Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 1
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there
are three specific guidelines to assist us.
The third, Self-Regulation addresses maintaining focus and
determination.
Criterion 1 of this guideline advocates that we promote
expectations and attitudes that optimize motivation.
Everyone has intimate knowledge of what they find personally
motivating and this is an important aspect to self-regulation. Learners
need to be able to set personal goals that they can reasonably obtain, as well
as foster positive beliefs that they will be able to meet their goals.
Successfully accommodating this will require allowing for ways that
learners can curtail frustration and eschew anxiety that many face while striving to meet their goals. This will
require multiple options for learners to help stay motivated.
To do this, you may consider:
Providing guides, rubrics, prompts,
and checklists to encourage increasing the length of on task orientation
and elevating the frequency of self-reflection and
self-reinforcements
Create activities that support
self-reflection and identifying, and assessing, personal goals
Explicitly and implicitly promote the
use of coaches, mentors, and tutors that help inculcate skills in
goals setting that successfully account for both strengths and
weaknesses.
Encourage external success coaching
and tutors for additional help, and promote the development of these
services if your institution does not have them.
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line
with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for
Learning.
You have been working on ensuring your course has a perfect
Ally Accessibility score and to your surprise you see a page that has an
issue. It reads:
96%: This HTML file does not have a language
set.
If you explore the issues, you may notice that
the page is also missing a title. Both
are critical for accessibility. To your
dismay, Ally states, “Guidance is not available yet”.
Figure 1
Guidance is Here
Luckily, we do not have to rely on Ally to solve this
problem and you do not need to be an experienced HTML programmer either. Any faculty can resolve this issue in the
Brightspace editor. You simply need to
follow these steps:
Select Edit HTML to the page in question to open
the editor. (See Figure 1)
On the toolbar select the drop down from the Other
Insert Options icon – it has a + sign on the button (See Figure 2)
Select the Attributes option.
Select the “Page Attributes” Tab (See figure 3)
Give the page a meaningful title (if it doesn’t
already have one)
Set the language set – “en’ for English (This is
so much easier than adding <html lang="en"> to in the html
code.)
Select Create.
Select the blue “Save and Close.”
That was it.
Figure 2
You
didn’t have to open the source code and drop in the appropriate code ( <html
lang="en"> for the English language set). Instead, you can quickly fix any problematic
pages with these issues and ensure your content passes WCAG accessibility
standards.
Figure 3
Now that you know this, you can have perfect
pages.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Self-Regulation
The third principle of UDL, "provide multiple means of engagement”, helps promote an inclusive learning environment on many levels. When developing a course and focusing on this principle, there are three guidelines to follow. They are:
Recruiting Interest
Sustaining Effort and Persistence
Self-Regulation
We are now going to take a deeper look.
Self-Regulation is the ability to regulate emotions and motivations necessary to succeed at a task, such as learning. Naturally, developing and mastering this ability is important for all learners. While a learning environment can increase engagement by recruiting interest and sustaining effort and persistence, the ability to self-regulate, or to control one’s emotions and motivations so as to effectively cope and engage with the environment, is critical for learners’ success, both in and outside of the learning environment.
Many learners have developed these skills in primary school, however, there are still adult learners who struggle developing these skills. This is partially true due to most classrooms not explicitly addressing these skills and marginalized students finding this skill set inaccessible or imperceptible within an implicit curriculum. Regardless of the cause, designing a course to promote this skill, through prompts and modeling, helps level the field for everyone.
This approach provides alternatives to support learners with different aptitudes and prior experience to effectively manage their own engagement and affect. When adopting this approach, consider the following criteria:
Promote expectations and attitudes that optimize motivation
Facilitate personal coping skills and strategies. These strategies should offer flexible options to account for the individual variation
Develop self-assessment and reflection. Learners need to monitor their emotions and reactions accurately in order to develop their ability at self-regulation
By promoting an inclusive strategy with multiple ways of promoting self—regulation, your courses will be more develop skills that will promote student success in the course and in life.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Criterion 4
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The second, Sustaining Effort and Persistence addresses maintaining focus and determination.
Criterion 4 of this guideline advocates that we increase
mastery-orientated feedback.
