Teaching for Student Success

Episode 17

Universal Design for Learning: Watch This Beauty Unfold with K. Behling and T. Tobin

STEVEN ROBINOW: This is Teaching for Student Success. I'm Steven Robinow. To help with distribution of this podcast and to help increase listenership, please rate this podcast on your favorite podcast app. In this episode, we're going to discuss Universal Design for Learning, or UDL. UDL can help provide increased access to your course for all of your students, and increased access is almost certain to have a positive impact on student perception, student retention, and student success.

And the work to improve access doesn't have to be burdensome. We will discuss the fundamentals of Universal Design for Learning for those of you unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar with UDL. But possibly, the most impactful part of this episode will be an effort to reframe the discussion about UDL and how it can be a positive force for students, faculty, and staff.

My guests are Kirsten Behling and Tom Tobin, authors of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, a book with practical applications for instructors to begin doing UDL immediately. Welcome, Tom and Kirsten. Thank you both for joining me on Teaching for Student Success.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: It's a pleasure to be here, thank you.

THOMAS TOBIN: Thanks for inviting us.

STEVEN ROBINOW: OK. Thank you, thanks so much. Let's get right to it. Let's begin with talking about the purpose and fundamentals of UDL. Kirsten, let's start with you.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Sure. Universal Design for Learning actually comes out of an architectural idea or universal design, and so I think a lot of times it's easiest to conceptualize it when we take it back to its origins in universal design for architecture. And so the idea here was that rather than build these beautiful buildings from the ground up and then you go and you go to that ribbon-cutting ceremony and you realize that there are a few people in the crowd who maybe can't get through the front door.

And they can't get through the front door—perhaps there's some ornate steps or a particularly heavy for example, that aesthetically looks really wonderful but isn't actually accessible. An architect by the name of Ron Mace suggested that, why don't we build buildings to be usable by the greatest number of users from the beginning? So the idea here is that you can still build a beautiful building, an architecturally pleasing building, but you can do so with a door that's accessible—with, perhaps, more of a sloped or a gentle ramp than the required steps necessarily to go up into the building.

And so this is an idea that makes a lot of sense, right? What we're trying to do is to increase the number of people that can access the building without having them needing to go and ask for specific favors or ask somebody to help them open the door. The organization CAST, or the Center for Applied Special Technology, took this concept with some neuroscience research and brought it to the K-12 education field. And the idea here again was why are we pulling specific learners outside of the classroom to get additional support?

Maybe it's an English-as-a-second-language kiddo who needed to be pulled out for special support, or it might be a kiddo who needed a specific type of technology, those types of things. And they looked at neuroscience and they realized that our brains are all developing differently and will continue to do so well into our early 20s. And so we can't assume based on a particular set of experiences or previous educational learnings that this is how all students learn; rather what we need to do is to value the independent learner, value what they're bringing to the moment and consider how we can teach these students in a way that makes it most accessible to everybody.

THOMAS TOBIN: To build on that, when we're thinking about higher education— Kirsten talked about people's brain functions and how we're not really all fully wired until we're in our mid-20s. The challenge is that even those of us who are fully wired, we're all wired differently, and so the challenge for us in higher education becomes one of having a standardized way of teaching. So lecturing to students for 60 minutes, or teaching our courses in a particular way, where we're asking the learners to conform to the structures and the ways of teaching that we do in colleges and universities.

That means that we also have to have a lot of individual supports out there for people who don't learn well under those circumstances. We're making one change one time for one person, and that "one change, one time, one person" model is terribly resource-intensive. We can't anticipate the workload that it's going to be.

We can't say, oh, yes, I'm going to have some students in my class next semester who just live too far away, or, they have only a mobile device at home, or, they're getting their internet through an internet cafe or from McDonald's. We can't predict that. So Universal Design for Learning in the higher education space asks us to think about the barriers that our learners are already encountering, and to try to design ways that we can lower those barriers for as many of our learners as possible.

What that does is it also allows us to keep the "one change one time for one person" for the people who really need intensive individual affordances. So Universal Design for Learning in the higher education space is a little bit different than what it looked like in K-12. And one of the reasons why Kirsten and I wrote this book was we've got a lot of research, we've got a lot of evidence from practice in the elementary, middle school, and high school environment that shows that adding Universal Design for Learning practices to our curriculum is actually effective in keeping students with us longer, helping with their retention and their satisfaction.

