The Global Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Classroom

Created Feb. 7, 2024 by Frances Smith, Serra De Arment

The Global Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Classroom was initially designed between a U.S. based and international partnering institution of higher education to build an online learning community around UDL. The focus of this collaboration highlighted opportunities to engage both doctoral students and international educators in jointly building a virtual model classroom to study UDL principles, pilot applications of innovative pedagogical methods, and evaluate the effectiveness of online resources in varied and culturally different educational settings.

The model classroom posted here was designed using the the open Wordpress platform using the Twenty Eleven theme to provide a user friendly, accessible and responsive platform for the design of this space. Several plugins were included to enhance functionality such as wp-accesibility and gravity forms to provide opportunities to capturing comments by participants.

The design of this virtual classroom was intentional to make learning visible, constructive, and applicable through online dialogue, interactive demonstrations, resource curation, and evaluation of the application of UDL in diverse cultural contexts. This classroom was initially developed by a team of doctoral students, faculty and international educators.

The core content of UDL is linked from the internationally recognized text from CAST, UDL Theory and Practice. This open resource along with several freely available UDL tools such as CAST UDL Bookbuilder and the UDL Guidelines - Version 2.0 were important resources incorporated into the content for this classroom.

Standards