These days we hear a lot about personalizing the learning experience to help provide more agency for our learners. This speaks to me because I value the human connections I create in my role. I serve as one of the Technology Instructional Specialists for our small, rural district in Indiana. My role supports K12 teachers in Canvas implementation, efficient use of PowerTeacher PRO, and other blended/digital learning tools, resources, and instructional strategies. When CAST announced its adjustments to the UDL Guidelines, I was immediately intrigued.
Before sharing about my district’s practice, let’s take a moment to explore CAST UDL Guidelines 3.0 and learner agency. These guidelines demonstrate adaptations instructors can strategically use to address biases and exclusions that have historically impacted learners. The guidelines also lean more heavily into the ideas of learner agency. Actively involving learners in making choices about their learning empowers them to take ownership of their goals, especially important for a generation that seeks to understand the “why” behind what they learning. When we seek to change the design of the learning environment rather than view barriers as a deficit in the learner, we see greater, more impactful change.
This focus on accessibility and learner agency doesn’t always come easy and can feel quite daunting when first starting out. However, the positive impacts in learning and student engagement make those shifts worthwhile. In our district, we wanted to take steps to bring the same accessibility-first mindset to our Canvas courses.
Bringing UDL into Canvas Courses
Canvas courses provide the digital learning environment for our students. It is important to ensure that we bring the ideas of the UDL Guidelines - engagement, representation, action & expression - into our course design. This philosophy came at the perfect time, because in a post-Covid world, we were working actively to implement “fixes” for some of the common frustrations we heard from learners and their adult helpers at home. To take their feedback along with the updated UDL Guidelines and create a more accessible, learner-friendly Canvas course template provided a much-needed assist for our instructors.
In our district, we rely on the input of teacher leaders from every building and grade level as we consider changes to our policies and guidelines. Step one was to bring these leaders to the table and conduct frank conversations. Step two involved me examining the updated UDL guidelines, prioritizing the feedback from our learners, and getting to work to re-design Canvas course templates that addressed all of these components.
What did we seek to incorporate into our templates to accomplish this? Let’s look at it through the three main pillars of UDL.
Engagement - We established a consistent homepage design so all learners (and their adult supporters) have the same initial experience across all Canvas courses. We also provided templates for announcements and discussions as well as supporting information to help make these more accessible. Choice boards are encouraged and this year we have a partnership with MagicSchool that makes creating UDL-aligned choice boards even easier for instructors. We have also streamlined the course navigation to reduce clutter for our learners.
Representation - These are items that our staff previously overlooked or simply didn’t consider because they weren’t aware of the impact they can have for some learners. Our template utilizes text headers, color-contrast appropriate content, and multimedia embedding. There are also guided reminders to include these components along with alt text for images. We have also included examples of accessible tables.
Action & Expression - Within our course templates, we also provide additional templates that encourage flexible assignments and assessments. Most of our teachers embrace Modules for organizing content, and we provide exemplars that demonstrate different content formats like read, watch,and demonstrate. Our district has access to a lot of LTIs and integrations that we encourage instructors to take advantage of while also creating a more inclusive environment. We also provide guidance documents, links to Canvas Guides, and UDL-friendly tips that may be helpful when creating content.
Teacher Collaboration and Feedback
To review our work, our teacher leader group met to approve our first iteration of our course templates (Commons Link). We convene at least once a year to discuss feedback from their buildings and make revisions or improvements to the template for the coming school year. Though most of our feedback is informally gathered from professional learning sessions or lunchtime discussions, it is invaluable to inform our decisions. Having our teacher leaders on board was paramount to our initial success with course templates because their fellow teachers trust them and are more accepting of their input. Creating short guides to accompany the instructions for course set-up helps the beginning of each term run smoothly.
Additionally, our district has applied the same template and exemplars to our staff professional learning course that all teachers work within during our staff days. Some of the learning choices include how to make the most of our course templates, but we are intentionally modeling everything that we recommend and encourage staff to do with their students. During in-person professional learning, we also provide sessions that support the best practices for use of Canvas and our templates.
Impact on Teachers, Students, and Families
At the start of our template journey, we worried there would be pushback from teachers, but it was marginal. While course templates established consistent home pages throughout all courses, teachers could incorporate creativity and personalization in the teaching and learning components of the course. That assuaged a considerable number of concerns. One of the greatest challenges we continue to see is helping our staff understand that accessibility is a constantly changing process, so the updates are important to read and consider.
An unintended benefit was the positive feedback we received from our homebound instructors, special services teachers, and tutors about how much easier they could locate important course content with the template, saving them valuable time! I like to get out and visit classrooms and student groups when possible to gather information about their experiences in Canvas. Thanks to previous grant opportunities, we had the opportunity to host events to help parents and families navigate the tools that can aid them in supporting students. Our feedback from students and families was also positive because there was reduced cognitive load while trying to navigate course content, allowing them to concentrate on the task at hand. Helping our teachers reframe their thinking to embrace learner variability rather than focus on the required accommodations can make their caseload seem less daunting because, by implementing UDL strategies and options, they are meeting the needs of their students organically.
Continuous Improvement and Next Steps
We certainly don’t have answers to all the challenges, and we’re constantly looking to improve our work. Keeping the learners at the heart of what we’re striving toward helps us stay focused. We are going to continue to review and refine our templates and work to enhance the supports we provide to our instructors to enhance their capacity to effectively implement the template and best practices of UDL. Our work at the elementary level probably needs the most scrutiny because we have to scale it across grade levels. The work is never done, but it is always worth it to see success shining in the eyes of our learners.
It’s said that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s where you all come in. I love to learn from the experiences and perspectives of others because I believe we are truly better together. What steps have you taken in your learning environments to remove barriers to student learning or to incorporate UDL? Join the conversation in the comments below to share your experiences and successes.