In higher education, until about 2015, not so much. When we wrote the book, it was published in 2018. Since then, there have been a number of different studies. I'm thinking of the work, especially of Catherine Manly at UMass Amherst, and her work on the impact of Universal Design for Learning in higher education spaces. So we're starting to see the research catch up with the theory, and it's a really cool time to be thinking about UDL.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Cool, thank you. And when you talk about barriers here specifically—you talk about it in the book—what you're really talking about are environmental barriers, as you sort of talked about the physical barriers when you're talking about the buildings, right? So it's a different way to think about what barriers we're talking about.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Yeah, I think it's a really important question. And something that's worth pausing and having a bit of a reflect on, is barriers. What barriers are we inadvertently putting up for our students? And sometimes it truly is—as you say, Steve —a physical barrier, right? A classroom is not accessible or the desk can't be moved around.

But sometimes we're designing classes, and we're inadvertently putting a barrier up. Do we want, for example, the student to be able to know how to take a multiple-choice exam, or do we want them to know what our objective of the class is? Perhaps, the better understanding of the Civil War, for example.

Is the multiple-choice exam the barrier for the student? They may know the information, but because we are funneling a student's method of demonstrating knowledge into one way, we are creating a barrier for them. And I will add to something that Tom said earlier. In addition to barriers, we are also potentially creating burden for students.

We're creating that burden in that they have to go and ask for help or identify as needing additional support, whether it's to the faculty member or to the TA or another resource on campus, which can make college very discouraging and it can make the question of retention come into play.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Exactly. And as we have more diversity, we have a lot of cultural issues—

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Absolutely.
STEVEN ROBINOW: That prevent people from coming forward and asking.

THOMAS TOBIN: To build on this conversation that we're having about barriers and burden, one of the things that we tend to assume is that the barriers that students have to learning well are ones that we can see and identify. Oftentimes, that's not the case. When we think about students who have barriers, we think about disabilities and students who have wheelchairs to get around or have a guide dog or use hearing aids for their auditory needs.

The challenge is that the biggest barriers that most students have aren't disability based. And Steve, you mentioned cultural challenges like being English language learners, people whose first languages aren't English, or the language in which we're teaching. The biggest barrier, though, is the clock.

Our students are adult learners—they have work responsibilities, family responsibilities, they're serving in the military, they have caregiving responsibilities for their own parents. People are trying to fit their educations into increasingly busy schedules. So if we're thinking about how do we reach out to students and give them even 20 more minutes—for practice, preparation, homework, studying, collaboration—so that when they do come into the formal spaces where we are interacting with them as instructors, support staffers, and administrators, then they're more likely to be prepared.

They're more likely to feel a part of, rather than apart from, and they're more likely to feel like their voices are heard in the spaces and conversations that we're having with them. So Universal Design for Learning is about helping to make students feel like they have a choice in how they move through the paths of our education. And that they have a voice in how that educational conversation is happening.

So we'll talk—I think—in this conversation at that high level, but also at the really practical level of how do we actually do this? Universal Design for Learning is a way to actually reduce our own workload, make things smoother and easier for us as people who are supporting the learners. That mountain of grading that we're buried under, the students who always ask the same question 800 times, the challenging concept that students get wrong on the exam and I end up having to reteach—those are all problems of our own design.

STEVEN ROBINOW: There's a lot of things I want to say there, but let's focus on those issues right now by starting with maybe we should go back and talk about the principles of UDL now, and then integrate how a faculty member addresses the issues you're talking about that—in fact—over time reduce their workload and give them more time.

THOMAS TOBIN: Absolutely. The Universal Design for Learning framework has three principles. That is, having multiple means of learner engagement. So how do students get engaged, stick with us even though the topic is challenging, and keep moving through the learning experiences that we design?

The second one is multiple means of representation, and that's what we usually think about when we think about accommodations or accessibility. This is putting captions on your videos, this is having alternative text for images, this is making a transcript of your audio podcast. Giving people more than one way that they can take in the information in order to learn.

