Improve you practice and become and inclusion champion!
You can become an inclusion champion by reconsidering your educational practice. Consider these five key principles to support all students and improve you practice.
Top Five Universal Design Principles for Higher Education
1. Accessible Language
Accessible language accommodates people of all abilities, social-economic and cultural backgrounds including those with disabilities, students who have English as an additional language or who are the first in their family to attend university.
When language is too complicated or obscure, students might disengage or feel excluded from fully participating in the class. Some ways to make language more accessible include:
- Avoiding the use of jargon or slangs, and spelling out acronyms, at least the first time they appear
- Use concrete explanations of key concepts using everyday words
- Provide explanation when specialist terms are introduced along with an accessible glossary of terms in unit guides
- Learn about inclusive language – you can find some examples here.
2. Accessible Modalities
It is essential to consider a variety of medias and methods to present information and content to students. Some modalities are essential to enable participation, but often many of these formats and options are helpful to many students. For example, it is important that video transcripts and closed captions are made available to all students. Resources must be designed in accessible online formats that are presented logically and predictably across units. Many aspects of online accessibility are easy to implement, for example, providing ‘alt text’ to pictures, illustrations and charts, using headings and high contrast colours between text and backgrounds.
3. Accessible Pedagogies
Some pedagogical practices might create barriers for some students (e.g. when educators speak too fast or use complex sentences). Reflect and consider adjusting some of your pedagogical practices, such as voice projection, enunciation, pace of speech, use of in room AV equipment and providing frequent pauses to enable note taking to maximise student learning.
4. Coherence
Consider the structure of your resources (written materials or Blackboard for example) and pedagogical practices (verbal instruction for example). Providing foundation of content and increasingly adding details about the components in a logical and sequential way, which is in direct alignment with assessment and learning objectives of the lesson/unit is essential to support student learning. A sequential and logical structure also allows for additional explanatory entry points to be in place for students who might need it, which can be extended by developmentally appropriate readings.
5. Scaffolding
It is essential to provide direct alignment between unit content and assessment with clear learning objectives. This needs to be paired with a step-by-step approach to learning, or scaffolding, to promote progression along a developmental sequence. Scaffolding involves breaking up content and providing a structure that will lead to the learning outcomes.
As students progressively develop skills and knowledge, the role of assessing students is to reveal what they have learned so this must be closely aligned to the learning objectives of the unit. Unclear learning objectives or misalignment between assessment and learning objectives is likely to hinder student learning.
To ensure that assessment aligns with learning objectives, educators can ask:
Learning objectives: What students are expected to know/understand by the end of this unit/course?
Assessments: In what ways/tasks can students show whether they have learned the learning objectives?