CBIF UDL in HE seminar Joe Houghton Dec 8th 2020 optimised

Hello and welcome to the College of Business Intercultural Forum workshop number 5 on universal design for learning and why we should all be using it. We're really happy to be back with our CBIF workshops and to see you all, of course. And so again, you are all very welcome. So we've overcome the kind of first hurdle of moving our teaching online, which is moving our, you know, our teaching, our assessment, Getting students to engage online. And now it's really time for us to take it to the next stage, which is really looking at our teaching design and really helping to inform our teaching practice more. To do that, we have a really interesting session today. The format's a little bit different because we're just having one speaker today. We have Joe Houghton here, who is a true advocate of the Universal Design for Learning. I know I've heard him speaking about it before, so I'm really curious to see some of the detail. And Joe is going to take us through some of the concepts and the principles behind Universal Design for Learning and explain to us all, and I'm sure persuade us all, why we should be using it in our own teaching. Joe, what do you hope our viewers all kind of take away with them today?

I think if you haven't come across UDL before, I just want to introduce the concept and just give you a flavor of what it is. And I would just like to sow a seed, and if one person picks this up and runs with it with their own teaching from today, I will have achieved my outcome, if you like, because I think it's important, and that's why I suggested the session.

It sounds fantastic. So I think we'll do— I'll just hand over to you, Joe, and are you happy to work away and we'll do questions and answers at the end? We'll leave some time at the end.

Yeah, we can do Q&A at the end, or if people want to ask as we go through, I'm fine. The chat window's up as well. I dropped the presentation into the chat a bit earlier on. I don't know whether people got that or not.

We did, yes, I can see that in the chat.

Can everybody else see that? Can you see that now that you've come on? No, Valentina's saying no. I'll just drop it in again there. So I'll do it, I'll do it when we're discussing afterwards. Okay, so you're seeing my window, and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into full screen view with PowerPoint. And I've turned subtitles on, so what you should also see underneath the PowerPoint is the automatic transcription that PowerPoint will now deliver. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and the idea of this is to make your presentations more accessible to people who have perhaps, you know, hearing difficulties or English not as a first language, and this will certainly aid them in comprehension when you are delivering sessions. So this is something I picked up during the UDL course that I've just completed, or I am completing, as a result of having done this today. So let me just take you through a few slides. We start with the why. Why worry? Why do UDL? Well, I never really noticed my challenged learners— dyslexia, dyspraxia. I've had students in my courses who needed to use screen readers because they had sight difficulties and stuff like that, but I've never really taken a whole lot of notice of them in terms of changing things to make things easier for them or better for them. I always engaged with them, you know, I mean, I check on the learning disability site when I get the emails and find out who I've got that's registered, and I always touch base with them and say, look, if there's anything that I can do, let me know. Very often they come back and say, no, it's fine, you know, the lectures are clear and the Putting the stuff up early is great and all the rest of it, but I just, I've never really engaged with accessibility. Was I lazy, uninformed? Did inertia kick in? Yes. Was I kind of too busy? Yes. Maybe I shouldn't have been. This year, alongside teaching and COVID, I've done the professional diploma for entrepreneurial educators with the Innovation Academy. at UCD, and I met the lady in the picture there, Jen Lynch, who actually won the UDL Design for Learning kind of award last year for the work that she did at Marino College. And Jen and I became quite good friends, and we've actually run some sessions together for the European Adult Learning Network, and she was hoping to be here today, but maybe she'll come in a bit later on. So she's kind of like the spark that lit me up in terms of UDL. But, you know, the power of CPD, it connects these dots. So what is UDL?