And the third part is multiple means of action and expression allowing the learners to say what they know, show what they know and take action as part of our learning conversations in more than one way. A lot of colleagues said this seems overwhelming. So what Kirsten and I wanted to do was figure out, well, how do we give people kind of a step zero? And that step zero we termed plus-one thinking.

If there's one way for an interaction to happen now—so one way for your learners to interact with the content and materials, it's where everybody starts—but also, one way that they interact with each other or with you as the instructor or with the support staff at your institution or with the wider community. If there's one way for those interactions to happen now, plus one. Just make one more way, because we could burn ourselves

out trying to think of all the different ways that we could present information or get students to show what they know or keep them engaged, and we would be constantly tinkering and trying to redo our courses and our support environments.

So with plus-one thinking, we set a bar of let's not just have one way to do something, let's have at least one more way and then we can go from there.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Kirsten, you want to follow up?

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Yeah. Tom's absolutely right. So the plus-one thinking came out of years of trying to work with instructors and faculty and to introduce the concept of Universal Design for Learning. When you introduce it, just as Tom has just done so beautifully, it makes sense. It's like, oh, yeah. Of course, aha!

And I think another area in higher education where this really resonates or why it really resonates is most of our faculty and our staff have not been trained to teach. They haven't gone through an education degree program that our K-12 area has gone through. No fault of their own, but a lot of times, they end up teaching the way that they learned. And again, these are really incredibly bright people who sat in a lecture and could absorb it for hours.

That's not the reality of our students today, it's not the reality of all 100 students in the classroom. Sure, there'll be one or two. So we had both gone around and been talking about Universal Design for Learning to various groups of faculty for years, and they always had that "aha" moment and, yes, that makes so much sense.

And the excitement was palpable, but then they would go back to their offices and their 13 to 40 emails that popped in, and all the papers that needed to be graded and all the things. And our Universal Design for Learning talk sort of collected a light layer of dust on the corner of their desk. The problem there though is that as soon as they picked it up—they had that five minutes to sort of take a look at it—it became instantly overwhelming.

I don't know how to do it. Do I have to redesign my entire course? The technology is different than it was two years ago. Does that mean I need to infuse all of this new cool tech?

And we really wanted to take a moment, create a digestible bite-sized chunk of UDL that they could grab on to, look at, watch, see it be successful or tweak it, and move from there. And I think the beauty of it is—I don't know about you, Tom—but I often get, well, where do I start? Where do I embrace this UDL journey?

And for us, we ask faculty to identify their pinch point. And I like to describe this much as Tom just did, that moment where you get the same question on the syllabi, or you look out at your class and it's all glazed eyes. Or if you're teaching on Zoom, it's all black boxes, right? Those are the places where maybe you've lost the learner, and that is the place where you start with your one—just one—digestible UDL strategy, and see what you can do from there on.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So the idea of the plus-one is to remove a barrier for the faculty, to take a step forward and do something?

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Exactly.

THOMAS TOBIN: Very much so, the challenge for a lot of us is, I'm following the Accessible Canada Act, or, I'm following the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I have to have all of my videos captioned and I have to have alternate formats for everything that's in my learning management system. And I probably should have done that last year. So we can see that there are 82 things that need to be done yesterday. So what Kirsten and I always advocate is take one step. Do one thing.

STEVEN ROBINOW: The beginning of that chapter on plus-one starts, I believe, with the story of a faculty that does try to do everything. Tries do everything at once for that course, and it does not go well. The story you tell does not go well.

One of the nice things in the book is you tell lots of stories of how this has worked. And then you talk about, take off one thing, and that's your introduction to plus-one thinking. The book itself doesn't really give a set of instructions of exactly what to do.

You're prescriptive in a way of thinking, but not in what one actually does. You actually leave that open to the instructor to say, what works for you? What is that plus-one? You give lots of ideas, but it's not a checklist of, here, do this, do that. Go ahead, Kirsten, sorry.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Well, I think it's really important to recognize and to value the faculty member as the content expert. So we have to be really thoughtful of that, we don't want to come in and steamroll a faculty member and tell them, this is how you have to design your course in order to successfully get to all of the students in your classroom. That's not accurate, and it's also just not a good collaboration. What we

can do is create a menu of different ideas that faculty can look at and maybe pick something, try it a little bit.

