confusing concepts
With regard to colleagues, I presented my UDL project at a faculty lunch and learn and have presented my multi-access course design at our faculty’s annual teaching colloquy as well as at CTLT’s Spring Institute in 2023. I hope that I have inspired other instructors to adopt a multi-access approach to teaching.