Blog 3: Inclusive Design

In this week, we focus mainly on discussing universal design. According to the web article, “Making Sense of Universal Design for Learning”, the author states that universal design for learning (UDL) is a useful educational method that benefits all learners by reducing barriers to learning and addressing learning needs of different learners. In my opinion, there are many benefits of using universal design in learning, such as giving learners many different ways to acquire and demonstrate knowledge, making the instructional practices more flexible and equable, increasing learner engagement and helping instructors to better support every learner.

In our group’s interactive learning resource, we also tend to use universal design to ensure that the needs of all learners can be met. We plan to use a blog on WordPress as our project’s teaching platform. The topic of our project will be divided into three main sub-topics (i.e. three blog posts). Each post will include a brief introduction of learning outcomes, learning materials with a variety of multimedia (i.e. texts, videos, audio, images, and links), and learning assessment. In my opinion, the design of our interactive learning resource can help learners to meet their learning needs and preferences specifically in several ways.

Specific learning goals are given to our learners. The brief and clear learning outcomes for each sub-topic will be shown in the beginning in order to help our learners to have a clearer viewing about what they will learn from our post directly. Our learners will know exactly what to expect from our lesson and will feel more motivated to pay attention to complete their learning goals.

Flexible learning places and times. Our project is learner-centered, which means learners can decide on their own pace, time, and place of learning directly by themselves. One of the biggest challenges for our learners are that they need to have access to use the Internet in order to read our blog posts. However, the learning places and times are very flexible, so they can participate in our project at any time, anywhere they want when they are available in using the Internet.

Learning materials with a variety of multimedia. As I mentioned above, the learning materials in our project will be used by different kinds of multimedia, including texts, audios, videos, and images. Therefore, it will always be convenient, useful, and effective for different groups of people. For learners who prefer to read, they can learn from the texts and additional reading materials in our lesson, but for learners who prefer to listen, they can watch the videos we shared and and get benefits from them directly.

Overall, I think all the ways can make me ensure that needs of all our learners can be met specifically from our interactive learning resource.

References

Making Sense of Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from: https://education.alberta.ca/media/464638/video-discussion-guide-4-making-sense-of-universal-design.pdf

Jordan N. (2019). Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from: https://www.prodigygame.com/blog/universal-design-for-learning/