Welcome to Episode 132 of the Think UDL podcast: Design Cycle and Research with Kavita Rao. Dr. Kavita Rao is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the current director of the Research Institute there in the College of Education. In today’s conversation we discuss her published article on the UDL design cycle and then move into the current state of UDL research in Higher Education. We start this discussion with an understanding of the UDL design cycle and why it was codified. Then we move into taking stock of the state of UDL research in higher education, what we have, and what we need as we move forward as well as what to do if you want to start your research in UDL in higher education! I hope you will be inspired to add to our research base on UDL!
Resources
Contact Kavita Rao here:
Research Gate (Kavita-Rao-3)
Linked In (kavita-rao-4ab344302)
Inclusive instructional design: Applying UDL to online learning
UDL Bibliography of Kavita Rao’s publications and various other suggestions
Rao, K., Gravel, J.W., Rose, D.H., Tucker-Smith, T.N, (2023). Universal Design for Learning in its 3rd decade: A focus on equity, inclusion, and design. In R.J. Tierney, F. Rizvi, & K. Erkican (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education 4th Edition, (712-720), Vol. 6. Elsevier. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.14079-5.
(Contact Kavitao Rao if interested in this chapter and you are not able to access it here.)
Transcript
Episode 132 edit 1
Wed, Aug 28, 2024 11:11AM • 31:33
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
udl, design, research, higher ed, framework, learning, people, variability, focus, cycle, teaching, learner, kavita, students, applied, lillian, instructional design, studying, cast, soft skills
SPEAKERS
Lillian Nave, Kavita Rao
Lillian Nave 00:00
Welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 132 of the think UDL podcast, design cycle and research with Kavita Rao. Dr Kavita Rao is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and is the current director of the research institute there in the College of Education. In today’s conversation, we discuss her published article on the UDL design cycle, and then move into the current state of UDL research in higher education. We start this discussion with an understanding of the UDL design cycle and why it was codified. Then we move into taking stock of the state of UDL research in higher education, what we have and what we need as we move forward, as well as what to do if you want to start your research in UDL in higher education, I hope you will be inspired to add to our research base in UDL, in higher ed and thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. Thank you to our sponsor, Texthelp, a global technology company helping people all over the world to understand and to be understood. It has led the way in creating innovative technology for the workplace and education sectors, including K 12 right through to higher education for the last three decades, discover their impact at text. Dot, help forward. Slash, learn more. That’s L, E, A, R, N, M, O, R, E. Welcome to the think UDL podcast. Kavita, I’m glad to have you. Thanks. Lillian, it’s great to be here with you when we get to your design process that I’m very interested in, and your research, I’d like to know what makes you a different kind of learner.
Kavita Rao 02:35
So there are a couple of things that make me a different kind of learner. First, I was fairly a fairly shy child, and that was something that impacted my experience of school. From the beginning, I tended to be quiet and observant of what was going on in school, and I was also focused on doing the right thing, because I wanted to be a good student. One thing I really didn’t like was being put on the spot. So I was I dreaded situations where I might be called on or required to come up and speak. So all of that made me a child who was I was always anticipating what was going to happen next, what was the teacher going to ask of me. And although I generally did well in school, what that did for me was kind of made me work outside my comfort zones a lot, because I was always kind of anticipating when I’d suddenly be called on, or when I’d suddenly be thrust out and to have to say something when I wasn’t ready. So that was one thing, especially in elementary school, that was something I was very aware of. And as a child, the second thing that made me a different kind of learner is my early experience of moving from one country to another. As a child, I moved from India to the US in the fourth grade, I already spoke English fluently when I came to the US, so language and literacy was not an issue for me. However, I did have to learn how school worked in the US, and there were many new things to learn about how elementary schools work when you first come as a child. So I became a keen observer of what my peers were doing, what the teachers expected. So I really kind of became someone who observed how I was supposed to act, how people acted, what you were supposed to do. So that also impacted my experience, because I kind of became very aware of how people learned, including myself, just by watching and learning the culture of being in a new place, in a new school environment. Wow,
Lillian Nave 04:27
that gives you a whole different perspective on the US educational system. I’m sure it makes me think about how we are serving all of those students that come into our educational system and in higher ed too, because we have a lot of international students.
