Universal Design for Learning at Scale with Thomas J. Tobin

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for improving learning for all learners based on the science of how humans learn. It involves providing learners with multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. We’ve mentioned the framework on the show from time to time, and I thought it was time to dig in a little deeper. 

Naturally, I thought of inviting Thomas J. Tobin on the podcast. Tom helped found the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Teaching, Learning, & Mentoring, and he is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and speaker on technology-mediated education—especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practices, academic integrity, accessibility, and universal design for learning.

Tom is the co-author (with Kirsten Behling) of the 2018 book Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, one of the best introductions to UDL around. And then I saw a social media post of Tom’s mentioning that he was working on a new book about UDL at scale. I had to talk to him to about that! 

In our conversation, we talk about the “Plus One Principle” as a way to understand and get started with UDL, the relationship between UDL and the myth of learning styles, the value that UDL can have on student retention and student success, strategics that academic leaders (or would-be leaders!) can use to help their campuses adopt UDL practices, and more!

Episode Resources

·       Thomas Tobin’s website, https://thomasjtobin.com/ 

·       CAST, https://www.cast.org/ 

·       UDL on Campus, http://udloncampus.cast.org/home 

·       Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, https://wvupressonline.com/node/757 

·       Derek’s sketchnotes of Tom’s 2015 POD Network keynote, https://www.flickr.com/photos/derekbruff/22911027632

·       "Understanding and Evaluating Online Course Accessibility," Limed: Teaching with a Twist [podcast], https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EFmNWWG0JetSaV6uiRyH7 

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching

Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:05

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas and teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. I realized recently that I hadn't yet produced an episode of this podcast focused on Universal Design for Learning.UDL is a framework for improving learning for all students. Based on the science of how humans learn, it involves providing students with multiple means of engagement, of representation and of action and expression. We've mentioned the framework on the show from time to time, and I thought it was time to dig in a little deeper. Naturally, I thought of inviting Thomas J. Tobin on the podcast. Tom helped to found the University of Wisconsin, Madison Center for Teaching, Learning and Mentoring, and he is an internationally recognized scholar, author and speaker on technology mediated education. Tom is the co-author with Kirsten Behling of the 2018 book Reach Everyone. Teach Everyone Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. One of the best introductions to UDL around. And then I saw a social media post of Tom's mentioning that he was working on a new book about UDL at scale, and I knew I had to talk to him about that. Before we get to the interview, I'd like to remind listeners that they can support the intentional Teaching podcast on Patreon for just a few bucks a month. You can help defray production costs for the podcast and you get access to Patreon only interviews and bonus clips. See the show notes for a link to sign up. Okay. In my conversation with Tom Tobin, we talk about the plus one principle as a way to understand and get started with UDL. The relationship between UDL and the myth of learning styles, the value that UDL can have on student retention and student success,strategies that academic leaders or would be leaders can use to help their campuses adopt UDL practices and much more. Tom, I am very excited to have you on the Intentional Teaching podcast. I know we're going have a great conversation today and thank you for being here and sharing what you're going to share about Universal Design for Learning.

Thomas Tobin: 2:17

Thank you very much, Derek. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast with you. Thank you for inviting me and listeners. Thanks for listening today.

Derek Bruff: 2:24

Yes, always. Tom, I'm going to start with my usual opening question. Can you tell us about a time when you realized that you wanted to be an educator?

Thomas Tobin: 2:34

This goes back to me being five years old and in kindergarten and being in awe of the teachers, not just in my classroom, but all throughout the school. I thought this is a way that people give back to their communities. It's a way that they keep in touch with scholarship and what's going on in the world. And that was always a driver for me. I actually wanted to be an English professor when I was very little, and I was one of those strange people who actually kept that goal all the way through. So, you know, did a high school degree and then four years later had an undergraduate degree in English literature as well as K-12 teaching experience, then a master's degree in English literature, and then a Ph.D. in 19th century British art history and literature. And only then did I discover there were no jobs in my field. But back it up for just a second. Yeah. With that K-12 teaching certification and then the double major in English and English education. That English education degree and my student teaching in middle school and high school prepared me for teaching in a way that no, you know, semester long teaching fellow training ever could. I understood the theories behind why different tactics actually worked and how to experiment in my own classroom, and especially since there weren't jobs for graduates with PhDs in 19th century Brit art, history and literature. My career path kind of went naturally into educational development, where I now teach teachers how to teach.