And I think that's also something that's really important with the Universal Design for Learning, is that it's trial and error. Just because you picked a particular strategy doesn't mean that it will always be successful right out of the box, rather what is it that you can do within your course to tweak it. Part of UDL and plus-one is really looking at the impact of the strategy that you looked at.

You can pretty quickly look at something that you've tried and look at your students and say, oh, that did not land. I've got to tweak that. I thought that was going to be great, it didn't land. Or in other situations, you'll see students start to maybe poke their heads up a little bit, and question, and say, well, what do you want me to do?

And this comes up a lot when you start adding plus-one strategies around assessment. Sometimes, our students get a little anxious. Because what we're saying to them is, look, you don't necessarily have to write this paper.

Rather, here's the rubric for the final assignment, and I want you to demonstrate to me that you understand this content. And I'm going to give you a few suggestions. Perhaps you could do that in a podcast, you could create a news channel, you could create a website-type situation. Tom, do you want to add some ideas?

STEVEN ROBINOW: I actually just want to acknowledge that we have set up a K-12 education system in which students have learned how to be students and in that system, but they haven't really learned oftentimes how to be learners. So they know how to take a test, they know to expect that they're going to have a numerical grade on every tiny little thing they do for us. And so then when instructors in colleges start saying things like, you have some choices here, you choose. Try this out, or try that out, students are saying, where's the trick?

Could you just tell me what I'm supposed to do? So it's an acculturation for the learners as well as for us as instructors to help students feel that they safely can have a voice and I think that's one of the things, Kirsten, you were getting toward. I'd love to hear the rest of what you were saying, but I wanted to make sure that we acknowledge that there is that nervousness in there.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Absolutely. There absolutely is that nervousness, and especially your first year in college, right? You're sort of feeling around and trying to get your feet wet, and make sure that you're doing the right thing, and following the right path.

But what's amazing about this is that once you've given the students some guidance— and again, the rubric and maybe a bit of scaffolding to introduce them to that early on —they will run with it because this is an opportunity for them to demonstrate what they know to really invest in the experience, invest in the learning, get excited about what they're doing and to show you that they know it in ways that resonate with them. And we've seen this play out where students will take subsequent classes and utilize the learning that they've used in their final project in a previous class, moving that forward.

We've also seen and heard from faculty who love this because they are no longer sitting down to grade 30 20-page papers at the end of the semester when, let's be honest, they're also burnt out. But rather, they're getting to see the excitement of learning through their students’ various projects and presentations. And we've even had faculty utilize those presentations in different projects as examples for their next generation of students of all the cool things that they could do.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I find this idea of sharing the rubric with the student and then letting them determine what the project looks like is fascinating. It's a really interesting idea and one that, in some way, the faculty doesn't even have to decide what the content looks like. They can say, you could turn in a five-page paper. Or, it's open, as long as I can assess it based on this rubric, opening the choices to the student, not limiting them. That's really interesting.

You talked about learning, let me just comment—episode five of this podcast we have an interview with Mark McDaniel called Learning Is a Skill, and this is something—why are we keeping that a secret, why have we kept it a secret for so long? So I love that idea of sharing the rubric, that is a really interesting idea.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: I will say, Tom, I'm not sure about your experiences but when I talk to faculty—when we start thinking about adding plus-one strategies to the assessment component of their courses, it's probably the scariest, because there's been— historically, this is how we've done it, or this is how the department has done it, or I'm teaching a class that will lead to a specific type of exam like a licensure type of exam that feels now I'm stepping out and the students won't be prepared for the next level. And I would argue that even within those restrictions, there are opportunities to add plus-one strategies.

STEVEN ROBINOW: The pandemic over the past couple of years has lowered a barrier for people to adopt more inclusive teaching practices. I'd be interested—Kirsten, I haven't actually had a chance to talk to you about this yet, so how has that changed how you're practicing?

THOMAS TOBIN: Great, I'll just sit here and listen.

STEVEN ROBINOW: No, go ahead.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Tom and I are catching up. Of all the things that happened these last couple of years with COVID, perhaps the eternal optimist, there is a lot of positive things that came out of it with regards to education and institutional practices. What we saw with the pandemic was we saw all sorts of barriers just popping up.

