UDL Fellows Laurie Ford, an Associate Professor in Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education, and Gabrielle Coombs, a learning designer in the Faculty of Education’s Learning Design and Digital Innovation Unit, collaborate with the ECED 406/407 teaching team, including course instructor Koichi Haseyama and Graduate Academic Assistants Fatemeh (Emma) Arian and Abby Dalmacio to make their courses more accessible.
Section 1: UDL Fellows Gabrielle (Gaby) Coombs and Laurie Ford
What is your role at UBC, and how have you applied UDL to your work and approach? Could you please tell me a bit about the course that your project was based on and how you applied UDL to it?
Gaby: I’m a learning designer in the Faculty of Education’s Learning Design and Digital Innovation Unit. In this project, we applied UDL to rethink the course content of ECED (Early Childhood Education) 406 and 407, with potential implications for the Early Childhood Education program as a whole. We really focused on the syllabus as a starting point for applying UDL principles from a design standpoint, and then we added more engagement opportunities that were multimodal, so people had a variety of ways of demonstrating their knowledge.
Laurie: I’m a faculty member and Associate Professor in the Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education Department. We looked critically at our undergraduate Early Childhood Education Program, in particular, and tried to be more mindful about the diversity of learners in that program. We ensured that the language in our syllabus was not only clear and easy to understand but also supportive and welcoming for all types of students who read it. Although we haven’t made significant revisions to the course per se, we have this UDL-based syllabus as a foundation that we intend to use this coming term.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed at UBC? How does UDL help address these barriers?
Gaby: I’ve found that there’s a skill gap between the tools and methods that should be used to increase accessibility and people’s knowledge of and ability to use those tools. This isn’t because people don’t want to increase accessibility but that they never learned about accessibility practices. Another example is that most people aren’t aware that PDFs can be an absolute nightmare for someone who’s using a screen reader.
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found or created that were particularly effective in applying UDL?
Gaby: H5P is a great embeddable tool we employed to create drag-and-drop activities and clickable images, which gave us the opportunity to create low-stakes, fun, and interactive activities in the course. There are many other tools that are easy to use and implement as well, such as Kaltura captioning, where the auto captions are actually pretty good. It’s simple to set up, yet it can have a large positive impact for some people.
What motivated you to partake in the UDL program and engage with accessibility work?
Laurie: I’ve been teaching for a long time, but I acknowledge that I’ve been in a rut when it comes to UDL implementation. However, having Gaby and colleagues take on this task alongside me provided me with the motivation to break free from this rut. We’re privileged to have outstanding teaching and learning staff like Gaby here at UBC, so I thought, let’s take the high-quality content that we’re teaching and teach it in a more universally accessible way that meets the needs of diverse learners.
Section 2: Course Teaching Team – Instructor Koichi Haseyama; Graduate Academic Assistants Fatemeh (Emma) Arian and Abby Dalmacio
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed at UBC? How does UDL help address these barriers?
Koichi: The inherent barriers with asynchronous online courses create the biggest gap between my ideal practice and the way I teach. The physical distance between my students and I creates an emotional disconnect between the learner and the course content. I’ve been thinking of ways we can reduce this disconnect in small ways, such as language. A lot of the language we use, such as in our syllabus, can be very cold and dry. Students are young, often right out of high school, and we have a responsibility to convey ideas to them in a way that is more casual and relatable.
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found or created that were particularly effective in applying UDL?
Emma: Like Koichi mentioned, the fact that the course is asynchronous made it difficult to connect with students. What I tried to do to reduce this distance was utilize Padlet and other interactive interfaces to have students engage with each other online. I would also frequently use Canvas announcements to send students regular reminders about deadlines, which can be harder to keep track of in an online course.
What motivated you to partake in and engage with UDL/accessibility work?
Abby: As a former undergraduate student at UBC, I experienced disengagement in an online course first-hand. This experience inspired me to contribute to the development of an online classroom environment, where students no longer perceive me as a mere computer interface but rather as a person who is approachable, available to discuss and accommodate their needs, and able to establish a platform that fosters meaningful engagement with course materials, as opposed to a rigid discussion forum.
In being part of the teaching team for this course, how did you apply UDL principles to your role in course delivery?
Koichi: We worked extensively on the syllabus, which is an incredibly important document that serves as an agreement between instructors and students. Additionally, having so many UDL tools embedded in the course, whether it be through Canvas, Padlet, Mentimeter, etc., was great for students but also great for me as an instructor, as it gives me more avenues for teaching.
How did students and colleagues benefit from the UDL strategies you implemented?
Koichi: I had Zoom meetings with a few students, and having multiple ways to showcase learning and having different types of tasks weekly, as well as the incorporation of engaging activities like the drag-and-drop using H5P, are some things that got mentioned multiple times. Students also benefited from how we set up assignments, which is that weekly tasks were just for completion marks and for letter grades students would write up a reflective piece every three or four weeks. This format allowed busy students to balance how much effort they want to put into smaller tasks while also allowing students to rely on weekly tasks and use them as reflection materials for larger assignments.
In your experience teaching or being a teaching assistant in other courses, how did this course differ? Did you learn anything new from this experience?
Abby: I learned a lot, particularly about how courses can be structured and how the expectations of students can be met through the principles of UDL, which has really inspired my outlook as both a student and future educator. From the outset, this course excelled in creating a comprehensive and practical syllabus. The syllabus is often overlooked in course design, and it’s easy for students to not be fully engaged with the course, know what is expected of them, and know how they could be best supported when they aren’t reading through or don’t have access to a well-written syllabus.
Learning more about UDL and accessibility and getting to work alongside other people who are passionate and knowledgeable about accessibility was a wonderful experience. It truly underscored the practical application of inclusivity and equity, emphasizing the importance of supporting students with both visible and invisible accessibility needs.
Providing students support doesn’t make the course any less rigorous; it rather provides students with the tools that allows them to fully engage with the course at a high capacity.
Emma: To highlight the importance of welcoming language, I noticed that the openness of our syllabus affected the way that I interact with students. Whenever I give feedback to students, correspond with them over email, or meet with them over Zoom, I am more aware of my words and the importance of using amicable language in conversation.In my previous class, I had three students who had letters from the Centre for Accessibility, and it was helpful to know that these three students might have different needs, but then I was thinking, accessibility shouldn’t only apply to those three students; it should apply to the whole class. All students are diverse learners, and we have a responsibility as educators to facilitate their learning and empower them with their education. This is what I took away, and it was really inspiring to see the impact that UDL can have. I feel privileged to have this learning opportunity, which will affect my teaching and interactions with students and others.