Feedback is critical for successful learning and is the
fourth principle of Chickering and
Gamson’s seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education.
When the feedback is relevant, accessible, constructive, and timely, the
feedback is both more productive and critical for sustaining motivation and
effort crucial for learning.
Mastery-oriented feedback guides learners towards master
rather than a narrow and fixed view of performance and compliance. It
focuses on top tier learning in Blooms taxonomy while emphasizing the learners’
effort and practice as important factors for successful long-term habits and
learning practices. This empowers learners with a sense of agency and treats
learning as improving a skill, instead of a fixed target. The latter
notion often adopts the notion that some students, particularly those with
disabilities, may be constrained from meeting these fixed goals, and thus impedes motivation to persist.
When trying to meet this criterion, consider:
View learning as improving, and focus
on effort, improvement, and achieving a standard.
Supplying feedback that promotes
perseverance, the development of self-awareness, and encourages the
use of strategies that will assist learning when they face
challenges.
Providing
timely feedback
Offering frequent and specific
feedback
Adopting
strategies or models that will ensure that the feedback will be more
substantive and informative, instead of comparative or competitive.
Within
your feedback, include how
learners can incorporate the feedback to help identify patterns that
promote errors so that they can self-correct in the future.
The
feedback should also include
positive strategies for further success.
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.
References
Chickering, A & Z Gamson (1987) Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate
Education. American Association for Higher Education, p 2-6.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Criterion 3
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The second, Sustaining Effort and Persistence addresses maintaining focus and determination.
Criterion 3 of this guideline advocates that we promote
Collaboration and Foster a Community
Communication and
collaboration are key skills for students that will both benefit them in school environments and their professional
careers. These skills may be only tertiary among the goals of the course,
but those are indeed goals for all learners. Like other skills, there will be a
variety in their competence in the class. Nonetheless, mentoring through peers
can increase one-on-one support that will benefit both the mentee and
the mentor. Crafting collaborative exercises offers an excellent
opportunity for leaner growth, and the development of both collaborative and
communication skills.
Be sure to structure
activities to significantly increase the support for sustained engagement.
Provide flexible groupings to better multiple and differentiated roles. It will
also provide opportunities to learn how to work effectively with others – a
vital skill in or out of the classroom. Learners can select the level most
suited for themselves when options are available in how they can build and
utilize these skills.
When crafting
activities, consider:
Supplying prompts that assist learners
in understanding when and how to ask for help from either peers or the
instructor.
Creating cooperative
learning groups with clearly defined:
goals,
roles,
and
responsibilities
Encouraging
peer interaction and support opportunities, such as peer tutors
Helping
develop a community of learning that engage participants with common interests
Setting
expectations for group work through various channels, such as grading rubrics and explicit
objectives
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Criterion 2
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The second, Sustaining Effort and Persistence addresses maintaining focus and determination.
Criterion 2 of this guideline advocates that we optimize
the challenge by varying demands and resources
The kinds of challenges that motivate learners to do their
best vary, just like their skills and abilities. Because of the
variances between learners, we should expect that not all will be motivated or
challenged in the same way. When varying the challenges, it is important to
offer a flexible range of appropriate resources necessary for learners to
succeed in the challenge. This will allow all learners to find challenges
that are motivating. When doing this, it is vital to balance the resources available
to meet each challenge.
You should consider:
Providing a choice of alternative tools
available to learners
Varying the range of acceptable performance
per challenge
Offering differing degrees of complexity
within core activities
Emphasize development, individual
improvement and effort as standards (as these are self-motivating) instead
of external evaluation or competition (which can be discouraging for some who
struggle).
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Criterion 1
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The second, Sustaining Effort and Persistence addresses maintaining focus and determination.
Criterion 1 of this guideline advocates that we focus
attention on the salience of goals and objectives
Many sources of interest compete for attention during the
course of any long project or practice. For example, some learners will require
reminding of their initial goal or what will happen when they obtain that goal.
In this case, it is important to consistently offer elements to remind them of the
goal and the value of meeting it. This will assist these learners in
sustaining effort or concentration to overcome factors that may distract them
from meeting the goal.