Imagine you went into a big clothes store and all that was on sale was one type of outfit. In one size, with no talk given to different individual body shapes or personalities. That would be crazy, right? Expecting everyone to be able to fit into the same size and express themselves in the same colour and style? Yet in many cases, that's exactly what is happening in our education system. When it comes to learning, variability is the rule, not the exception, and our college campuses are now grappling with the demands of an increasingly diverse cohort of learners, with increasing numbers of international students, students from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, mature students, and students with disabilities. Despite this, curriculums are still designed for the mythical average learner, and all are expected to engage and learn on the same terms. Not enough flexibility is built in at the design stage to give all students equal opportunities to learn in ways that play to their own strengths. So, how can our institutions respond to these challenges? Enter Universal Design for Learning, or UDL for short. UDL is an educational framework that guides the design of learning goals, materials, methods, and assessments, as well as the policies surrounding these curricular elements. With the diversity of learners in mind. The framework was developed by US organisation CAST and is based on research in the field of neuroscience. It promotes 3 core principles for educators to build into their teaching practice, calling on them to provide students with multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. The framework includes a set of and how you can turn these principles into practice. For example, by fostering collaboration with the introduction of group work with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities; by using different types of media to support learning and ensuring that all materials are accessible; and by providing a choice of assessment instruments while maintaining robust learning outcomes. You are probably already including some UDL elements in your practice without realising it. And there's much more to explore, so don't be afraid to let Universal Design for Learning give you a new lens through which to look at your teaching and learning practice and help you to better reach all of your students. For more information and resources, visit ahead.ie/udl.

So AHEAD is the kind of Irish organisation that's championing UDL. But I think the most important thing he said in that little clip was you probably all do this already, and I think we all do. Okay, so this isn't a matter of kind of like you've got to change your teaching practice completely, you've got to, you know, completely redesign all your courses. In fact, there's a little phrase that they use in UDL a lot, which is plus one. Okay, you only need to change one thing. So each time you start a new course, each time you revisit a course to update it or whatever, just apply one new thing that fits into UDL. You know, maybe give the students another way of submitting their assignment. You know, maybe you've always requested a written report. Well, could they Could they maybe video their input? Or could they do it as a business report rather than an academic paper? Different ways of both representing and then actually expressing themselves and engaging on it. This is based on neuroscience pioneered by a guy called David Rose, and there's a link there on that slide. So I'll share both the PDF and the PPTX of this presentation and you can follow the links, but there's a lot of very solid science behind this. Okay, so those 3 principles: engagement, representation, and action and expression. So how do we engage with our students? And I mean, the last 6 months we've engaged with our students in very different ways, haven't we? We can't do it face-to-face, so we've engaged online. We've started perhaps recording our sessions and making them available as videos so that people can watch them offline. So we're already doing this, okay? You just have to kind of— it's just sensitizing your mind to some of the ideas. How do we represent our information? Do we give it out as handouts? Do we do face-to-face, you know, talking at our students? Probably not anymore, or not as much as we used to, because online you can't just do that. Delivery. You've got to engage them, you've got to set up more discussion groups and breakout rooms and stuff like that. So how do we represent information in different ways so that different types of learner and different people from different backgrounds have ways of connecting with our material and the ideas that we're sharing with them in a better way? Okay, so, and then expression is, you know, how can the students express themselves back to us? Both in graded and in ungraded pieces. He mentioned CAST, which is the U.S. organization that kind of came up with UDL, and there's a very well-thought-through framework. So it breaks down engagement, representation, and action and expression into, you know, access, build, and internalize, and then goals and stuff, and each one of these has more behind it as well. So there's a very robust, very practical educator-focused pathway, if you like, into UDL. So if this is of any interest to you, if you follow up with some of these links, it will really, you know, pay dividends for you. So cast.org is the website. It's not cast.com, it's cast.org. And, you know, again, there's loads of stuff on there. AHEAD.ie is the organization that champions UDL, and what they do each year is that they run this thing called a digital badge. I've just finished— I'm just finishing it today by doing this presentation to you guys, and it takes about an hour a week for about 3 months. And the way that they've structured the course, and you do it in fours, so you just— you link in with 3 other educators, probably from different institutions, and you're facilitated by somebody who's done the UDL badge and the facilitation, which is a little extra, and you collaborate and you share ideas and you just think about your own teaching and the way your learners learn and engage with some of the principles, and it's just eye-opening. It's fantastic. It's part of the Teaching and Learning National Forum, It's extremely well designed. This year, 600 people signed up for the digital badge when it started 3 months ago, and a good number of those have actually stuck with it and will be finished with it. And for another 5 hours of kind of, you know, work on it, you can get the facilitator accreditation where you can start to roll it out in your own area or your own institution. So I've done the facilitator badge as well. Really, really well worth a look when they run this next year. But, you know, so looked at the why, looked at the what, so now the how. That's the third kind of element of this. It's just small changes. I've started asking my students on a regular basis where their challenges are. Where are you challenged, not just by online learning, but where are you challenged by the course, by the way we've delivered the course? Would it be better if we did things in a different way? I've tried to identify my assumptions and then ask for feedback from the students and said, well, what are my blind spots? What am I not seeing? Tell me about that. A little one that really resonated with me was adding full stops to all your bullet points on slides. That actually helps screen readers differentiate between each of the bullet points because otherwise a screen reader just sees the slide as a paragraph. Now we don't use screen readers, but people who do, apparently this makes a huge difference to the comprehension of slides when a screen reader is used, and all we've got to do is just stick a full stop on the end of each line. Offering subtitles when talking over slides. I'm doing that with us now. PowerPoint has this built in. All you do is you go into the slides when you're doing the presenting thing and just turn on show subtitles, and when you maximize PowerPoint up like this, then it listens to you and it gives you this transcription underneath, which is fantastic for accessibility. Things like otter.ai, which is an online transcription service, you can have that open in a browser window and it will do this automatic transcription, but then it gives you a savable text file as a transcript which you can save alongside your lecture notes or your videos or whatever. The new dictation feature that was souped up in Word about 3 months ago, fantastic. Recording your teaching sessions and making them available, these are all things that I've done over the last few months and, you know, so I've probably done about +7. I need to save some for next term so I can keep doing my +1s. And all the new tools that we're using— Jamboard, Mentimeter, stuff like that. So that's kind of it. I'm completing the facilitator part of the UDL badge at the moment. If this is of interest to anybody, I'm up for having a conversation, doing more on UDL. I'm certainly going to be reviewing my teaching materials for next term in light of UDL. And how I assess them and how I present them. And I just really wanted to share with you those basic ideas, and I think I've done it in 15 minutes. Kathy, are we on time? You're muted, Kathy.

