Universal Design for Learning (UDL), developed by CAST, is an international framework for educators to design content for all learners. The UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessment, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.
Course planning for the coming academic year is either underway or about to start. It offers a chance to look at how learning experiences—exams, assignments, and activities—are sequenced in a course and what they add up to collectively. Assembling learning experiences so that they effectively
Summer is a great time to sit outside. I remember when we were building a new patio. The contractors delivered a huge pile of rocks to our front yard. Big stones. Midsize stones. Some multihued and no larger than hefty pebbles. The patio was going
In the rural part of North Central Pennsylvania where I live, a lot of families have owned the same farmland for generations. Houses are handed down, with each new family adjusting the home to their needs—adding a porch here, a back bedroom there, an attachment
Higher education tends to bow down to Bloom as the oracle of educational objectives. Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, which ranks types of learning on six levels from “lowest” (remembering) to “highest” (creating), is a standard guide that almost all academic committees use in reviewing course proposals.
When it comes to making decisions about what happens in courses, students don’t have much say. Teachers decide what students learn, how they’ll learn it, when they’ll learn it, and finally, whether they have learned it. Expertise and professional responsibilities give teacher power over what
It’s a great question and not one most of us ask ourselves as often as we should. Is creating or reconstituting a course a design process, or is it more like course assembly? Even though instructional designers are more visibly present than they used to
Long careers provide opportunities to look back, and I found myself doing a bit of that of late. It’s not so much to reflect on what I’ve learned as what I still don’t know. What still puzzles me about teaching and learning? What remains unanswered,
One of the challenges that an online program faces is how to keep courses up-to-date. Links break, articles become outdated, new material appears, and so on. In essence, an online course starts deteriorating as soon as it is built. New programs are often unprepared for
For our next installment in this series on assignments, we’d like to share an assignment template that we think can be helpful to teachers and students. Let’s start with how it can help teachers. It’s no surprise that we think many teachers could do a
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