Derek Bruff: 4:14

And I'm glad you do. Okay, so you were planning to be a teacher from way back and now you teach teachers? I think I first saw you at the 2015 Pod Network conference. You were keynoting on Universal Design for Learning, which is a topic we'll talk a lot about here today. And there were actually two things that that that stuck with me from that keynote. One was your fantastic mustache, which I actually drew in my sketch notes for that keynote. I don't often try to draw an image of the speaker, but I couldn't resist with your mustache. But the other was the plus one principle, which was kind of a shorthand. You used to help people understand universal design for learning. So what is the plus one? And it really has stuck with me. It's given me kind of a starting point for a lot of conversations with faculty over the years. So what is the plus one principle and why is it important?

Thomas Tobin: 5:13

Fantastic. Well, listeners, you can't see me, but I am a white man with grey hair and as Derek describes, a giant black mustache. And we're talking about universal design for learning, which is giving people more than one way to get engaged with to take in information about and then practice with things they want to learn. So one of those concepts is doing visual description because we're doing an audio podcast and giving all you listeners more than one way to engage or understand what's going on. The official definition of universal design for learning that there are three principles to the way we put together our learning interactions, and they correspond to roughly to three different chemical pathways that have to connect in our brains when we learn things, we have to have a reason why that's an affective, affective network of things. We have to have content to learn, and that's recognition networks in our brains, and we have to have a way to practice or a how, and that is strategic networks and executive function. Now we can make a lot about the neuroscience of learning, but I prefer to take that and try to simplify it a little bit. The neuroscientists at CAST, what used to be called Centre for Applied Special Technology in Boston, now they've just shortened it down to the acronym CAST.

Derek Bruff: 6:37

So it's just CAST.

Thomas Tobin: 6:38

It's just CAST now.

Derek Bruff: 6:39

Because that old one does sound like the evil corporation in a science fiction movie.

Thomas Tobin: 6:43

AI A little bit, yeah. So also they've expanded way beyond their initial research and by doing so, it's not just those three principles anymore. It's three principles that are underpinned by nine different guidelines according to different types of learning, and each of those nine guidelines is further split up into a total of 31 check points, each one a very specific type of neurological approach to the learning interactions and the design of them. Now, if you've got that much complexity and you say, Hey people, here's universal design for learning folks are going to get lost, right? So they're all backed by research, but it's easy to get overwhelmed and it's difficult to find starting points.in a book that I wrote in 2018 with Kirsten Behling, it's called Reach Everyone Teach Everyone Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. I advocated for understanding UDL, at least at first, from a plus one perspective, meaning if there's one way for interactions to happen now and we all think about interactions between learners and materials, right? But also if there's one way for things to go with learners talking to other learners with learners, connecting to instructors, learne and support staff learners and their communities, if there's one way that you're asking people to do that now, make at least one more way. And what that does is it takes all of that complexity and turns it into do one thing. What that does is we're trying to lower access barriers for folks. And that was where we started in the conversation. And it's part of the research that we're doing now as well.

Derek Bruff: 8:31

That's great. And you gave the example on the fly of of describing your own facial hair. For our listeners, what are maybe one or two other examples of how an instructor in a college setting might implement a plus one principle?

Thomas Tobin: 8:47

So, for example, if you're thinking about how your students get engaged, like college instructors, when's the last time you heard students say, I'm so sorry I didn't do the reading or I'm not prepared? That's usually not out of laziness. In fact, I don't believe there are any lazy students out there. What I see are busy students, and when we think about engagement, it can be as simple as for all of the activities you ask your students to do, like doing reading, to prepare, doing some homework problems, engaging with their colleagues on labs or practices, give them a time estimate for how long that's going to take. This allows students to plan what's one thing that as human beings, we are all terrible at doing? Derek. Time management, right. So. And you think, Oh yeah, my students are really bad at time management. It's us too. So the challenge becomes, okay, give people a little bit of an understanding of how they could estimate their time or plan for it. And listeners, this isn't science. The back of the envelope way to do this. You do the thing and then tell your students about half again as much more time. So if it took you 30 minutes to read that article, tell your students it'll take them about 45 and you'll be roughly right. So that's one way that you can lower those access barriers. Another way that we can practice, plus one is when students are showing what they know. How many times do you ask students to write an essay or write a report? Could you grade if the students took their cell, their cell phone cameras and turned them on and said, Hey, I'm going to pretend I'm a news reporter and give you the same information? Could you grade that using the same criteria? If so, give your students that option. It'll make grading a little bit more fun for you, and they'll have choices so that they can choose them in the moment. So that's a little bit of plus one as well.

