Well, welcome everyone. We appreciate you coming today. We will probably have some coming in and out. If you have to leave a few minutes early, but we appreciate you coming out to Eric Moore's presentation today. This event is sponsored by the Accessibility Commission. What we do is have 22 members of faculty staff, students, graduate, and undergraduate. And we actually are a part of the Council for Diversity Inclusion. And our main focus is to provide equal opportunity and access on campus. If you're interested, give us a call or send me an e-mail. We would love to have you work with us. And also we would like to thank the executive director of the Wyatt Center here for this venue as well as the refreshments that will be received after the presentation. Around 4:30, there will be a 30-minute reception in the foyer. You can ask more informal questions and things like that. So I'm going to have you come and introduce our speaker today. And thank you so much for being with us. 

>> Good afternoon and thank you for coming. I'm the new director for the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation on campus. I'm pleased to introduce Eric Moore. I met Eric during my tenure at University of Tennessee and was pleased to know that the course he designed on UDL in Canvas was featured on Inside Higher Ed in February. He is starting after years of teaching drama, literature, philosophy, he is starting scholarly work in universal design and accessibility. He has a doctorate from U.T. in Inclusive Education. And he is currently U.T.'s accessibility specialist working in the Office of Instructional Technology. We're pleased to have him here. We're also pleased that the course that he created is now imported into Canvas. If you're a faculty member, that is an open course for you. You can see more of Eric's work through that course. So first let's hear from Eric about UDL. 

[Applause] 
>> ERIC MOORE: Welcome. Going through Clemson yesterday, I noticed how many places had the tiger paw on it. So today's talk focuses on different aspects of UDL. 

I want to look at the what of UDL, the how of UDL, and the why of UDL. And I want to begin today's talk talking about why you would look at UDL. 

Look at the idea of averages. When we think about our students, few of your students would think of them in terms of averages. You're probably not going out of your way to teach to the average student. But you'll have to go out of your way. You would have to go out of your way to not teach as if your students are average. This is the way our students are designed for us. What I mean by this is we have this emphasis on the myth of the normal student. Normal students are so idealized in higher education and education in general. In terms of how they learn, how fast they learn, how they express their learning, and in terms of what motivates and sustains them. The more similar our students are in these ways, the easier your job is. That's by design. So what do I mean by that? In terms of how we learn, a few things seem familiar. We really want students who respond to lecture. We want students who can work okay in small groups sometimes. We want students who can do independent seat work. And we might, depending on your different styles in higher ed, we tend to have a very narrow range of the things that we expect of our students in how they consume information. We want normal students in terms of how fast they learn. Obviously we want students who can keep up with the class. If they're too slow it's problematic. And we might begin to suspect that there is a learning disability that may or may not be diagnosed or maybe they just don't belong in this class, which is too advanced for them. But ironically having students that are too fast is also a problem. If we have students that took A.P. chemistry in classroom and they got a 3 and they didn't get credit for it, and they have to take our class. They start goofing off in class and it causes the people behind them to get distracted. We want them all to learn at the exact pace that we happen to be teaching. Wouldn't that be great? We have this idea of average in terms of how they express their learning. We want students who know how to take multiple choice tests and who can express their knowledge on multiple choice tests and who can write essays and who can deliver powerful presentations. And if you're not good at those things, then you're probably not going to be very successful in our classes. We want students who are fairly average in what motivates and sustains them. Hopefully our students feel like they want a 4.0 and they're willing to work for that. And we know from research that some students are not motivated by grades. And that's a problem sometimes. We have some students that we hope they're going to just comply. I tell them read chapter one by Wednesday, and I hope that they read chapter one by Wednesday, because I'm their teacher and they're the student. The more normal they are in these capacities, the better. And the further away they get from that average, the more problematic they are. And we're not just dealing with a few students, I know some of you teach classes of 20 or 25. Maybe you're in lecture halls of 100 or 150. We can hypothesize as great as this would be, the reality is your students are diverse. 