There's always one, and it's nearly always me. I thought I'd be slicker with Zoom by now after using it since March, but apparently not. Anyway, thank you, Joe, for that. I think it'd be great to open it up just to like a general discussion. discussion among everybody who's here. One thing though I'd like to ask you maybe as the first question, what were your students' response like when you started engaging with them about their challenges? Because I'm guessing that perhaps that's not something that they're used to their lecturers or their educators doing. So what was their kind of response when you started engaging with them about these learning challenges?

I'd like to think that I'm— I've always asked students for feedback. You know, every module I do, I build in a reflective journal, and I do ask them for feedback, and I ask them for feedback normally, but I don't think what I'd ever done was actually at this— at the top of the module said, I'm actually doing a module myself on accessibility, and one of the things is like, you know, we don't know our own blind spots, so if there's questions that I'm not asking or if there's things that I'm not seeing about how this course is run, please tell me. Yeah, that will be, you know, I'll welcome that criticism with open arms, if you like. And I got 4 emails that night from different students on different little things that I hadn't picked up, and I was thrilled to bits with that. And some of those students were ones that perhaps wouldn't necessarily have talked out loud in class, but because I made it safe, they kind of did contribute, which was fantastic.

Very good. That's really interesting. I'd like to just open it up to the floor, I think, or if we have— let me just double-check the chat for— by the way, Joe, the audio on your video earlier was a little bit sketchy. So will you show your slides? There'll be a link to the video, will there?