We saw a chaotic need to change modalities in 5 to 10 days, we saw students trying to get home to international countries that were quarantined in hotel rooms. I work at Tufts University, I saw faculty carrying desktops across the parking lot to cars to try to replicate an office at home. And so all of a sudden—in some ways—we all had these sort of equivalent and yet not equivalent barriers where students had the barriers, faculty had barriers.

We were all sort of on the same page, we're starting fresh, trying to figure out this new modality. And what we saw was incredible creativity, faculty who—for years I had been begging them, please share a copy of your notes with the rest of the class, everybody will benefit. Or we saw captioning, which is something that we've been pushing for years, all students are benefiting from having captioning in their classrooms.

And now because of the change in modality, you could hit "captioning" on Zoom, and the auto-generated captions aren't so bad. And so we saw all of these amazing things, things like I'm going to chunk my lecture videos into small chunks. All of a sudden, this was becoming reality.

And it was living online indefinitely so students could come to it whenever they want. We see a lot of that, where students are coming back and checking knowledge prior to the end of class or throughout the semester as opposed to just having that one in- class flash-in-the-pan moment to try to get everything down as quickly as they can. So there's so much good that came out of it.

And I think one of the things that was really beneficial, and one of the reasons Tom and I got together, is we are coming at this from different fields. I'm coming at it from the disability perspective and Tom from the faculty development perspective. And I think in one of our earlier conversations together, I would sort of share a level of exhaustion from asking faculty to do this. And please, this is good teaching, and this will help everybody.

And they would—OK, that sounds nice, Kirsten, but you work with a specific group of people. Whereas, coming out of the pandemic, faculty were teaching each other these beautiful plus-one strategies.

So it was being supported from, created by, and shared with faculty across the institution. And that was just—all of my friends in disabilities sort of were like, ahh, the moment has come. We can sit back and just watch this beauty unfold. And we have been doing so.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's interesting. The biggest barrier hit in a day, you said four or five days. But honestly, when I was at Chico State, it was a flip of a switch. It was overnight. Everybody went home, creating the biggest barrier you can imagine, and there was no choice but to overcome it. And people did—as you were saying, Kirsten —that's so fascinating.

THOMAS TOBIN: That brought everybody one step forward. The challenge for me for Universal Design for Learning if I'm looking forward into the next few years is to think about how lowering barriers for access is foundational to our institutional efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. In terms of retention, persistence, and satisfaction—the kind of stuff that keeps the provost up at night.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Tom's absolutely right, and I think we spent some time in our book actually talking about that, right? Like how do we get university administrators to appreciate and to understand that? And I think COVID has done that, as well as the ever-increasing diversity of our student bodies today. I've been talking to a couple faculty members recently at different institutions, and one of the things that they're saying—which I just love—is that the students are asking for the continued flexibility that they had during the last couple of years.

And whether it is a rising junior or senior who started their year in the traditional—and I agree, Tom, traditional is out the window—methodology of teaching, or it's our incoming first and second years who had—again, remember, drastically different high school experiences depending on what part of the country that they came from. And so the students are asking for it. The students are pushing, which is a wonderful new ally to have that maybe we didn't have before.

Because they're coming in and saying, well, biology 1 did it this way. And because I could access the lectures online, I could reinstate and reaffirm my learning later on. In biology 2, why can't you do that? And so it's sort of pushing the envelope a little bit. And when we talk about specific courses to start with, sometimes that's the question, right?

If an institution's looking at creating a Universal Design for Learning sort of formal practice—if you will—sometimes the question is, well, where do we do it? Do we do it to the 10% that always come? They're probably doing a really great job and they might be great advocates, but I always suggest that we start with those intro-level courses because that's where our students, especially with disabilities, may not identify.

We do things so different in college than the disability world and the K-12 environment, and we can lose a lot of students in that gap. We're also welcoming a more diverse group of students, and if we can get them through that English 1 and on to English 2, we have a higher likelihood that they're going to stay not only with us, but potentially follow their dreams in their course of study wherever it might be. As an ex- administrator let me say, Kirsten, it's not hard at all to understand where to start.

You've got to start at your intro courses, because where we lose our diversity of students is in the first year. Those are the students that don't persist, and the ones that don't persist are our diverse students. So if you want to graduate a diverse class, you have to attend to them at the start.