Everything we know are the neuroscience and cognitive science research is that the human brain is as unique as our fingerprints. How people learn and how they express themselves and what motivates and sustains them through challenge is different for each individual. So this idea of the average, it just doesn't really work. Let's take a look at just one of these. This idea of how they learn. So we might find in a lecture hall that some students are going to say "You know what? I learned the content pretty well can lecture and note taking. I figured out how this works." You're going to find some of those students. But you're also going to find some students who say "you know what? I find it really hard to focus and to take notes at the same time. I can't really do both successfully. I really need to time to slow down and talk about it with people before I understand it." And then you're going to find some students who say "You know, this is boring. I already know this stuff and I wish we were doing something with it, instead of just repeating this information." These aren't surprising. We know that they're there, but the system doesn't allow us to reach them. That's just one of them. They're going to be different in terms of how fast they learn, different in terms of what motivates and sustains them. We've got this idea that the more average our students are, the better. 
But as we're seeing, this introduces a couple of problems. Number one, none of your students is truly average. They're different from one another and different from themselves on different days in different circumstances and in different situations. What motivated them on Monday may not work for them on Wednesday. It's a problem when we continue to think about it. The other issue is we don't want them to be. You know, when we talk to researchers, to administrators, to teachers in K-12 in higher ed, we have these things that we say about education. We're trying to prepare them for jobs that don't exist yet. We want them to be creative thinkers. How do we know they're successful? We standardize test them. We give them the same multiple choice tests, the same PowerPoint presessions, the same essays, we deliver lectures to them as if they're all the same. Are we preparing them to be divergent or teaching them to be the same? Or are we rewarding sameness? How can UDL help? In other words, why would you practice UDL? 

Well UDL takes this idea of teaching to the average and challenges them. And it invites us to wonder what would it look like if I instead designed for students on the margin. What if I designed a class experience for a student who has never taken anything in this topic before and is coming into my 100-level course and is going to be able to learn and grow. And at the same time the student that got that 3 on the A.P. exam is going to find this class challenging and rigorous. It's going to take creativity to design experiences that are flexible enough to meet the needs of all of those students. But when I do, all of the students in between have their needs met, as well. And all of my students rise together. What UDL does is takes this challenge so idyllic and gives us concrete strategies of how to make this happen. It's drawing from thousands of empirical research studies based in neuroscience, cognitive education research, and we're looking at best practices that we've known have been best practices for generations, for decades, and organize them into new insights into how the brain works and how learning occurs. And it teaches us how to design such that we're not just using a best practice because it's a best practice. But we're saying we're going to use this strategy here to design for these students so everybody can learn in my class. It's a framework for designing in that way. As a result, you'll find that your students can achieve more rigorous outcomes by more students with lifelong to outcomes for learning. I want to draw attention to this idea of more rigorous outcomes as an essential part of UDL. 
One of the things that people confuse when we start talking about making more learning more flexible, more engaging for more diverse students is we must be watering the course down. Nothing can be further from the truth. What oftentimes happens is we start a course with very high intentions of what we want our students to accomplish. And when they struggle, we really only have a couple choices. We can either say well those students who are struggling are just not going to cut it. I'm going to continue to teach for those students who are making it. The top 15-20%, whatever it might be. Or I'm going to have to reduce the rigor of my course. That's really what I have. You also must have clear, powerful outcomes and allow our students different way to get there. And that way I don't have to compromise my objectives. I don't have to compromise my goals. I just give students flexibility in how they get there. In fact UDL does away with this the idea of averages all together. 