When re-enforcing the understanding of goals and objectives,
consider:
Displaying the goal or objectives in
multiple ways or throughout the learning activity
Prompting
learners to explicitly formulate or restate goals
Encouraging division of long-term
goals into short-term objectives or demonstrate how this is done
Using prompts to visualize desired
outcome
Engaging learners in assessment
discussions of what constitutes excellence and meeting the goals. Be
prepared to accommodate different cultural backgrounds and interests
Providing exemplars to
demonstrate goal achievement.
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 2 - Sustaining Effort and Persistence
The third
principle of UDL, "provide multiple means of engagement”, helps promote an inclusive learning environment on many levels.
When developing a course and focusing on this principle, there are three
guidelines to follow. They are:
Recruiting
Interest
Sustaining
Effort and Persistence
Self-Regulation
We are now going to take a deeper look.
The second guideline, Sustaining Effort and Persistence,
addresses maintaining focus and determination.
Sustained attention and effort are necessary for many types of learning, such as skill acquisition. With sufficient motivation, most learners can control their attention to sustain their concentration and the effort required for learning the task. Learners vary in their ability to self-regulate their attention, with some needing more help than others. Some of the factors accounting for the differentiation in their ability include:
Initial motivation
Susceptibility to contextual inference
Skills for self-regulation
Capacity for self-regulation
One instructional goal is to empower learners by building
skills in self-regulation and self-determination. This will assist all the
learners by ensuring each has the necessary skill set. By developing a learning
environment that supports learners adversely affected by the factors impeding
these needed skills, the environment can minimize these effects.
When doing this, you should strive to meet the following:
Focus attention on the salience of goals and objectives
Optimize the challenge by varying demands and resources
Promote Collaboration and Foster a Community
Increase mastery-orientated feedback
By promoting an inclusive strategy with multiple ways of motivating learners to persist to a wide variety of learners, your learning environment will be more accommodating and promote student success
Principle of Engagement - Guideline 1 - Criterion 3
When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The first, Recruiting Interest, focuses on how accessible the content is to learners. Information that does not engage the learner’s cognition is effectively inaccessible.
Criterion 3 of this guideline advocates that we minimize
threats and distractions
Having a safe environment of space to learn is critical for
effective education. Besides the obvious reference to physical safety, subtler
types of threats and distractions can impede the learning process as well. By
reducing stimuli that create negative experiences or interfere with the
learner's concentration, we can ensure that the learner has their needs met and
can focus on learning more effectively. This is particularly relevant when
considering at-risk learners and non-traditional students. Variations in
culture and background experiences can make subtle micro-aggressions, or even
unintended events where contexts can be blurred, and students with different
backgrounds may find themselves in a uncomfortable learning environment, while
others within the class are not. The optimal instructional environment
supplies options that can reduce, or minimize, threats and negative
distractions for everyone, so each student feels safe and comfortable when
exploring or learning.
Some tips to help reduce perceived threats and distractions
include:
Create an
accepting and supportive learning climate, that explicitly states its
commitment to inclusion and tolerance.
Differ
the level of novelty in the learning environment by:
Using alerts and previews that can help learners
anticipate and prepare for changes in activities, schedules, and novel events
so that they are prepared
Offer warnings to prepare students for possibly
intense content (such as video that might produce PTSD episodes or be
considered disturbing to students with special needs or experiences)
Vary background noise, or optionally, allows
students to control it individually (such as music or background audio in an
online presentation)
Options that can maximize the unexpected,
surprising, or novel in highly routinized activities or reduce it to tailor the
experience to the learner’s needs.
Vary the level of sensory stimulation by maintaining:
Variation in the presence of background noise or visual stimulation, noise buffers, number of features or items presented at a time
Variation in work pacing, availability of
breaks, or sequence of activities
·Fluctuate
the social demands required for performance, the perceived level of support
and protection, and the requirements for public display (class participation)
and evaluation
Involve all participants in whole class discussions or collaborations. Encourage otherwise timid students and reinforce/moderate the discussions to ensure inclusivity
By following these suggestions, your course will assist students in communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.
