Organizing Online Materials for Students’ Ease of Use

UDL is about making choices that privilege diversity over expedience. Whenever a student identifies a barrier, and shares this information with me, devising an accommodation is usually straightforward. Yet the responsibility for achieving the goals of UDL cannot rest with students alone. Educators must examine their teaching practices with vigilance to avoid marginalizing their learners.

The effective deployment of UDL principles requires empathy and imagination. Because I mostly teach courses that meet twice weekly during a 14-week semester, I used to always make 14 online folders labeled for each week ("Week 1", "Week 2”, etc.) inside of which I would name files for the first and second classes respectively (“Week 1.1.pptx”, “Week 1.2.pptx”, etc.). Organizing every single course in this exact same way satisfied my compulsion to be consistent. At first, I had imagined that my students would download the PowerPoint files ahead of class to familiarize themselves with each lecture’s key points, but I know only some students do this. Several students access these files for the first time when they sit down to study for a test. In this case, my week-by-week organization could present a barrier, since such a student who is too pressed for time to prepare ahead of class on a daily basis must wonder "what's on the test?". As professors, it is easy to say that the course outline or an online newsfeed item makes the content of each test obvious, but such a snooty attitude is not helpful for any student who cannot make sufficient time to study or review. Nowadays, in courses with a traditional structure (say 3 tests and an assignment) I organize the primary online folders in terms of evaluations (“test 1”, “test 2”, “assignment”, “test 3”). This helps all of my students figure out what is included more quickly and also prevents me from having to repeat what will be covered on each test. Although I know how I would study for the tests that I give my students, I cannot dwell in some idealized version of the past because I also know that my students arrive in my classroom with different abilities and constraints. UDL challenges all educators to think beyond their own experiences to effectively achieve their pedagogical goals.