So there's really no question, and that's where you hit the big numbers, too. And then, as you've just sort of talked about, students then become the pressure on other courses to provide alternatives. That's a really interesting thing to think about, is it's not just the faculty to decide.

So then students will start asking for these alternative ways that they may have experienced previously. Before we end, because we're getting close to time here, I also want to point out a couple things. So you've talked around it but you haven't said it really directly, a lot of the book talks about taking the learning mobile, that now over 90% of our students have mobile devices.

We always have to think about those 10% that don't, and solve that problem. But if you're going to provide people time for their complex lives, when you talked about students’ complex lives, I thought about the iceberg. We, as faculty, can see a certain percentage of a student. We can see what they look like, we can see how they behave in front of us, but we know nothing about their life once they walk out of our view.

We don't know how complex their lives are, and those are the sorts of other issues you're talking about, they need to be attended to. And going mobile, you talk about going mobile as a way to untether them from the classroom and provide lots of plus- one opportunities. And you also talked about administrators, but also staff. You talk in the book about providing staff, educating staff about UDL so that they also apply these principles to how do students get other services, and how do they find them and how do they access them using sort of the plus-one model, which I think is also very interesting.

THOMAS TOBIN: If we train our media services people and our information technology people on inclusive design and UDL particularly, then when a faculty member goes to the media service area and says, I want to do the flipped classroom model this year, their response is, that's awesome. We'll send a student worker with a camera into your classroom, and we'll help you chunk those up into five-minute segments, and we'll help you with the captions, because that's just what we do at this college or university. And it's part of the service that the institution provides, not only to students but also to the instructors themselves.

And you talked about mobile, and I want to throw it over to Kirsten here, too. When we are in conversations with our administrators, when we make arguments for students and their mobile devices, they will hear this affects everyone.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: Absolutely. Yeah, Tom. That, I suppose, is a pinch point of ours. We've seen a lot of institutions look for sort of university-wide or institution-wide approaches that they can take and there are things like we're seeing universities develop captioning policies. So now, there's a university-wide captioning policy, and you don't just want to develop it but you want to have the resources to back it up.

So there are people on the ground, as Tom said, who can support faculty in how to utilize that. One of the things that we're seeing a lot of these days, to your point around digital and student services, is everything is online. If those online spaces are not universally accessible, including allowing the student who's traveling home on the train to register for classes at the exact moment that they're supposed to register for classes, then we're putting up more barriers.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Absolutely. I've got two more questions that I'm going to try to squeeze out of you in the time we have. I know, I know, we're really getting there. So we'll move quickly here. There's so many more things, we're going to have to come back and talk again.

The first question is—I don't want to hear anything about academia now, I want to know how your work on UDL has impacted your view and interaction with the world outside of academia, how's it change your perspective? When you're walking down the street, when you're in a restaurant, when you're in a park—how has it changed your life? Kirsten, you want to start?

KIRSTEN BEHLING: I am much more observant. I'll be walking by something, the new serrated sort of mats before a curb cut or a major intersection. I'm like, huh, I wonder what these are for?

I'm interested to know, these are interesting to me, because I noticed it because I was walking along texting on my phone and not paying attention. So I feel like I'm much more observant in trying to constantly think about how different things will impact a wider group of people, not just the traditional students or people with disabilities that I tend to support.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So if you were in New York City, that serrated mat would have saved your life from walking into an intersection and being hit by a car [INAUDIBLE]?

KIRSTEN BEHLING: I think so, yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Tom, what about you?

THOMAS TOBIN: For me—listeners, you can't see it, but I'm a cisgender heterosexual white male with gray hair. I tick all the privilege boxes, and so for me, the work that I'm doing on inclusion has led me to want to use that privilege to speak up when things aren't going well or aren't well designed. And that's not just in my university, it's in my everyday life as well.

So I'm one of the election judges for the city where I live, the polling places where people were coming to vote. So a few of them were not accessible, that was something that I thought I should actually speak up about, and we actually got the changes made so that there were temporary ramps put in. And once people had the temporary ramps for voting people said to the city, why don't we do this in a permanent way so we can come use the city services more easily?

And that ended up becoming a campaign for permanent change. So I'm trying to use the privilege that I have on behalf of people who may not be able to or comfortable with speaking up in those kinds of scenarios. So good question, thanks.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Great, thank you. OK, last question. Can you think of a moment that transformed you that does relate potentially to your academic career? It might be a story that altered the course of your career.

