Digital Pedagogy
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Both Digital Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) focus on inclusive educational practices. Ensuring all students (including those with disabilities) have access to content, while providing multiple options to acquire information are key to student success.
According to the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA), UDL:
- provides flexibility in the ways information is presented, in the ways students respond or demonstrate knowledge and skills, and in the ways students are engaged; and
- reduces barriers in instruction, provides appropriate accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient.
Digital Accessibility with Blackboard Ally and Panopto
To support faculty with Digital Accessibility and UDL, GVSU has implemented the following enterprise solutions:
- Blackboard Ally supports inclusive education through accessible content. Ally automatically checks all content uploaded into Blackboard for accessibility issues. In addition, Ally automatically creates alternative formats of files, including: Tagged PDF, OCRed PDF, ePub, HTML, and Audio Only.
- Panopto supports accessibility through video captioning. Panopto will automatically create caption files for videos added into the system. Faculty can edit these captions for 100% accuracy.
This page focuses on best practices concerning UDL, for more details and information about Digital Accessibility, please see: Creating Accessible Course Content.
It is excellent that Ally helps to meet the needs of our ADA population but the whole of the campus benefits from the added presentation modes. Ally addresses learning styles and circumstances. Students may now listen to a paper on the bus or walking across campus. Some students benefit by observing the printed words while visually following the paper.
The Three Components of UDL
Providing multiple methods to acquire knowledge gives learners the opportunity to learn in different ways. To do so, instructors must...
Learners often differ in ways they can best express what they know. To provide learners with alternatives to express their understanding, instructors can...
This component taps into student engagement. Best practices for student engagement can be as diverse as our students are. To build student engagement, instructors can...
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