Kavita Rao 04:49
Yeah, actually, you know, those are the soft skills that we never talk about we get. So we focus so much on the content skills that we’re teaching. But all of our students, what, even if you’re, you know, you’re, you’re familiar with the culture. There are so many soft skills going on underlying what you’re learning. So for me, that was a real I had to explicitly learn the soft skills because I moved cultures. But I think all students are kind of learning the soft skills to survive in different school environments, in different educational environments. And you’re so right that that is also necessary in higher ed.
Lillian Nave 05:19
Yes, so important to look into intercultural competence and how we can act and interact in those different cultures, and think about our students coming from different cultures. So being explicit, I think, is really important. So I’m really interested in your design cycle, and wanted to know how and why you came up with this UDL design cycle?
Kavita Rao 05:44
This is a great question, because it lets me articulate how I see UDL overall, and some realizations I had about UDL as I worked with the framework over the years. I’ll start by saying that as I’ve done work with UDL, it’s at this point I think I’ve been working on with UDL for about 15 years. I really developed and refined how I teach about UDL. In the process of teaching about UDL and doing research with UDL, I’ve kind of changed my conception of it. I started off really focused on the UDL framework. It was like, you know, what is the principles, the guidelines, the checkpoints. That was my jam at the beginning, because I was an instructional designer from from the start, and I was really interested in using the framework for design. But over the years, I now think of UDL as concentric circle. So in the middle of that, in the in the center of that concentric circle is the UDL framework, that is the brains, the bones behind it all. Then I see another circle that that contextualizes that, that is a process. I see UDL very much as a process. And then there’s another larger circle that contextualizes both of those, and that is the values be values of that guide UDL use. So really, I see the framework in the middle process, and then values as the larger context in which we use UDL. So and I’ll give you kind of an anecdote that that that more directly answers your question about the direct the design cycle. I’ve been teaching teachers for many, many years, and I teach both pre service teachers who are training to become school teachers, and I teach in service teachers who already in the schools, and 15 years ago, when I first started doing a lot of teaching on UDL, I would jump right into the framework. I would talk about, I’d introduce the framework, I’d talk about casts early work and how they developed the principles and guidelines the connections to brain networks. So I did that as my way of teaching about UDL, and I think when I did that, the teachers understood the principles, the guidelines, the checkpoints, the teachers understood that, oh, this is a way to foster inclusion in the classroom. But whenever I walked away from those PD sessions or their classes, I always felt that there was something missing in the way I was teaching UDL. I didn’t know what that was, but I was like, I think they got this whole framework, but there’s something missing and not and then another thing that always bothered me after these these courses or these PDS I did, was that I felt like one of the things people took away was that UDL was about options, and that is not wrong. UDL is about giving options, but it is not just about giving options, and it can also be dangerous if it’s conflated with just giving options. There’s so much more to UDL than just providing options. It’s about thinking about how you’re designing things proactively and intentionally, and the options should be provided intentionally to help you support what your the end outcomes are. So when I put that together, I realized that in my courses and the PDS that I did, I really wanted to also focus on the process, more than just the checkpoints. So then immediately, that was maybe four years into when I was an assistant professor, I started teaching UDL from a process angle. I didn’t focus on the framework. First, I started talking about why we do, why UDL is important, and going right into the process. And that’s where I began. I before I even went into UDL, I started talking about learner variability and having my students do things, unpacking what variability is. I also started talking about reducing barriers in the curriculum and the, you know, all of the things that are seminal to what cast put out there. I started with those things, and then I drilled down into using the framework to address those things. How do we look at barriers, how do we look at the strengths of our learners? How do we look at variability? So from there, I realized I was doing this in my courses. I was like, Oh, I’d like to actually put it down on paper. So the UDL design cycle that is now published and that people see and use really comes from just a process of teaching and realizing that I wanted to teach the process to my students as a context for the framework that they were using.
Lillian Nave 09:53
Wow, that makes a lot of sense, and a great introduction to what. Cycle is. So I want to know, can you explain it and kind of detail what your UDL design cycle is?
