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Adopting Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in order to create online course content allows higher education faculty members to reach out, not only to learners with disabilities, but also to learners who are increasingly using mobile devices to connect to campus and to each other. This article outlines 5 key strategies for creating and converting online course content to be more accessible to today's Web 2.0 learners. One challenge of creating content according to UDL principles is the large scope of a full-on UDL treatment. This article shares specific time-based milestones to help readers to work through the UDL process in a realistic, step-by-step fashion.
INTRODUCTION
Well-designed online courses keep students engaged with each other, with the professor, and with the material being covered. However, we have all seen online courses that are merely repositories of barely warmed-over materials originally designed to support faceto-face courses (those PowerPoint slides that replaced the overheads that replaced the mimeograph sheets), perhaps with some asynchronous discussion forums or autoscored quizzes thrown in.
Even when online courses are constructed "from scratch," Hart (2012) identifies "quality of interactions and feedback" and "social connectedness/presence" as key predictors for student persistence in online courses and "difficulty in accessing resources" and "lack of accessibility" as significant barriers to student persistence (pp. 32-36). When was the last time one of your online students reported being unable to gain access to your carefully crafted video lecture materials or narrated PowerPoint slide presentations?
The trend of online learners in higher education using a mobile device as their primary-or only-connection for class activities is also increasing (see Chen & Denoyelles, 2013, for a recent study). More and more students are time shifting, screen shifting, and place shifting their studies. Learners in our online courses increasingly expect access to course materials, not only all of the time, but everywhere, and through narrower and narrower information "pipes." For faculty members and those who support them, adopting the tenets of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an effective response to the challenge of creating and maintaining an enhanced connection with our students.
UDL is most often associated with the use of online technology to help extend learning opportunities to students with disabilities, though UDL allows us to do...