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And again, Julie just commenting on the subtitles for PowerPoint. I wasn't aware of that either, and neither was Julie. So, and it seems to be that they're quite accurate. Like I said, I wouldn't say it's 100% accuracy, of course, but it seems quite close. And then, sorry, you just sent that to Carolyn. Sorry, in the chat, I'm just keeping an eye on the chat there. So yeah, that's news to me that you can use subtitles in PowerPoint. That's interesting, especially like you said, when you're pre-recording and leaving it up there for students. That's interesting.

Absolutely. It's really good. And I'd suggest people look at Otter as well, because I'm using that alongside my lectures now. I've, you know, we've all got international students. Don't have English as a first language. And a number of the Chinese students particularly have come back to me and said that being able to get a transcription of the sessions, even though I talk reasonably slowly and fairly clearly, they're finding that really, really useful. So, you know, this is something that we can do without any real extra effort.

And that was on otter.ai, is it?

Yeah, that's otter.ai. Yeah.

Excellent. Very good. Guys, let's open it up since it's a— since we have a nice enthusiastic group of people here. Why don't we open it up to the floor a bit? Any questions or comments for Joe on what you've heard so far? Has anyone talked about their own experience in terms of making learning more accessible? Okay.

I'm going to say something. And first of all, I think that now I'm so excited, you know, really enthusiastic about UDL. So, thank you so much, Joe, for really bringing this approach to our attention. And I think that You know, I think you're right. As a teacher, I always try to be kind of inclusive, you know, making learning more accessible to all the students and everything, and I think you're right. It's like, I think somehow to some extent maybe everyone of us is doing something about it, but I think that having the framework, having the theory to guide us through, I think that that is a very powerful tool, so I'm going to actually check the CAST website, especially the framework. I'm going to take a look actually. So one thing that popped into my mind when I was listening to We're saying that I really, same as Julie, I think that the PowerPoint subtitle, that is so powerful, you know what I mean? It just really sort of, because I think I speak fairly good English, but I'm not native English speakers, and I couldn't help but looking at the subtitles just to make sure that I actually understand you completely, and that is really, really helpful feature, so thank you so much. Another one is that I think there's one thing I always been thinking is that is the participation. Because, well, you know, because of my background, I would automatically be looking at the cultural dimension over here. So obviously we have students, you know, in Smurfit School, and I think the dominant— it's not just Smurfit School, I think it's all the Western universities— the dominant teaching belief, teaching, you know, approach would be, let's say, student-centered approach, you know, and using Cathy's more fancy word, what is that, constructive approach?

Constructive teaching, yes, that's for a future session. That's for a future session.

We'll talk about that. So it's very student-centered, which means that, okay, we want students to participate, right? Saying they need to speak up and everything. But obviously, for students from a more like teaching center, a teacher-centered approach, like East Asian countries, especially in China, Vietnam, South Korea, so I feel that those students really need a lot of time to really adjust to this kind of approach. So I'm just thinking that in terms of having students participate, you know, this, this whole participation And, you know, for me, I think it's a little bit tricky to deal with that, and I'm just wondering whether Joe or anybody else in the room, in this virtual room, have any techniques or anything, you know what I mean, or any similar questions to ask. How do we make sure that there is equal participation or like participation is accessible for the students?

I mean, I always open every module with you know, this is a safe space, it's okay to challenge, it's okay to have an opinion, you're never going to be shot down for that, and, you know, please everybody contribute. And just saying that this is a safe space actually makes it psychologically a safe space, but then you have to draw people out, you know, if you get somebody tentatively raising a hand or saying something, you've got to encourage them and you've got to, you know, kind of Maybe give them a bit of praise, maybe follow up on their point a little bit more or whatever. So yeah, that works.

And just to build on that a little bit, one thing that I really love, and Joe, you already mentioned this, is using Menti as well as using the Zoom polls. So I actually use both because what I love about Menti— so Menti, you just give them a code and then they enter an answer on their phone and it pops up You can do things like word clouds or free response. And so, like, one thing that I noticed is you get a lot more responses from students when you do that than if you have them raise their hands, because if they raise their hands, it's like the same people speaking all the time. But if you have them, you know, entering in an idea, because Menti allows you to, to write an actual sentence and then it just scrolls through the different options, then you get almost everyone participating. So I found it's a really nice way to, I guess, be inclusive to students that are more— that are shyer. Because they feel comfortable doing that. They don't feel comfortable maybe necessarily raising their hand, but that's like a very safe way to get engagement. And if you're jumping between polls, Menti, and the chat, then they're on their toes.

