2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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

Presented at Advancing Diversity in Engineering Education: Insights and Perspectives from Underrepresented Communities

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.

Authors

Delu Louis Zhao
Meghana Gopannagari University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Xiuhao Ding University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Alan Tao University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Sujit Varadhan University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Sujit Varadhan is a Junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Computer Science. He is an undergraduate research assistant as well as a frontend developer on ClassTranscribe.
Dr. Chrysafis Vogiatzis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0787-9380 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Chrysafis Vogiatzis is a teaching associate professor for the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, Dr. Vogiatzis was an assistant professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. His current research interests lie in network optimization and combinatorial optimization, along with their vast applications in modern socio-technical and biological systems. He is serving as the faculty advisor of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, and was awarded the 2019 and 2023 Faculty Advisor award for the North-Central region of IISE. Dr. Vogiatzis was awarded ASEE IL/IN Teacher of the Year in 2023.
David Dalpiaz University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Prof. Yun Huang [biography]

Dr. Yun Huang is faculty in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her expertise is in the area of social computing, human-computer interaction, Internet of Things, and human-AI interaction. In her work, she
Dr. Jennifer R Amos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9437-8201 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Professor in Bioengineering.
Robert Dignan University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Bobbi Lee Battleson Hardy University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Prof. Lawrence Angrave http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7181 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Lawrence Angrave is an award-winning computer science Teaching Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He creates and researches new opportunities for accessible and inclusive equitable education.
Dr. Hongye Liu University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Hongye Liu is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science in UIUC. She is interested in education research to help students with disability and broaden participation in computer science.

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