Illustration with accessibility-related icons. On the left side, two stylized hands forming a gesture above a box labelled "CC" (Creative Commons). In the middle, an ear with a diagonal slash across it, representing hearing impairment. Finally, to the right, a butterfly outline followed by a cluster of gray circles of varying sizes, symbolizing visual impairment or color blindness.

Universal Design for Learning

Universal learning promotes inclusivity, flexibility, enhanced comprehension, and accessibility in educational settings, benefiting all students. The important considerations to incorporate the universal design of learning include:

  1. Accessibility in Online Learning Environments: Ensuring accessibility in online learning platforms is essential for creating an inclusive educational experience. This includes incorporating features such as captions, sign language interpretation, and media players that support accessibility. By providing clear instructions, tasks, and deadlines, instructors can help keep students engaged and on track with their learning goals.
  2. Enhanced Comprehension: Offering multiple options for comprehending course materials—such as images, tables, and graphs—can benefit all students, including those with disabilities. Visual aids can help reinforce concepts and improve understanding, making the learning experience more effective for everyone.
  3. Flexibility: Distributed learning environments offer flexibility for students to study at their own pace and access relevant resources anytime, anywhere.
  4. Inclusive Learning: Inclusive learning ensures students have access to educational resources and materials regardless of their abilities or learning styles. By incorporating different multimedia tools, instructors can accommodate the needs of everyone, not just students with disabilities.

This study is based on students’ perspectives of online education, particularly in online library research courses. The study was conducted at a university in the United States and based on the perspective of seven female students with special needs (different physical and cognitive disabilities) discovering the requirements for well-structured instructions. The author used recommendations based on the universal design of learning (UDL) that there is a need for both structured and diverse online instruction. This in particular relates to our research project, claiming that TRU online courses should have diverse instructions providing various choices for incorporating multimedia tools. There should be a range of different formats for delivering information; therefore, instructors should try to communicate by adapting various multimedia tools, not just one. Also, the author emphasizes this consideration should not only be for students with disabilities; instead, it should be for all students adapting to the idea of inclusive studies.

The author has created a hypothetical persona of a student who has autism and wants to learn a computer animation program with his excellence in math, art, and creativity. His behaviour and characteristics have been determined; based on these, the publisher recommends a distributed program from an accredited institution. With his education and attained skills from the program, he will be able to obtain employment opportunities. Distributed learning environments offer flexibility for students to study at their own pace and access relevant resources. These environments also provide support and funding for students with disabilities, along with helpful video lectures and animations. A framework of clear instructions and tasks and an instructor who knows how to teach students with disabilities would help the students succeed in their learning outcomes. In addition, the instructor should provide word limits and assignment deadlines to keep the student engaged and following instructions. Implementing a persona approach for TRU online programs requires considering the key elements and benefits stated above and feedback from both instructors and students.

This article highlights creating content that is accessible to all learners. Concerning media integration, the course should provide an equal and inclusive learning experience for all students. For learners with alternative learning capabilities, it is recommended to offer multiple options to comprehend the course contents. Using images, tables, and graphs can be beneficial for individuals with disabilities in demonstrating their understanding.

Ensuring accessibility in online learning environments like D2L is important for inclusive education. Key strategies to implement universal learning in online education to support learning and enhance students’ academic performance include focusing on text-based content (i.e. accompanying images and videos with text descriptions ensuring understandability), image accessibility allowing downloading for future purposes, accessible quizzes, accessibility checkers, feedback on accessibility implementations, hyperlink descriptions, organized content, HTML templates, interactive content, video accessibility, inclusive language, font size and style, colour contrast in slides, and alternate formats for course materials such as audio recordings, interactive videos, and graphics.

The web accessibility initiative is a framework of strategy, standards, and policies that allows everyone, including people with disabilities, to easily access and understand the content on the web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standard organization of the internet, and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) helps people make web content accessible to everyone by creating websites, applications, and other digital content. W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a W3C initiative, sets global standards for web accessibility, evolving through versions for inclusivity compliance that ensure digital equity. Points to be taken into consideration are incorporating captions, adding sign language interpretation, planning from the beginning to avoid accessibility barriers when scripting, storyboarding, recording and visualizing the media, describing visual information, providing transcripts, using media players that support accessibility, creating content considering the needs of the students, and enhancing user experience. The combination of the above points can be used to create an effective accessible program. TRU has an accessibility platform for Open Learning students, and it provides personalized support for student accessibility—an example is providing telephonic assistance to better cater to the needs of the students with disabilities. The university can adopt new strategies and policies and continue to follow the policies framed under the web accessibility initiative to ensure efficient services to the students and increase the number of students with better marketing and by creating awareness about the program. The common thread is the commitment to ensuring inclusivity and accessibility in digital environments.

Media Attributions

The featured image was created by Jung-Lynn Jonathan Yang under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.