While the typical UW-Madison undergraduate student is a 20-year-old woman living on campus and working 20 hours a week, more than 25% of our students are adult learners like Fatimah. Her story invites you to consider our students’ varied backgrounds, levels of preparedness, and life situations. It is discrimination to treat them as though they were all the same — and impossible to design to address and honor all of the variability among them ahead of time.

Fortunately, a research-backed framework helps us design with learner variability in mind: universal design for learning (UDL).

UDL was developed in the 1990s by the neuroscientists at the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in Boston, and it is a research-based set of principles to guide the design of learning environments that are accessible and effective for all. The CAST (CAST, 2015) scientists discovered that humans learn things — whether we are 6 years old or 60 — by activating three different networks in our brains. Things “stick” best for us (Jorgensen, 2016) when each of these networks is strongly activated, and they figured out that we have a better chance of triggering these brain networks when we can choose from multiple ways to proceed.

In brief, UDL asks us to design multiple ways for

• learner engagement,
• representing information and
• learner action & expression.

UDL is not a set of teaching techniques or a collection of specific tools or practices. It is a framework that approaches any teaching and learning situation, so it works well with many approaches to learning design and practice. The UDL framework is a series of principles, so it does not force you to change what or how you design or teach.

A simple way to think about designing to lower barriers for your students is to adopt “plus one” thinking: if there is one way that interactions happen now, create just one more way.

Getting started

Think about an interaction you will have with your students in the future; the more specific, the better. Think of an individual conversation, activity, assessment, lab session, or practice time.

Once you have a specific interaction in mind, create two ways to strengthen the inclusiveness of that interaction.

First, list the ways that you get students engaged (the “why” of the interaction), give them information (the “what”), and ask them to take action or express their skills (the “how”). Where there is one way for such things to happen now, create one more way (“plus one” thinking) that provides a different format, option, or method for accomplishing the same goals.

Second, use the Peralta Equity Rubric (website with PDF download) to identify elements of your interaction that can be strengthened by using more inclusive and diverse language, examples, and activities.

Create details for and implement one UDL and one relationship-based change in the design of your interaction, and predict how your teaching practices will shift based on the design changes you have made.

You can expand on this exercise by identifying which interactions in your course currently have only one way for students to do them or which interactions don’t always go as you have planned them between you and your students. Reviewing these related topics can help you to select which elements to work on first.

• CAST. (2015). About Universal Design for Learning.
• Fang, B. (2009, December 22). From distraction to engagement: Wireless devices in the classroom. EDUCAUSE Review.
• Jaggars, S.S. (2014, Winter). Democratization of Education for Whom? Online Learning and Educational Equity. Diversity & Democracy, 17(1).
• Jorgensen, C. (2016, May 5). How to Use UDL Principles to Boost Accessibility and Student Engagement.