This idea of averages in education goes way back to a guy in the 17th century. I'm not going to go that far back, I promise. But it's infiltrated our system so well that our ideal is built on averages. And UDL challenges that. It says we have a predictable variability among the population. And as we've begun to map the brain and understand how it learns, we've found hundreds of brain networks related to learning. And those networks are part of other networks are part of other networks and the most basic growth is formed, there are three critical networks for learning and people are different. We are different, predictably in what motivates and sustains us for challenge. We are predictably different in how we recognize and conceptualize information. We are predictably different in how we plan, perform, and express ourselves. And when we think about these different networks, one of the things, a pitfall that I want to avoid falling into is to think of them as if we have different things that we're catering to. But it's all one mind. And the best effects come when we begin thinking about how to use all three of these networks in conjunction with one another. Let's take a look at what this looks like. If I have a traditional lecture hall, we have a limited means of engagement, representation, and action expression. For example, in terms of how we represent information is mostly through oral lecture. Maybe I have a PowerPoint and usually the PowerPoint is the same thing as what I'm saying. Right? So it's really one method of representation. And then we have one way for students to take action and that is to take notes. And then have a couple different way to motivate them. Hopefully they're motivated by grades. And hopefully they're motivated by content interest. I'm being gracious here for myself. So we've got a couple possibilities of what's engaging them. So if we look at different student needs, we're really hoping our students are good at oral lectures, comprehending information that way, that they're good at note taking, and they have some interest in the content. Or if they don't have interest in the content, at least they're motivated by grades. Or the greatest of all, they're motivated by grades and they're interested in the content. Now this is our ideal student. So really we have three shades of the same type of student that we're looking for in this class. The further away you are from that ideal, the more difficult this class is going to be for you. That's what we mean by catering to the average. 

Now what would happen if we began to give multiple means of engagement? Multiple means of action and expression? Multiple means of representation? It might look something like this. Yes, we have great base motivation. We're not getting rid of that any time soon. Maybe I go out of my way to think about how to make this content relevant for you. Maybe I'm drawing from a real-life situation as examples for for this content. Maybe I'm looking at what your interests are and what fields you're interested in moving into and make it relevant. Maybe we develop some kind of community interaction. It's a large lecture hall, sure, but groups of four who are going to work together for various things. And you're going to rely on each other for collaborative note taking and assignments and do group work so we create communities for you in this class. I still may have some oral lecture, maybe not for the full hour anymore. But I break it up. I use graphic representations. This isn't just text reflecting the words that I'm saying, but a way of representing what I'm saying in a different format visually. In Maybe I have some hands-on activities. I lecture for 15 minutes to give you the idea and have you work with your groups as a think, pair, share, to do something with it. Share out your idea via clickers or tablet or something to have a voice. And then I go back and give you more information and we're breaking up the lecture this way. I give you different ways to interact with it. I still encourage note taking. Maybe I encourage collaborative note taking with something like Google Docs so you and your group makes can work together. And maybe we have those group discussions as ways for you to express yourselves, as well. This doesn't sound that outlandish to create a little bit of flexibility in these ways in a lecture hall. But so much opportunity comes here. You might find a student who says it's these non-traditional elements that really work for me. I don't learn by lecture or note taking and I'm not really motivated by grades. But this other stuff that this faculty introduces, this helps me to learn. Another student may say no I'm a professional student. I know how to listen to a lecture and take notes and I'm motivated by grades. They're fine. Those elements are still there. Another student may say it's kind of a combination of different aspects of it. In fact, with these eight different aspects, there's 17 different combinations that students can make of them. The idea is not that I'm personalizing learning. I'm not figuring out ahead of time who needs what because I can predict it. We have this predictable variability in the population. I know some people are going to benefit from seeing things graphically and others are going to like to listen to it. I don't have to poll them. I have already designed for them. I'm not personalize it for them, they are personalizing it for themselves. They get to choose among the different options that my faculty is providing for me. And this is what we mean by designing for the margins, for people on the outside, we get away from that whole idea of the average. 

So why UDL? Because your students aren't average. And because you don't want them to be. And UDL lets them thrive in their diverngence. Any questions so far? Okay. 