Yeah, absolutely. And the chat is, the chat is so powerful as well. I'm encouraging students now to use the chat as a second channel during every session. And, you know, I say to them, look, you know, There's a lot of horsepower in the room. There's a lot of experience. There's a lot of knowledge. So when I mentioned something and you know a good book or you know a good website or you've read a good paper or whatever, stick it in the chat. And then at the end of the night, yeah, the bottom right-hand corner of the chat window, if you look at it, there's 3 little dots. You click on those 3 little dots, you can save that chat file down as a text file. And now that's a resource because it's got all those links in. Yeah, so the chat function is underutilized as a really useful communication resource.

We also have, on that note, we have a question in the chat there from Michael. Hi, Michael. And he's asking about, you know how with Zoom if you record, that automatically records an audio file and it can be a transcript as well, isn't it, when you record on Zoom? And does anyone— I don't even— I haven't been— I have to admit I haven't been using that at all, but I'm wondering if anyone else has I've not used the Zoom transcription.

I know that Otter and Zoom have just struck up a deal. So, okay, we'll be built into Zoom going forward. All right. So Enrico said if you record into the cloud, you have a transcript. Okay.

And how good is that, Enrico? Have you used it yourself? Like, is it fairly— how good is the accuracy on that?

It's fairly okay. I would say it's comparable to what we're seeing now. Sorry about the missing video, but my connection is acting up. Yeah, it's very comparable to what we're seeing today. And it's a text file, so you can edit it a little bit if you really want to. Marie's saying in the chat she's not found it that, you know, that good. But yeah, I mean, all those transcription— of all, I've tried a number of transcription services, and the Otter one seems to be about 5 or 6% better than the others. Yeah. So, you know, and Otter—

is Otter free to use?

It's free. I think there's a free tier with 600 minutes a month, and then if you want more, you can pay.

So yeah. Interesting. That's definitely a resource I'm going to check out on that. Absolutely, 100%. And we're just— we have a few more minutes left. We're just coming up to our time. We have literally 1 or 2 minutes left. So I guess I'd just like to say firstly, thank you to Joe. That's something that I think has really got us all thinking about accessibility and accessibility of learning. And thank you for those resources as well. Those are going to be very useful. Again, anyone who hasn't yet accessed them, they're in that chat there. So you can access them through the chat window. I just want to make you aware of our next session. Again, a great one. So it'll be after the Christmas holidays in January, and it's about adapting experiential learning activities to the digital classroom. So again, going the next level with our online teaching and being able to incorporate some more kind of hands-on practical learning in a digital environment. And that would be, I believe, Dr. Jacob Eisenberg and also Alan Higgins talking about their experiences of moving experiential learning online. So again, really useful for developing our teaching practice, and I hope you can join us for that. Keep an eye on your email and you will get the date for that in January. Okay, um, I guess that's it. Linda, am I missing anything? Linda will tell me, I'm sure, if I'm missing anything. I think that's all.

We have covered everything, Kathy. And yeah, and I think that the third session, which I actually forgot to mention, is we'll be looking at the assessment in terms of adapting experiential learning to the digital world.

We'll be looking at how to assess the experiential learning.

That's right.

Great. That's always a good topic.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you, Joe, for that. So useful and so many things to think about now, I'm sure, for all of us in terms of our teaching practice. So we will see you all again after the break. So I guess we need to say happy holidays.

Yay!

Feels too early to say that still, but happy holidays to everybody. Have a great break. I think we've all earned our holiday break this year, certainly after the year we've had. So enjoy, and hopefully we'll all come back all fresh and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in January, ready to get back into our online teaching. Perfect.

Thanks very much, Linda, Kathy.

Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Bye.

Thank you.