The text below is an excerpt from Chapter 4: Engage Digital Learners, pages 110-113, from, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, by Thomas J. Tobin and Kristen T. Behling.

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UDL Step 1
UDL Step 2
DIY Captioning
DASS

Tobin and Behling encourage an iterative approach to UDL. To get started, look for ways you can apply UDL that only take you about 20 minutes. Below, they describe Step 1 in applying UDL in 20-minutes.

Excerpt Pages 110-111

Look through the course interactions and identify elements that are single-stream, meaning that there is only one way to get access tot he information. Your examination of the course should go beyond just looking at the materials being shared with learners. Look, too, at the discussions and conversations that learners engage in throughout the course: do they take place only in the classroom out loud? Only in the learning management system (LMS) via keyed-in text? How can students tell whether they are keeping up with the course's demands - via text, spoken feedback, subtle eyebrow-raising on the part of the professor?

Sure common single-stream course elements are lecture notes that are text-only, slide presentations that exist as visuals onn a screen, and instructor-created unit introduction video clips with information that exists only in the videos themselves (such as a preview of the topics to be covered in the coming unit). Find out where your list of single-stream content and interactions intersect with your list of pinch points in the course: These are places to start doing some [...] UDL.

Let's look at three examples from undergraduate courses in math and biology and a graduate level English course. In the math course the professor already provides text-based notes on how to approach sample problems, with steps outlined with equations and text. This by the way, is a great foundation on which to build: most faculty members and designers are already using text heavily in our courses. Text is usually our default mode.

In the biology course, the instructor has taken her existing PowerPoint slide decks that she has used for years inn the face-to-face environment and posted them inn the LMS course environment for learners to use as class notes. Not only are the slides inaccessible unless learners have PowerPoint on the devices they are using for access (making smartphones access chancy at best), but the slides themselves are mostly just bulleted lists of t ext elements that serve as reminders for an already expert audience: the instructor. This resource is both single-stream and also cryptically incomplete without the professor's explication of each bullet point.

The professor inn the graduate English course was an early adherent to the just-add technology movement. She recorded brief video segments to introduce each unit, each assignment, each class-wide discussion, and even each of the eight parts of the course syllabus. Students see and hear the professor talking to them about the concepts, processes, and requirements of the course.

Two-Five minute videos are a great way to reach learners where they are and increase instructor presence outside of Face-to-Face interactions. These videos are all single-stream because there isn't a consistent way to get the content in them other than to watch the videos - and some videos contain instructions for assignments that aren't included anywhere else. Think about the learners who prefer to read the content, who can't get the video due to a poor connection, or who can't have the sound on. Even, or perhaps especially, developers and faculty members who are techies can benefit from the opportunity to move down the complexity scale in order to practice UDL. It's now always a process of moving up to more technology or more complexity.

UDL: Step 2

The excerpt below explains how to add a 'second-stream' of access to the single-stream of content identified in Step 1.

(Excerpt Pages 111-112)

Once you have found single-stream course interactions that are part of the pinch-points in the course, it's time to b rainstorm expansions into one new medium, method, or expression for each. This is the type of thinking that makes UDL a manageable and iterative process. List those places where learners express barriers, then find just one way to provide a choice about how to address the barriers, or , better yet, remove the barriers. But let's take it one step at a time and revisit our courses in math, biology, and English to apply some 20-minute UDL.

For the math course that already has a number of static text-based resources in the form of proofs and action steps, the professor builds on that good foundation with a strategy of recording screencasts of the instructor actually doing the same proofs or problems, in real time, with explanations of each step. The instructor selects which videos to create first by remembers the three pinch points in the course, and then creates video resources for those parts first.

For math - where there are a lot of special symbols, diagramming and spatial thinking - the professor uses a pen and paper to work through problems longhand, with the camera positioned above the paper so viewers can see and hear the thinking that is going into each explanation. The visuals and audio reinforce the purpose of the examples and create alternate channels for learning that go beyond the text-only resources that were already in the course. Now learners can choose how they study the problems, looking at the text version, the screencasts, or both. The instructor has also created a presence that goes beyond the classroom and formally structured learning time.

Screencasts don't have to use fancy technology, although it's out there. Free tools exist for recording the screen plus microphone input, and like our math professor, you can also point a video camera down at a piece of paper and do a paer-cast of yourself doing the work onghand too. Each of teh videos produced this way takes about twenty minutes from setup to recording to uploading and sharing. And for the mobile learner, these videos are wonderful resources. Think of students who might be commuting to school using public transportation; they can watch these videos as they travel.

Just having an outline or transcript of the content inn a video gives access beyond the video itself. Not only are text files smaller and easier to download under low bandwidth conditions, they (and captions) are searchable. The math professor's students started searching for specific phrases or concepts, which meant that whenn studying, they went directly to the resources that mentioned them. UDL allows learners to home in on the resources they need to do targeted studying. The professor found that she took about twenty minutes to listen to and caption each of her five minute videos - and she saved a lot of time by *contracting out to third-party captioners when the videos were longer.

The twenty-minute UDL techniques also extend to engagement techniques, especially in terms of options for self-regulation (e.g. providing estimates of how much time students will need to read or watch course materials), options for sustaining effort and persistence (such as recording audio and text-based announcements for learners to keep them motivated and informed, and options for recruiting interest (like pointing students to news stories or examples from popular culture of course concepts being applied by people like themselves.

Learners can also demonstrate their skills in varied ways using twenty-minute UDL approaches. For example, in about twenty minutes you can expand an assignment so that learners can complete successfully via a text-based response (say, a traditional three-page paper) or an audio recording (a link to a five minute SoundCloud file, perhaps). As long as all learners have to meet the same objectives regardless of format, the assignments can be graded using the same criteria measurements - and the changes to the assignment likely won't take even twenty minutes each.

* For specific information about Captioning, view the next Tab.

Captioning

How do I add Captions?

The easiest way to 'caption' your videos is to screencast using Zoom. If you record to your Zoom Cloud and turn on Auto Transcript, Zoom will generate a time stamped transcript that goes along with the recording. You just need to edit the transcript to make sure it matches what you 'say' in your recording.

How to record using Zoom + Auto Transcript

What do I need to do?

If you are notified that you will have a DASS student in your course, if you are already applying plus one strategies, you will probably find you are already taking huge strides in having an accessible course. However, there is specific support and services DASS can provide students such as:

Document remediation (making sure your documents are accessible to a screen reader)
Captioning video content
Braille
Visual Descriptions
etc.

What DASS can provide will depend on the need of your student. Communicate with DASS to learn more about course support.

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