Centre for Academic Practice, Trinity Teaching & Learning

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Room 3.06
3-4 Foster Place
Dublin 2
Ireland

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academicpractice@tcd.ie

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in the United States that offers a framework for educators who wish to avoid student exclusion and marginalisation. By frontloading inclusion in the design of their courses and modules, UDL helps educators avoid the work of having to develop individual accommodations down the line and helps students avoid the burden of having to ask for these accommodations.

UDL is about creating and implementing instruction that meets multiple learning needs, preferences and circumstances in order to ensure all students have equitable access to learning. 

The three core principles of UDL are: Multiple Means of Engagement, Multiple Means of Representation, and Multiple Means of Action and Expression.

→ Click on the titles below to learn more about each of the three UDL pillars.

Our learners come with a huge diversity of life experiences, cultural backgrounds and everyday demands placed on them. Some questions that the Multiple Means of Engagement principle might help you to address are:

  • How can we help our learners to engage with their peers and the wider college community?
  • How can we stimulate the interest of our learners and motivate them to stay the course and finish the programmes we offer?
  • How can we ensure that learners feel that their contributions matter?

Providing Multiple Means of Engagement supports students to be:

  • purposeful and motivated
  • resourceful and knowledgeable
  • strategic and goal driven

In short, it is about empowering students to take charge of their own learning and broader College experience, and encouraging that experience to be meaningful, relevant and valuable. 

Multiple Means of Representation addresses the 'what of learning'. It relates to how students assimilate facts and ideas and understand and process information. It is about providing options for perception, language and symbols, and comprehension.

Questions this principle can help you to answer:

  • How can we ensure that we are giving our learners what they need to understand the material we present?
  • How can we leverage multimedia, active learning and peer-to-peer learning to retain attention and provide variety for our learners?
  • How can we scaffold our learners' use of technology to enhance their learning?

Our learners possess a huge variety of physical and cognitive abilities and differ widely in the ways that they organise and communicate information. Some questions that the Multiple Means of Action and Expression principle might help you to address are:

  • How can we give learners with a huge variety of skills and abilities equitable opportunities to show what they know?
  • How can we build fluency in different types of media and communications to ensure learners are equipped to share their talents effectively in a media-rich world?
  • How can we help our learners to set and monitor goals and to plan effective strategies to reach them?

You can explore the UDL framework in more depth on the CAST website - but, if you are new to implementing UDL, we recommend exploring the UDL resources our Centre for Academic Practice website first to get an overview and a sense of UDL in the context of teaching and learning in Trinity.

The +1 Approach

For educators trying out their first UDL implementation, UDL consultant Dr Thomas J. Tobin recommends that for each topic being addressed, educators add one more option for engagement, one more option for comprehension/representation, and one more option for how students communicate around a topic and express what they know about it.

If you are unsure where to start, identify a ‘road block’ (a concept that students may struggle with or that generates many queries) and start there. Add options for students to engage with it, to understand it and to communicate it — and see how it goes.

Next steps

In the next section, we will look at some practical steps you can take to make your teaching materials more accessible for your students which will provide an important foundation for UDL approaches.