We asked our faculty and staff at the University of Limerick to give us examples of how they have implemented Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In this example, David Moloney, Digital Skills Development Lead, Centre for Transformative Learning, tells us how he created a blog post template to allow staff to follow blog best practices.
Transcript
I manage and coordinate a Quick Tips for Teaching Online blog series on behalf of the Learning Technology Forum here at the University and as part of that I create a post outline document or a blog post outline document that I share with prospective authors on the blog post series.
I made I suppose three small changes to it to try to cater better for multiple means of representation for the readership of the blog posts so the first small change I made was I included a section about including alt text descriptions for the images. The featured images for example and other images that might be part of the blog post.
The second change that I made would have been to offer the readership the option of listening back to the blog post as well through audio playback so I would have included a section in the post template for the staff who teach that I work with to actually record an MP3 recording of them reading aloud their final blog post if they so wish. Alternatively they could ask me if they wished to create a text to speech audio playback for the readership to listen to as well.
The third change I made was including a post navigation section as well which clearly outlines the structure and anatomy of what a blog post to the series would generally look like so the author would fill out that structure and this is exactly what we presented to the readership at the start of the post that they read um as opposed to discover whether they wanted to read onwards or not. They get a chance to see what is actually going to be contained in our post.
The reason I made the changes really was as a result of a National Forum UDL digital badge, a course that I participated in which was facilitated by Ahead and UCD as well that course gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own practice to see what I was doing well in terms of implementing UDL principles and to explore where there might have been gaps in my own practice as well.
So upon that reflection I found that UDL principles may have been imbued in the posts by the specific authors collaborating with myself but it wasn't done so in a consistent manner so the changes I made the post outline template provided that consistency across the entire blog series and it meant then that those principles were applied to every post that went up on the quick tips for teaching online series.
I suppose at this moment in time because it's such a recent change it's difficult to ascertain the impact just now but I would hope that the impact would be that the blog posts model good practice in terms of how you might integrate multiple means of representation in a blog post format another perceived impact that might might be useful. I suppose for a staff who teach and for students at the University is that I have licensed the blog post template with a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license so staff who teach can actually take that and use it in their own and reuse it in their own teaching for example if they are getting their students as part of an activity to create blog posts of their own or if they have a portfolio style activity that might be similar to creating blog posts and further students can actually take that and and use it themselves as well.
I would hope an impact as well so I would hope that the ripple effect of what I've done or the changes I've made to the post outline document or template would affect the authors I work with by showcasing how you can actually Implement multiple means of representation in something like a blog post and also I would hope that a knock on effect of that would be that it's an improved experience for the readership of the blog. Also in be that staff will teacher to our prospective staff who teach or students who might be interested in the way that UL staff might teach online and because that's the topic of the blog. I would hope that the changes we've made are evident and that they model good practice for how you can Implement multiple means of representation.