Let's talk about what we're going to learn today. By the end of this workshop, I want you to articulate the value of UDL. I want you to basically explain what UDL is. And I want you to be able to use UDL design thinking to design courses. We started here. And I didn't want to start with the objectives, because they're kind of boring. But I wanted to get involved. Do you think you could articulate the value of UDL as it's claimed at this point? I'm going to check that off then. Let's take a look at basically explaining of what UDL is. We're going to move from the why of UDL to the what of UDL. This is going to basically explain what UDL is. So UDL, and I'm going to give you a couple of different ways to do. This doesn't convert to this huge screen very well. But hopefully you got the idea. You have the three people trying to watch the baseball game. You see they have varying heights. And we're going to imagine they're not doing anything illegal. A little league baseball game and they're trying to catch it from the outfield. They're standing on a box. The tall person doesn't really need the box. This person needs it and gets exactly what he needs. And this one, it's just not enough. When this image was first created it was presented side-by-side with this one to represent the idea of equality versus equity was the idea here. Where the same three boxes have now been redistributed according to each person's need. This person doesn't need them, so he doesn't get them, and this person needs more and so on. And this is really the way that disability services in higher ed is designed. Basically we say if you don't have a disability, if you're not an English language learner, et cetera, then these services are not for you. You don't get to use them. But if you have a disability that needs significant supports, then we'll be able to support you to that degree. If you need some support, we've got you there, as well. Right? This is the model. Now there's a lot of advantage to this. Obviously it gives access to people who otherwise would not have had access. It's not equal in the sense that everybody gets the same thing. It's equitable. People get according to what they need. But there's a problem with this conceptually. What we're really saying is that this is good. This is what we want people to look like. And if you're not like that, we need to fix you so that you're like that. And this has implications for life after college. People who go through K-12, after college, and they find that their support needs are always provided by external providers don't necessarily learn how to best engage themselves, how to be their own best learner, how they do things differently and are successful anyway. And we prioritize again the idea of the normal, the average. One other issue with this is it presumes that the problem is with the individual. The environment is fine. There's something wrong with you. And UDL challenges this. And it suggests that people of course they're different, we know they're different. And the problem isn't the fact that they're different. The problem is the environment is so static is that it does not allow for difference. That the barrier is the interaction between the individual diverse learner and an environment that is not there for them. Earlier today in some conversations with Timey and other colleagues, we were talking about how college, we have more people who are more divergent than they've ever been before. Historically, a lot of people who come to Clemson now would not have been allowed to come to Clemson. People with certain disabilities or didn't perform as well on the SAT, whatever it might be. People who are different from the cream of the crop that we used to graduate from high school with the purpose of going to college are now being admitted. And yet the college system has not necessarily kept up with the divergence of the students who are coming here. It's not any individual faculty's fault. It's a systemic reality what we're working with. We have ways of doing things, but our students have become more different. We need to find a way to create an environment in which that difference is acceptable. 

So UDL addresses this in a nutshell by clearly saying we want clear goals and flexible means. Our students know what is expected of them and what they will be able to know and do at the end of a learning experience, and then we say but we have different paths to get there. I don't really care how you get there. What I care is that you are able to do these things by the end of this lesson, by the end of this unit, by the end of this class. It's so liberating for students. Let me get a little bit more specific. UDL is both a set of principles and a design framework for designing learning experiences that use flexible means for students to learn and express their learning as they achieve rigorous and clear goals. So if you break that down, UDL is a set of principles that goes back to the learning that works. The UDL principles are based on what we learned about the three networks of learning. And they suggest that we need to provide multiple means of engagement, which fits with the effective work of learning and the why of learning. What we know now is engagement is absolutely critical to learning. If you think about the last thing that you learned because you really wanted to it. Maybe it was driving a stick shift or casting a fly or something that like you just want to learn this, and so you set out to learn it. Learning comes really easy when you're motivated. And think about that last class. For some of us it might be longer ago than others. That last class that you took because you had to take it. You didn't want to. And you were not interested in the topic. And how difficult learning was in that situation. We now understand why that is. Your brain is actually much more willing to retain information when you care about it than when you're not. As a high school teacher, my students often came into my class, and I had the joy of teaching philosophy, you can imagine what that was like in high school somedays. Students came into my class and they wanted to know why are we learning this. When I first started teaching, you know, I took it for granted. Well, because you're supposed to! Because that's what the principal says we're supposed to learn and I'm supposed to teach! I didn't ever really have a good answer. And I learned very quickly how hazardous that was. How that question was not flippant, but a genuine desire to understand what am I doing here? Why am I going to invest my energies in that. We have to have real answers if we're going to have real learning to occur. When I was an undergraduate, I was still able to get good grades because I was motivated by good grades and not content. I have forgotten almost all of the content in those classes. I retained it long enough to pass the final exam and forgot it. That to me is not learning. If you want your students to learn, they must care. This is what neuroscience is telling us. 