Derek Bruff: 10:49

Mm. I like that. And I, you know, I think a lot about multimodal assignments where perhaps the goal of the assignment is to work in some other modality. But one thing I think that is important about what you said is if I can grade this work using the same rubric or whatever mechanisms I'm using, regardless of modality, then just give students the option

Thomas Tobin: 11:10

Precisely. And I teach freshmen comp. So in a composition course, can I tell if my students have one inch margins and times new Roman 12 point font, double spaced all that if they did a video. No. So if the format is the assignment. Yeah. I don't give my students choices. At the same time when they're practicing, if I just want to see can you do a thesis sentence that has details, evidence and examples to support it? Heck yes. I give them those kinds of options.

Derek Bruff: 11:40

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, so that's a little bit about UDL kind of through this kind of introductory lens of of plus one. A lot has changed in higher ed since you gave that keynote in 2015. There's the COVID pandemic of course, and all of the increased use of non-traditional teaching modalities that emerged from it. But I was also I was looking over my sketch notes from your keynote, and one of the things that you said back in 2015, and that's nine years ago as we record this, I guess it was late 2015, so was eight and a half years ago. You said we're running out of traditional students in higher ed. And so so I'll just kind of frame it up that way and ask you what how is higher ed's conversation around Universal Design for learning changed in the last eight and a half years or so?

Thomas Tobin: 12:33

It's been a wonderful, wonderful progression. If we recognize the power dynamics at play in K-12 higher ed, an industry where instructors, trainers, facilitators, support staffers, they have varying levels of comfort and authority, both explicitly and implicitly. So our student body and our set of common practices. Those are also constantly changing thanks to demographic shifts, demands in different fields of study, legislative changes, advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning or SoTL. So we're also recognizing that making individual changes in classrooms and learning spaces goes only so far. The UDL guidelines are right now being re-envisioned to specifically address systemic barriers to equitable learning opportunities and outcomes. The 3.0 version of the UDL guidelines is slated to be released in early 2024, and it has a theme of rising to equity. That conversation about recognizing and addressing systemic barriers isn't just one that CAST is doing either. Many of my colleagues and I have been refocusing our work to build on the one person making good changes. Progress that we've seen over the past get this 40 years that UDL has been around. I'm now working with provosts, presidents, boards of trustees to help entire institutions to adopt inclusive design practices that lower barriers and help more students stick with their studies. It's become both a social good argument and a bottom line dollars and cents one as well.

Derek Bruff: 14:11

Is that because it means essentially maybe not more enrollment, but more student success? More student retention? You can then translate into enrollment, which can generate lots of efficiencies.

Thomas Tobin: 14:25

Derek, you've hit it right on the head. The one place that we have collectively, not yet looked for students is the students who are already with us. We've spent all kinds of time, energy, money and effort on trying to bring in nontraditional students or people who have some college but didn't complete or nighttime students or weekend students or international students. Right. We're always trying to bring new people in the door. We haven't looked at a lot is the people who are already with us. How many of them stay with us and complete their degrees or their credentials? How many of them stick with us and would say that it was a good experience. We all know what the freshman cliff is. Listeners, right? If you bring in 2000 first-year students, by the time it's second year, you maybe have 1600 of them. Where did the other 400 go? Number one reason why students drop out financial.UDL can't touch that. Number two reason why students drop out. Time and universal designed for learning is purposefully intended to help people lower those barriers so that they can make better use of their time and find more time for preparation, study and support it in places and spaces where maybe they didn't have that experience before.

