Jeffrey Joiner — Instructional Designer

Universal Design for Learning gets misrepresented constantly. In most faculty development contexts, it's presented as a checklist of accessibility accommodations — and accessibility is genuinely important — but UDL is asking a larger question: how do we design instruction so that the widest possible range of learners can meaningfully engage, without requiring each person to formally request an accommodation?

What UDL Is Actually About

CAST's UDL framework rests on three principles — multiple means of representation, multiple means of action and expression, and multiple means of engagement. The neuroscience grounding has gotten more nuanced since the original framework, but the underlying insight is durable: learners differ in how they best take in information, how they best demonstrate what they know, and what motivates and sustains their effort. Designing only for a narrow slice of that variation means building in barriers for everyone else.

The Representation Principle in Practice

Multiple means of representation doesn't mean you have to produce every piece of content in five formats. It means thinking proactively about where the format itself might be the barrier rather than the content.

A few concrete examples that don't require massive redesign:

Provide transcripts for audio content — this serves students with hearing differences, non-native speakers, and students who process text faster than audio.
When using charts or data visualizations, include a brief text description of the key finding, not just alt text of "graph showing enrollment trends."
Offer choice between a recorded lecture and a well-structured reading that covers the same ground. Some students process video poorly. Some can't reliably access it from their bandwidth context.

The Action and Expression Principle

This is where instructors often push back: "I can't let everyone take every assessment in a different format." That's true — some assessments need to be what they are. But the principle asks: are there places in your course where the format of the demonstration is actually incidental to what you're trying to measure?

If you're assessing whether students can analyze an argument, is the format of that analysis — essay versus recorded discussion versus annotated outline — actually the thing you care about? Sometimes it is. Often it isn't.

Starting Small

Pick the piece of your course with the highest stakes and the most student difficulty. Ask: who is this hard for, and why? The answer is almost never "all students find this hard for the same reason." UDL's practical value lives in that question — once you ask it specifically enough, you usually see at least one design change that would help without compromising rigor.

That's the premise: UDL isn't about lowering the bar. It's about removing the obstacles that were never the bar to begin with.