Kavita Rao 10:06
Sure First, I’d like to give full credit to cast for the components of the design cycle. It’s a they had the components, and I expanded that with some additional information to become the published UDL design cycle that people often use in about 2013 or 14. I was teaching with Grace Mayo from cast, and noted that cast emphasized that UDL should be applied to goals, methods, materials and assessments. Cast had been publishing that information in things like their UDL Theory and Practice book, and it’s something that the cast staff really focused on in their professional development. I took that idea and added the detail that I was doing in my teaching, which was the process piece, and that became the UDL design cycle that people refer to. Now the UDL design cycle, for me, is a way to bridge the guidelines into a process and add that proactive and intentional design piece that I mentioned in my earlier response, I consider the UDL design cycle to be a way to do intentional and inclusive design from the outset. It aligns to other instructional design frameworks, but adds two very important pieces that make it uniquely UDL. Those two pieces are the consideration of variability from the outset, and then a focus on reducing barriers in the learning environment. So I think that’s what the design cycle brings into the instructional design conversation that’s different from other instructional design models. So one of the things you asked me to detail the design cycle, the design cycle starts with thinking about learner variability and what what are the different ways that your learners learn? What are their different assets and strengths? What are their experiences they bring into things? What are their needs? And you may not already know your learners, but because you may be teaching the class you should be teaching the class after you design the components, but you probably know the types of learners you teach, just from prior experiences, from the demographics you teach, so you can anticipate some of that learner variability. So the unit, the UDL, design cycle, starts with anticipating learner variability and really thinking not just about the needs and of your students, but also what they bring to instruction. So there’s a real assets based piece of this, the design cycle too, which is, think about what the our students bring a lot of strengths and proficiencies to what they’re learning as well. So how can that be incorporated into whichever lesson I’m designing now or whichever unit I’m designing now? The other thing with learner variability is considering considering people’s preferences and interests. How can you build that in? So again, if you start with learner variability, first, you’re grounding your design in the variability of your students. Then the design cycle continues on to the next step of being very clear about the goal of that particular lesson or that unit. Or in the course of higher in the in the case of higher ed, you might be designing a chunk of one, one week of instruction or two weeks of instruction, really thinking about, what are the my my lesson, objectives and goals for that, and then designing the activities that you will do and the assignments that you’ll have, considering the variability and bringing that in. And where UDL comes in is the UDL framework gives you kind of a menu of things to consider. You don’t have to use all the checkpoints and guidelines, but it gives you some ideas to consider for the that you can apply to that particular lesson unit or the weeks that you’re designing.
Lillian Nave 13:34
That’s great, and we’re going to have a link to this article and your resources for this, so people can check that out and see exactly what you’re talking about. And what I really appreciate about your work is that you’ve done a lot of thinking about UDL implementation and done a lot of research on that, and I know you’re very heavily into the research at your institution directing their research institute. And so I wanted to know what is the state of UDL research today for implementing UDL in higher education. What do we have? What do we need more of as we move forward?
Kavita Rao 14:17
So a really exciting thing about UDL in higher education today is that UDL has really gained traction in higher ed, and I’d say in the past decade, maybe a little bit more where it’s kind of gotten out of the disability services realm. And I think many higher ed institutions are seeing that UDL is useful for addressing variability across its learners as we have more diverse populations in our universities and colleges. So an exciting thing that’s happening is that you’re I’m seeing more and more UDL research that are not just out of colleges of education. They’re not just focused on the people already doing pedagogy and instructional design. But these days, if you look at the UDL research. Research, you’ll see a lot more research going on in other fields, where people are looking at, how do you apply UDL, and to courses in computer science, how do you use it in nursing. So it is exciting to see UDL gaining traction across universities and also across systems. I think that’s one thing I wanted to say about the UDL design cycle in my last response, I was noting, I said goals for your lesson or your unit. But honestly, the design cycle can be used at different levels. You can even use it to think about, how do you design a whole program? So if you’re in higher ed and you’re designing a new program for a certificate program or a degree program, how can you embed UDL across that program to make the experiences and and the pathways for your students more supportive and accessible and flexible and engaging? So I just want to be clear that the UDL design cycle, the beauty of this is that it is broad enough to apply to any exercise where you’re designing something for others to engage with, to learn with, to collaborate, to use. So I think in that realm, in higher ed, that idea has gotten out more, and I see it now being used in many more, in many more fields, and kind of getting out of the education realm. The other thing I want to mention is that I think the focus of I think inclusion, and what inclusion means that, and the idea of that has expanded in the last several years. There’s more of a focus on equity. There’s a focus on how do we how do we provide more equitable environments for students? And I think UDL has come into that conversation in many post secondary environments as a way to look at gender creating equity. I do want to point out a article by Beth fornoff and joy Erickson. I think it was published in 2019 in the Journal of Post Secondary Education and Disability. And they really talk about this shift in higher ed. And they they actually do a review of articles looking at how UDL is being conceptualized and operationalized in higher ed. So I just want to mention their article, because they bring a lot of these concepts together and do a really nice job of summarizing what’s going on in higher ed.