Derek Bruff: 15:52

Yeah, and I had a guest on the podcast last year, Cathryn Friel, and she had done a study of students with ADHD and how they navigated online courses, and she talked about the kind of organizational schemes of an online course that would would cause some students kind of more trouble than than others. And the way she framed it was, you know, do I want students to spend 30 minutes figuring out where the assignment is and the things I need for the assignment, or do I want to make that easy and and have them spend that 30 minutes doing the assignment? Right. And so, particularly if some small changes on our end can free up a lot of student time, that that argument made a lot of sense. And I'm hearing kind of a version of that with with UDL right we're kind of if I'm a student and I I know I could write this, you know, response paper. It was going to take me two and a half hours because that's that's not a format I'm comfortable with. And it's going to take me a lot more time if I can meet the goals of the assignment by doing it through audio or video. And it's going to take me half the time because I'm more comfortable with that modality, then that's that's the time savings, right, for that student.

Thomas Tobin: 17:03

And when we think about the design of our systems, you'll hear a complaint, Oh, that's handholding. You're dumbing it down. You're making it easier for the students. You are if you're doing it wrong. So when we talk about universal design for learning and scaling that up, we're really talking about keeping the conceptual rigor at a high and challenging level. Make sure that your field is telling students new things and new skills that they didn't know before that they will struggle with and help them through that struggle. What we want to do is lower the process rigor,the the need for getting through the hoops like you were just describing to just get into the conversation in the first place or do the activity. So, you know, when we say we're guarding the tower, right, you know, oh, you're dumbing it down and all that. Yeah. If you're making the the actual content simpler or you're reducing the level of challenge, yeah, that's a bad way to go. So what we want to do is keep that challenge level high and reduce the barrier to entry into the activity or conversation in the first place.

Derek Bruff: 18:11

Well, I know you're working on a new book that that touches on these themes. I think I saw that your book title is at least tentatively UDL at scale, adopting universal design for learning across higher Education. What motivated you to start this book at this time and what do you what do you hope that it will accomplish?

Thomas Tobin: 18:32

Well, the UDL framework has been shown to lower barriers and increase learner persistence, retention and satisfaction in individual K-12 college and university classrooms. Recently, large scale studies are demonstrating that learners who have a sense of voice choice, agency safety and belonging in their overall programs of study, they're significantly more likely to complete their educational goals successfully. Kirsten Behling and I reported on this trend in our 2018 book Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone. And there have been dozens of large scale studies and campus wide implementations since then. So inclusive design practices like UDL, they're most effective when we adopt them broadly at the systemic level. Much of the current literature about UDL focuses on steps that individual instructors and designers can take, and the field of campus wide and systemic UDL application is relatively young.theorists and practitioners are creating new approaches right now to help colleges and universities discover the most needed places in their services and offerings. Where if we lower barriers, it will have the greatest initial impact. So my UDL at Scale book is intended to provide campus leaders with practical approaches for system wide adoption of inclusive design practices, using data and evidence from those recent large scale studies, also using data from campus wide UDL adoption efforts, as well as proven project management, change management and leadership vision techniques and tools. The book is intended for UDL practitioners who want to spearhead wider efforts to lower access barriers for learners across their institutions through the establishment of new institutional, cultural, practical and policy based structures.

Derek Bruff: 20:22

Okay, so let's talk about moving to scale. All right. So if you're perhaps a faculty member, an academic leader, and you'd like to move your department or maybe your whole campus towards greater adoption of UDL, where where might you start? What are some what are some ways to get going on that?

Thomas Tobin: 20:41

Excellent question. Okay, listeners. Imagine

Derek Bruff: 20:44

I ask a guy writing a book on this topic. Oh, he has a lot of ideas right now.

