Accessibility Nuggets, Video Vignettes, and Other Instructor Development Approaches to Foster UDL Adoption and Inclusive Engineering Education

Students with disabilities need accessible courses. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has become a well-known approach to creating inclusive and accessible education. However, despite general interest around UDL among instructors, previous studies have revealed the lack of resources to adequately educate instructors on UDL, accessibility principles, and best practices. This study details multiple methodologies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign used to educate and inspire instructors about UDL with the goal of creating more accessible engineering courses. We implemented multiple approaches to increase interest in, and utilization of, UDL by instructors: 1) Developed a Learning Management System (LMS) based training course which gave instructors “plug-and-play” practical examples of UDL design practices; 2) Created short tips (“Accessibility Nuggets”) to inspire interest and show the starting points; 3) Provided hands-on help for non-UDL based engineering courses to make them more accessible; 4) Surveyed students and instructors about UDL practices. We report the results of several methods of instructor engagement practices including: 1) Canvas training modules about implementing UDL at beginner, intermediate, and expert levels of difficulty; 2) Newsletters about UDL sent to instructors along with statistics including: number of subscribers, number of views per week, visits to linked resources and the feedback from subscribers; 3) Prerecorded video tutorials about utilizing various UDL tools at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and motivational videos (vignettes) about why UDL is important. Our study provides insight into how best to foster interest and provide education around UDL. Our end goal is to increase utilization of UDL in the classroom at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We will provide open training materials for use in other universities.