THOMAS TOBIN: Mine actually started me in Universal Design for Learning to begin with. My doctorate is in 19th century British literature and art history. I am about as far away from that as I can think right now, and it all started out back in 1997.

When I was at a two-year college in Western Pennsylvania, they hired me to help them put their very first online courses together. I helped them adopt Blackboard version one, I am that old. An instructor who had gone blind in his 40s came to me and he said, I think online is bunk, but I think it's the way of the future, too. So can you help me teach online?

I was a 28-year-old kid with my doctorate and I said, yeah, sure, I'll help you. I was helping this instructor, his name was Marty. There was no literature, there was nothing there.

There weren't any supports, I didn't really know what to do. I was fortunate that I was able to get in touch with a couple of folks at Rochester Institute of Technology, and they gave me some tips, but at the same time, we got Marty to teach online. He had graduate students from a local university reading things out loud to him from the learning management system, and it was wonderful.

Until about three semesters in, when we recognized that we were violating the FERPA privacy laws like seven different ways, and we had to stop. But that experience caused me to take a hard look around and think, if that was that tough, who else are we not serving well? And that really started me down the path where you find me today, so it was a transformational experience and I'm eager to hear what Kirsten's was, too.

KIRSTEN BEHLING: That's a great one, Tom. For me, it's similar. It was my introduction to Universal Design for Learning. So I got into the field of disability services, because I grew up with a family member who had a significant disability and sort of watched the segregated education that they needed to go through.

And I didn't want that to continue, I wasn't sure how to make that happen. And so I happened upon an opportunity to work on one of the original Department of Education grants around Universal Design for Learning, but at the time, we were really focusing in on reflective practice. And we were asking faculty to be more reflective about the work that they were doing and to be more sort of intentional, ultimately, in how they were designing their course.

And then I would come in and I would say hey, and I also have this student who is so excited to be here. This is their major, they can't wait to move things forward. They are nonverbal, so let's talk through different strategies for how to make that happen.

And I would quickly get dismissed and said, well, there's a disability office for that. We happened upon—at the time, CAST was just sort of getting their feet wet and getting going with this Universal Design for Learning, and I got to spend a day there in training and all the light bulbs were just popping like a fireworks show in my brain. And I was so excited to be able to go back to this faculty member and say hey, I think we could do this in a way that will open the doors wider for other students, not just my student with a disability.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Oh, that's wonderful, very inspiring. Thank you both for sharing those stories, really interesting. I want to thank you so much for your time, I really enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to hearing more about your continuing efforts to improve the adoption of UDL, and wherever this goes.

This has been a fascinating discussion for me, and so much fun to meet you both. I also like the idea of having two other people I'm talking to, I can just sit here and listen. So we're going to have to have you back so that you guys can talk again sometime, because clearly, you don't talk to each other outside of these opportunities. Anyway, thanks so much for joining me, I really appreciate your time.

THOMAS TOBIN: Thanks, Steve. It's been a pleasure. KIRSTEN BEHLING: It was a pleasure, thank you.

STEVEN ROBINOW: My guests today were Kirsten Behling and Thomas J. Tobin. Kirsten is the Associate Dean of Student Accessibility and Academic Resources at Tufts University. Kirsten has conducted research on how the principles of UDL positively impact all students and the instructors teaching those students. Thomas J. Tobin is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin.

Tom has been an advocate for the educational rights of people with disabilities and people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I deferred this introduction because I specifically wanted to introduce and discuss UDL without coloring that discussion with the lens of disability services and student accommodations. Our website, teachingforstudentsuccess.org, will have additional information about Kirsten and Tom, including an extensive list of recommended readings.

So please, dig in, and learn more about how small steps can really help your students. Thank you for spending time with us today; please share our podcast and website with your friends. Please rate us on your favorite podcast app; that would really help with distribution of the podcast, and increase our listenership. Please rate us on your favorite podcast app.

Those of us at Teaching for Student Success would love your feedback; please contact us through our website at teachingforstudentsuccess.org. Teaching for Student Success is a production of Teaching for Student Success Media. Let's end this podcast as I do all of them with some music by JuliusH. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.

[MUSIC: JULIUS H]