Thomas Tobin: 20:47

All right, listeners, imagine now 200 students seated in a theater style lecture hall. They all have their laptops open. And while I would never advocate for large enrollment courses as an effective way to teach or learn. This is part of the reality on many of our campuses, right? So when we think about UDL at scale, we can talk in two ways. First, about what happens when we make bigger units like those large enrollment courses. And second, what happens when we move beyond those units into the level of entire systems whole departments, schools, colleges, divisions, universities? What changes at larger scales for UDL in both of those senses of scaling up.five things. One, we adopt fewer broader, more strategic goals, and we measure them in terms of overall learner persistence, retention and satisfaction like we were talking about earlier. UDL increases learner persistence. This means more students who are there on day one are still there to complete the final examination or turn in their course project. We know that UDL has a positive effect on persistence because of large scale research at individual schools like Colorado State University has a beautiful study on this, as well as meta analyses of the literature across smaller scale studies. We also know that UDL increases learner retention. More learners take a course with me and then come back next term to finish their educations with you. We know that UDL increases student retention. That's the holy Grail of every provost and registrar. Because of its positive effect on that freshman cliff, where students enter their studies and they stop out for various reasons by lowering barriers and by normalizing help seeking behaviors, UDL at scale affects student retention numbers and UDL increases learner satisfaction. Study after study shows learners who feel those strong senses of here they are again belonging, choice, controls, safety and agency. They're more than five times as likely to be satisfied with their experiences in college and university ity. Not only do satisfied students stick with us in greater numbers, they're more likely to advocate that others come study with us as well. So this impact of UDL, especially when it's adopted as part of a larger push for equitable and inclusive education, is the most easily measured at scale with student rating and exit interview instruments and things like that. By the way, listeners, if you're in a state where legislative changes have made certain words not too terribly easy to say, like diversity and inclusion, talk about access and citizens rights and you'll get to the same place. So one was fewer broader strategic goals. Two is individual applications give way to systemic practices instead of doing changes one at a time, and then repeating that person to person course to course service to service. We change the structures themselves so that everyone adheres to simpler but broader inclusive techniques. So listeners, imagine that there are 20 steps to perfecting UDL. There aren't. But think along with me for a minute. Most of our efforts to date have been to train a small, willing group of colleagues to reach step 20, whi the majority of our instructors and staff members and administrators, they're at step zero. Or maybe step one. When we think about UDL at scale, we design our systems and aim our advocacy efforts toward getting everyone in the institution to step three, we allocate money, time, talent, political capital toward those efforts at the level of the entire organization. And the push for change comes from the top down rather than as a grassroots effort. So, Derek, one was fewer and strategic goals. Two was individual applications going to systemic practices. Three is harnessing the power of defaults. It's amazing how few people raise a fist and say, You can't make me do that. I have academic freedom when everyone follows inclusive practices because of the way systems and services are designed. Okay, listeners, imagine a dialog box in a learning management system that warns alternative text field is required for an image that's being uploaded. So reminding people, training people, pleading with them to remember to practice inclusive techniques consistently, that's doomed to be ever only a partial solution to a challenge that requires near perfect adoption if it's going to be effective. There's already whole shelves worth of legal requirements related to making materials accessible, and our colleges and universities continue to be sued for inaccessible materials. Right? Everyone agrees taking the time to make things accessible is the right thing to do. We can look at the sheer enormity of retrofitting all of that inaccessible content and will suffer from analysis paralysis, and we won't even start. So rather than trust that everyone will do the right thing, we assign resources to create systems that just require good practices like that required all the text field on on the screen. I had you imagine or a workflow in your media services area that requires the staff to create captions for all the videos produced through that office. This part of UDL at scale helps normalize the work of making engagement representation and action choices. It moves accessibility and inclusion from, Oh, that's extra effort to: That's just our everyday work. So four out of five we go beyond the classroom and formal teaching and learning interactions. We start to think of the entire ecosystem of the institution and identify where learning is happening during learner's time away from our formal learning spaces and when they're working alongside support staff like librarians, tutors, counselors and so on. So UDL had its beginnings in the classroom. It's a framework for lowering barriers across various learning interactions in which our campuses engage, and there's lots of learning interactions happening in spaces far beyond the classroom lab and lecture hall. Can you think of anything that might pop into mind? Derek

Derek Bruff: 27:06

I mean, it depends a lot on the campus and kind of what that campus culture is like. But, you know, there's everything from office hours to student organizations to committees that I've I've been on with students in the past. Right.

