Future-Proof your Instructional Design with Universal Design for Learning and Translanguaging

Abstract

We face new challenges in education as our learners are becoming increasingly diverse and expect our programs to be designed with quality and enrichment for their work-life balance. Our educational communities are also more global, with language and cultural differences, with technologies that continue to develop and offer opportunities to enhance our teaching and learning. Our course and instructional design need to remain responsive to our changing populations with a nimbleness in our strategic pedagogies that enable us to adjust with the changing times. We need to “future-proof” our designs and ensure personalized learning opportunities. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) offers a path to that end. UDL provides extra layers of design deliberation, including the use of existing and emerging technologies, that will reflect our considerations of our learners’ uniqueness while also increasing the likelihood that their background knowledge and skills will also be tapped successfully [1]. Our programs are now global communities of learners who see each other as sources of knowledge and untapped resources for learning. This work presents the results of a course design with UDL that evolved over several years with an international demographic of learners. Results from the last two years are shared as an example of the implementation of UDL in course design, with data from the students’ evaluations of multiple sections of 2 graduate level courses.