Lillian Nave 17:18
We’ll put that in our resources too, so folks can take a look at it. Yeah, I’ve noticed that there are a lot more opportunities for faculty, development specialists, educational developers, to do kind of a SOTL, which is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, type of research across lots of different disciplines. So like nursing or in STEM fields or things like that, and can see how UDL has increased student success or graduation rates or things like that. And I’m really excited for that, because I do think that gaining more traction, as you say, and we’re getting more visibility about how this can be so helpful. And when we do that, we are turning the focus back on students, about how different variable and how many strengths they bring into the college classroom as well. So I’m, I’m excited about the proliferation of research, and I must say, I always go back to you when I think about research, I have a bibliography that has your name on it that I share with people. And I’m like, if you need to know about research, you need to talk to Kavita Rao. So what? What about you? What’s the most interesting direction you think you’ve seen in UDL research recently?
Kavita Rao 18:48
One of the things that I’ve seen that I’m really happy as I read the UDL literature more recently, is that people are really starting to articulate more about how they’re using UDL. So I think one of the big questions maybe 1015, years ago was, does UDL work? There was a lot of like, does UDL work? And I think the question is now moving towards, how does UDL work, and how does your application of UDL work? So I think we’re also broadening the research conversation about looking at what works when UDL is applied. Cast is coming out with the cast research agenda, I think this summer, and we’ll be publishing that so they give a little more guidance of the different types of questions you can look at with UDL. What are the things we want to explore around UDL? So that will be out soon with their guidance on it. But I definitely do see a lot more of that in the literature already, where people are being more clear about how they’re applying UDL and what the outcomes are in relation to UDL. One of the things I think that has been part of that conversation is the UDL reporting criteria. So the UDL reporting criteria is a guidance. Document that was developed by the UDL Irn Research Committee about five years ago. There was, there were a group of us who worked on that for about a year, and we really talked about what is missing in the UDL research. And at that time, we reviewed the research for about 20 years before. And what was missing was that people would do studies and say we did something with UDL. We did our intervention, or our design or our unit was UDL based, and this is what happened. But when you read the article, it wasn’t clear what components were UDL Exactly. Sometimes it wasn’t clear what the what variability was being addressed. Sometimes it wasn’t clear if the which outcomes were related to UDL versus just the outcomes of the thing that they had, the intervention that they did. So there was a murkiness in the UDL literature of the past. So what I feel like, at least in the past five years, there’s definitely been you see articles being a lot clearer about the design process. How did they who was this thing designed for? How were barriers and strengths and needs addressed, and then how, specifically, how was UDL applied to the intervention, and how were the outcomes related to UDL? So that is exciting to see, because I think by being more specific, we’re building our knowledge base about what UDL related strategies work, and for whom they work and how they work. So there’s definitely a lot more of that.
Lillian Nave 21:24
Oh, that’s great. I love how this research is evolving and pinpointing the mechanisms for what really makes those gains in learning and retention and success actually happen. Because sometimes it seems like a magic box. If we have the research, it can help us.
Kavita Rao 21:44
Yes, definitely yes. And being I think just clarity always helps with research, like being very clear about what was the application. In this case, because UDL is a large framework, and it can be applied in hundreds, 1000s of ways, yeah. So you can’t just say I applied UDL. You need to be specific about how and why. And then again, I emphasize this a lot, but I think the proactive and intentional design, to me, is the beauty and the hugest part of UDL, that is my favorite part of UDL, that you’re really designing and thinking about who you’re designing for from the outset. It’s not and you’re not doing it after the fact. So I find the research base now, capturing some of the design thinking better than it used to before. And again, the UDL reporting criteria actually are just criteria. They’re not standards. They’re not, you know, they don’t evaluate, but they’re just, they’re just guidance for researchers of which things to articulate when you are creating a UDL research study and reporting on a UDL research study. So there’s a real emphasis on discussing why you designed something, how you designed it, and what that did.