Thomas Tobin: 27:19

Oh, fantastic. And I'll encourage you to even expand beyond that. So think about your advisors. They're teaching students how to navigate the systems of your college or your university. Your tutoring staff are teaching study skills, your mental health counselors, they're teaching coping strategies, your librarians are teaching how to assess and work with information. So wherever students interact with support services, think of how those are teaching and learning interactions. If students are learning something, even if it's not part of the academic curriculum, we can apply the principles of UDL to lower barriers, increase engagement and support, learner voice choice and agency. And then number five, we have to weigh academic freedom against access and predictability. Derek, you talked about this earlier. Part of lowering barriers for learners is not making them learn new patterns, systems and ways of being when they move from one part of our environment to another. So our instructors do have the right to teach in their fields in the manner they deem best. That's the essence of academic freedom. So as we think about UDL at scale, we should be especially wary of framing UDL as a set of prescriptive actions that force instructors all to do exactly the same thing. UDL is all about choices, so it's doubly ironic to say you must when we're talking about the content, the knowledge, the skills in the fields that we teach. At the same time, we should say you must, when it comes to making our various systems predictable, using the same color scheme, general layouts, button styles, text names for common controls across our Web sites, learning management systems, other touchpoints. It goes beyond just the identity manual and glossary that your marketing team is created too. This speaks to having federated style vocabulary and operational parameters for all the base systems on which people build. So our i.t. Colleagues are allies in this conversation. By the way, we already have predictable systems for our physical environments. They're called classrooms and they all look and operate roughly the same except for labs and other special needs situations. And a splendid example is the work that the University of Cincinnati did to customize all of its student facing tools to have the same look and feel. They started with an electronic accessibility policy and they worked outward from those principles. Along the way, they discovered that UDL was a framework that fit all of the needs that that policy expressed.now, especially because some colleagues can mistake consistent and predictable access to systems and tools for an encroachment on academic freedom. It's totally not. It's important for UDL at scale that we get support for these requirements from our administration, faculty, Senate, academic staff, governance and other campus oversight bodies. So those are five different ways that we can think about UDL at scale fewer broader, more strategic goals, individual applications, giving way to systemic practices, harnessing the power of defaults, moving beyond the classroom and weighing academic freedom against access and predictability. I'll be expanding on all of these basics in that new book, using examples from colleagues who have actually done them.

Derek Bruff: 30:39

That's great. I love that Tom and I are. I feel like there's a whole conversation about academic freedom we could have and I'm not going to have on the podcast. But I do feel like that is sometimes brought out in ways that are slightly inappropriate to to give cover for, for perhaps less than professional practices. And so I think I tend to take a more narrow definition of academic freedom, and I think it's more helpful that way. But I love the, you know, the thinking about changing the defaults, thinking about changing the systems and structures and even something you mentioned classrooms as a place where we have kind of a standard interface for learning, right? Many campuses, a lot of classrooms look very similar. And even if it's a little bit different, it has some kind of basic structures that you would expect, right? There's a chalkboard or a whiteboard, there's a front of the room, there's a bunch of chairs. Right. But I think about, you know, even as a as a left handed individual, me going into a classroom, hoping maybe there's a left handed writing desk somewhere in there as a student and as as hopeless as that search often was. Right. That's a very small example that's been around for decades of a little bit of structural change that makes it a little bit easier for some students to access the learning environment, right?

Thomas Tobin: 32:03

Absolutely. And that's actually a really good example of universal design in the physical or built environment that if every classroom has a couple of left handed desks, you don't have to go searching one out. You just expect that it's there.

Derek Bruff: 32:16

Yeah, Yeah. And so I can imagine thinking about, you know, what if we had other types of seating, right, for folks who might not do well with a traditional, you know, classroom chair of sorts. Right. And and, you know, once you you could fix that problem. Right? Let's say you've got some students who would like some seating options for various physical reasons. You could try to fix that problem classroom by classroom, or you can make a change to your classroom furniture purchasing so that it's kind of standard practice to have a variety of seating in every classroom on campus. And maybe you don't change that overnight, right? It may take a few cycles of furniture replacement before you get to something quite universal. But that kind of change at the structure or policy level, kind of, as you say, even at the default level at a system wide, can have huge impacts across many, many, many classrooms. And I can imagine similar things for the other learning environments that we're in, whether they're face to face or online or something else.

Thomas Tobin: 33:13

That is exactly right. You've got it very well now.