On occasion you will teach a course and have a student withdraw
from it. This is not a big deal since
there could be many reasons for this happening.
However, when the Dean needs you to report the students grades from work
prior to the withdrawal, it then becomes a big deal. How can you view their grades and participation
when this happens?
Luckily, in Brightspace, viewing the grades from a student
who has withdrawn from the class is no big deal.
There are four simple steps:
From inside your class, select the Roster option.Fortunately, at SUNY Schenectady, that is
right on the menu. (The Roster can also be found in the Course Admin under
Course Tools.)
Select the Enrollment Statistics button
Scroll down to the bottom and a list of
withdrawn students is displayed.
Click the chevron next to the student in
question to view their information.
Please note that you will need grade items for grades. Likewise, the attendance
is from the Brightspace Attendance feature. Your college may use a different
system for tracking.
These four easy steps will give you access to their grades
and information.
Since the Lockdown the use of videoconferencing can no
longer be denied as a key part of online education. Whether you are teaching a synchronous
course, a hybrid, holding virtual office hours, or providing a sense of
community with an optional introduction in an asynchronous session, you will
need to select a video conferencing tool the suits your needs. But which one?
Collaborate in Blackboard and Bongos Virtual Classroom in
Brightspace are free and are conveniently embedded inside the LMS. However, not
everything that is free, such as the flu, is good. Both of these free
applications refuse to provide automatic captioning. They do ‘claim’ to have captions provided you
arrange for a transcriptionist to transcribe them in real-time. Free and not
toxic at all!
But why should I care if I do not have any deaf students? First, in many cases you are not aware of all
of your students’ disabilities. One in ten college students report having a
disability and this should not be ignored.
Second, The American Disabilities Act
requires organizations to provide accessible online content and missing
captions is frequently cited in ADA lawsuits. Don’t be that guy - meet WCAG standards.
Captions expand your audience and increase their engagement often in unexpected
ways. In 2022 50% of US
citizens surveyed stated they use captions ‘most of the time’. The study also revealed that 70% of members
of Gen Z (ages 11-25) frequently use subtitles. They are a growing demographic
of students, and they will expect captioning.
Luckily, you can easily provide captioning in video conferences by using MS
Teams. When you enter a meeting, you
merely select the “more’ feature on the menu – its symbol is three dots. Go to “Language and Speech” and select “Turn
On Live Captions”. Now you have live captions. You could also do this by
selecting “Accessibility” and turning on the Captioning tab. This is an individual feature, so all your
students can access it and use it privately.
A similar feature exists in Zoom.
Live captioning also helps you be more inclusive by
assisting ELL students or offering translations for non-English speakers. MS Teams, as well as Zoom
(with the Wordly App add-on), not only offer real-time captioning, but language
translation. Once the captioning is on
in Teams, select the three dots on the top right corner of the captions
bar. This will offer the following
options:
1.Change
the spoken language. This is handy
when your class is not in English.
2.Translate
the captioning language. Yes, this feature can translate your session into
more than 30 languages. This helps level the bar for ELL students who may have
difficulty understanding their second or third language in the online
environment.
The translation tool is not as good as an interpreter. For
example, ‘Warming the cockles of your heart’ does not mean to “heating the
mollusks inside your cardiac organ”. However, the translation feature is a
handy tool when you need something. It is effectively an electronic dictionary/translator
to assist your students.
Remember, not all instructional technology is the same, and
this definitely applies to video conferencing applications. Choose one that has auto-captioning and
translations. It is not only more
inclusive and accessible but demonstrates your commitment to being so.
Amin, F. M., & Sundari, H. (2020). EFL students’
preferences on digital platforms during emergency remote teaching: Video
conference, LMS, or messenger application? Studies in English Language and
Education, 7(2), 362-378.
Patil S & Davies P. (2014) Use of Google
Translate in medical communication: evaluation of accuracy BMJ 2014; 349:
g 7392 doi:10.1136/bmj.g7392
Kaliyadan F, & Gopinath Pillai S. (2010)The use of google language tools as
an interpretation aid in cross-cultural doctor-patient interaction: a pilot
study. Inform Prim Care 18:141-3.
