Page 41 - Reimagining Higher Education : Case Studies On Designing For Inclusion, Equity, And Access In The Buka Project

M. Leikomma · Inclusive Learning Design

various opportunities for collaboration, and o ering a variety of tools and
activities with which students can engage.

2. Multiple Means of Representation, or alternatives in how students access
information. This can be achieved by o ering content in a variety of

accessible formats, providing documents in advance of synchronous
teaching, using captions and alt texts for images, using multiple media to

illustrate key concepts and breaking content into chunks.

3. Multiple Means of Action/Expression, by supporting multiple media for
communication, and alternatives for completing work and submitting

assessments.

It can be seen how these three principles of UDL map onto the nine principles of

UDI, and both should be considered together to create an accessible and inclusive
learning environment for all learners.

The accessibility and inclusion project (Brunton et al., 2022), which was
conducted in DCU, is an example of how these principles were implemented in an

online higher education psychology programme. The accessibility and inclusion

project was prompted by the evaluation data from students on the programme with
specific conditions, impairments, or di culties, which called for the improvement

of accessible practices in the online programme. Following the universal design
principles, the project sought to improve four main areas of the programme using

an action research design with stakeholders included as co-designers of online

learning; where research was done with, rather than on, those in minority groups.
The write up of this project and its preliminary findings can be found in its ‘lessons

learned’ guide (Brunton et al., 2022), which also provides a discussion on inclusive
learning design guidelines for learning designers and educators of online/blended

modules of programmes.

Conclusion

One of the main points of discussion in this subsection is that while inclusive

learning design may seem like a daunting task at first, it does not overly burden the
educator. Instead, making the materials and course design inclusive may even

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