Derek Bruff: 33:17

Well, I want to end with a question that actually posed on Blue Sky several weeks ago. And you you would you weighed in with a response. And I want to ask you to elaborate a little bit. And I think it might tie together some of these ideas. So last year, I was listening to an episode of another podcast called Limed Teaching with a twist from the good folks at Elon University. And that episode was looking at accessibility in online courses. So they were thinking about that online environment. And one of the speakers mentioned asking their students via survey, How do you learn best? And one student responded according to what the professor said on this podcast. I learn best by talking, and I took that to mean through discussion, right? That's kind of where I learn best, how I learn best. And as someone who's had to kind of fight against the learning styles myth for more than a decade now, that smelled like someone kind of owning their learning style, right? I'm a verbal learner. And so but on the other hand, well, from a UDL perspective, how do you make sense of a student's expressed learning strengths like this case.

Thomas Tobin: 34:30

Who I love this? Question And it's also a splendid place to wrap up our conversation. So let's unpack three things together. One, learners are good at expressing their preferences, but they're fluid, right? So we know that students, we've got lots of data that show that students are actually pretty bad at predicting how well they learn active learning. They kind of hate it, but it is the most effective when we talk, when we talk about retaining concepts and practices. This, by the way, is why Learning Styles listeners don't exist. We aren't exclusively or primarily locked in to one sort of input channel for information for our whole lives. If I'm, say, a visual learner, does that mean I can't learn by hearing information not at all. And our learning strengths and preferences change based on our circumstances. What seems to have worked before? Even how much sleep we got the night before? Yes, students are bad at knowing their strengths and learning situations, but so are all of us instructors and designers too. This brings us to unpacking number two: Two,patterns are meaningful, but we have to uncover them afresh. Every time The instructor who asks How do you learn best is engaged in what we call differentiated instruction or D-I. In other words, they're finding out what preferences and patterns this group of learners right now seems to cluster around. And then the instructors adjust their approach to fit some of those patterns wherever it's possible. This is different from UDL in that it's a response to a specific group of learners, and it requires instructors to make changes in the moment. DI is a splendid approach to teaching and applying even a little bit of it helps us to get to know our learners and respond to them in supportive ways. So the question might raise a learning styles response. At the same time, the instructor can probably glean good patterns from those responses when taken in the aggregate, but it's not UDL. And that leads us to unpacking Part three three. UDL is all about designing learning interactions before we know who will be in them. We assume that we're going to have variability among our learners, among their levels of preparedness, familiarity with our concepts, social networks and support economic stability, physical and mental abilities, you name it.So we designed for the people at the margins rather than some mythical average or typical learner, and we provide as much voice agency safety and belonging as we can. That way we've created learning spaces and interactions that by design, lower access barriers and provide multiple paths for learners. Fewer learners will have to say, treat me differently. So to sum up, UDL is not a magic wand that we wave and all accommodations or adjustments based on groups of learners go away. Rather, we make those individual in the moment adjustments less necessary in the first place. And that's why I'm focused on helping institutions design entire systems to lower barriers. UDL works best when it's not a one at a time effort here and there, but it's just part of what we do at our institutions. So I've really enjoyed talking with you and your listeners today, Derek and listeners. I'd love to hear your stories too, if you'd like to connect, chat, or even have me as part of your professional development efforts, you can find my email, social links, books and speaking brochure at Thomas J. Tobin dot com. I hope your paths will be good ones everybody. So thanks.

Derek Bruff: 38:18

Thanks for coming on the podcast Tom, and we'll make sure to have a link to your website and some of the other resources you in the show notes for Easy Access. I really appreciate you taking this time. Thank so much.

Thomas Tobin: 38:29

Fabulous. Thank you, Derek. Take care, everybody.

Derek Bruff: 38:39

That was Thomas J. Tobin, speaker, consultant and co-author of the book Reach Everyone Teach Everyone Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. Tom is a wealth of ideas and inspiration for instructors interested in UDL, and I'm very glad to know he's working with institutions to bring these practices to scale to help more students. Tom tells me he expects that the new book will be available in spring or summer of 2025. If you'd like more information on Tom and his work, see the show notes to a link to his website. He's also well worth following on social media for his lively and useful posts. Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the intentional teaching newsletter and my Patreon where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.