208 Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning — 12.11.2019

On December 11, 2019, participants of the Active Teaching Lab met to continue the discussion of accessibility and Universal Design for Learning. The focus was on the fundamentals of accessible instructional design, instructor perspectives on accessibility, and how to find more resources through contacts with campus partners.

Takeaways

1. Design for Extremes: Design for learners with different abilities or circumstances who may not represent the norm. 
2. Expect the Invisible: Understand where students are coming from and what challenges they face. See the UW-Madison Campus-Wide Disability Survey Results to gain a clearer picture of ability differences on campus—and how our perceptions may not reflect reality.
3. Assess the User Experience: Push students to consider user-facing design and accessibility in multimedia projects. Doing so promotes higher quality student work, gives instructors new ideas for ways to present information, and trains the next generation to integrate UDL and inclusivity into their practices. 
4. Enlist Students: The 1:many instructor perspective of teaching is typically geared for mainstream needs. Smaller peer learning groups can often more nimbly address more personalized individual learning needs.

For more information and resources, view the session’s activity sheet.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Wednesdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

Sign up for regular Lab announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.