Lillian Nave 22:52
That’s great, and I would love to we’ll make sure that we have the UDL reporting criteria and the cast research agenda all linked in our resources, so folks who are inspired by this conversation can get to work on some more research in higher ed. So what advice do you have, because you are my research guru, and you can now be the guru for others. What advice do you have for someone who would like to conduct research on UDL in higher ed? This
Kavita Rao 23:26
is a great question, because I’ve been thinking about this in the context of some of my doctoral students I’m working with right now, as we’re looking at they’re excited about studying UDL, and as I’m working with them to angle their studies, I’ve given some thought to this. And one thing I realize I feel like sometimes we do is we bite off a lot with UDL because the framework is big. So sometimes people think they’re trying to research many, many things from the framework. And I might, I personally see it a different way. I think what we’re looking at is if the educational practices work that we have applied UDL to. So it’s not that we are trying to research the whole framework. We are looking at a practice that we’re doing that is an application of UDL for a specific reason. So one of the things I advise the people that I work with on with UDL is to scale it down to something doable that you can study. You’re not trying to figure out if the whole framework works. You are trying to figure out if this application of UDL works. And sometimes that application of UDL can be something very real life. So you are doing something in the classroom, and you would like to to make it work for a greater number of students. You’re looking at learner variability. So you’re doing this, let’s pretend a writing activity intervention project, and you think you use the UDL design cycle to think about how you’re going to make it more flexible. So you are, you are using some components of UDL to make that activity or that intervention more flexible and and you’re. Studying that. So you’re studying the writing activity or intervention, and there are some outcomes for that that you’re studying, and UDL is a part of that. So your unit of study is not necessarily UDL. Your unit of study is that activity or that lesson or that intervention, and that integrates UDL. So when, when you have the outcomes, and you can discern whether the outcomes went did it work? Did it not work? How did it work? Whatever your research questions are, you are looking at the activity or the intervention, and whether that UDL aligned activity or intervention had the outcomes that you were hoping for. So that is one thing. I to be really specific, that we’re not just randomly looking at the guidelines and the checkpoints, but we’re actually looking at it in application to something, and the outcomes are about the application of that activity or intervention or lesson or unit, or whatever unit your study that you’re researching.
Lillian Nave 25:56
Right, right? So that would be a kind of a pitfall to bite off too much, and we definitely need to prioritize clarity and what you’re trying to find out exactly
Kavita Rao 26:09
and the outcomes of what you’re studying should be linked to whatever that thing is that you are studying. Because sometimes I think people say UDL does work or doesn’t work, or whatever it is in the research design, but they are, it’s not clear what, what, what they have looked at with UDL. It might be a writing intervention that has worked or not, what work, but what were the UDL components of it that that you’re saying worked or didn’t work? So just again, you as your as you said, being very clear about what it is you’re studying, and where UDL was applied to that got
Lillian Nave 26:44
it. So are there any areas of research that you are excited to explore in the coming months or years, or that you see coming along, just to kind of give us an idea about what might be on the horizon.
Kavita Rao 27:03
You know, I think I feel like, as I look at the UDL literature, people are exploring so many things, and that is what is so cool, because UDL can be applied to so many things. Researchers are exploring whatever they’re interested in, in making more equitable and inclusive. So I think first, that’s exciting. I feel like UDL can be again, applied to so many things that it’s very cool that the research can also look at how this application has worked for many different purposes. One thing I see a lot of after the pandemic is UDL and online learning. That’s because loading the number of articles I see. So that’s wonderful. I see more, as I mentioned earlier, I see more people looking at different levels of post secondary education. How can UD UDL be applied system wide, like, how can systems adopt it? How can programs adopt it? How can individual professors adopt it? And then there’s always technology in UDL that’s always been a happy marriage, and, you know, so that’s the people have been looking at how technology supports or UDL and vice versa, like how those two come together. So, yeah, no, I think the research is endless, and it really should be. Whatever sparks the person doing it and applications of UDL are just honestly making something more inclusive in an intentional manner. So you can’t go wrong when you’re trying to make something more inclusive in an intentional manners and and studying what worked about that is wonderful, because it’s giving us as the field, more information about models that work and and how to replicate it and how to do it in our own in our own realms.
Lillian Nave 28:33
Yeah, so this is like a win, win. And do you hear that? Everybody, anybody could do this there. You can apply it to whatever field you’re interested in, and you can go from there. You’ve got some really good pointers from Kavita Rao here, and now you can go and add to this incredible research base and help all of us as we are changing the world for the better. So thank you so much Kavita for spending some time with me and lending me some of your brain for a little bit and your interest and knowledge about research, because I really do think you’ve done a lot and understand kind of where our research is for UDL in higher ed. So I just want to say thank you very much, and I really appreciate your time in speaking to me, and I think inspiring other UDL researchers and higher ed.
Kavita Rao 29:33
Thanks so much for having me. Lillian, it was really fun to get a chance to talk UDL research with you.
Lillian Nave 29:43
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