So when you provide multiple means of engagement and multiple means of representation, this is the recognition that works, or the what of learning. So we have this old neuromyth. This idea of learning styles. There's not really learning styles in the sense that people are not static visual learners all the time in all situations. But it's a useful tool to think about if we're saying I want to present information in different ways. Because that's really what this is telling us. That we want to present information in multiple ways because it's going to reach different students. And this is also a way to address accessibility issues up front. So for example, closed captioning is one way to address the principle of providing multiple means of representation. We have auditory information and we have text information for the same thing. And traditionally we think of closed captioning as being for students with disabilities. Specifically hearing impairments or audio processing disorders. What we've been learning in research, for example a paper was published in 2015 called "Video captions benefit everybody" that was a meta analysis over 100 empirical studies that showed that the use of video captions and educational videos improved retention, attention, and comprehension for everybody. BBC did a study in 2006 wondering who uses their closed captions on all of their networks. They found that 80% of the users of closed captions have no hearing impairment whatsoever. Closed captioning simply provides another way to interact with the content. When you're at a restaurant or a noisy bar or at the YMCA when you're trying to work out and catch the news at the same time. Or when you're not able to follow this particular newscaster and it's helpful to have another representation. In the learning sciences, we have a man who came up with this idea of dual coding. When we can see something and hear it at the same time, we are storing it in different parts of our brain which leads to better recall and better understanding of concepts. These principles indicate that what we thought was designed for somebody on the outside in fact benefits everybody. The third is to provide multiple means of action and expression. This relates to the strategic network or the how of learning. When students are enabled to express themselves in a way that works for them, that lets them be different in how they prefer to share their ideas, you'll find the students who you might have thought were just so shy or unwilling to communicate in class when given another way are able to express themselves well. We see this a lot with people who taught a student in person and then saw the same student in an online course and where they were silent, they were very vocal. It's simply given them another avenue to express themselves. These are the principle that UDL suggests none of them are new to UDL. These aren't things that we just suddenly came up with when we started developing UDL. It's a way to say that these things that we have known for a long time have been effective and now we know why. Now we understand what is happening in the brain and we're saying these should be applied all the time. 

So if you go to, I'll give you this link in an e-mail afterwards. There is a UDLguidelines@cast.org. And you'll be able to find these. What we've done here is taken the three principles and divided them into nine guidelines. The secondary level headers. Providing options for recruiting interests, options for sustaining interest, and self-regulation. We have nine guidelines and 31 checkpoints. The 31 checkpoints are supported by well over 1,000 empirical studies across multiple disciplines. These are things we know work. All we've done is organized them into a framework. The framework is also organized vertically in the rows from top to bottom. In the top row we talk about providing access. This is where accessibility and UDL overlap. Provide options for assessment. Offer alternatives for auditory information like caption. And options for things like alt text, for example. And where accessibility stops, UDL expands the picture quite a bit. It suggests that the end game is not simply to have students perceive information, but to comprehend it. And we can offer ways for them to get to that point, as well. So when you look down from the access to the build to ultimately the internalized row, by the time they get down here, provide options for comprehension, we have activating or supplying background knowledge, critical features, big ideas, relationships, guiding information processing and visualization, maximizing transfer of visualization. There are concrete ways to do these things. When we do them, this is well beyond what is required by ADA, Section 504, Section 508, it doesn't require any of this, but this is what learning is. It's developing students who are able to internalize motivation, representation, action, expression, and ultimately to become what we go for, which is this idea of expert learners. And UDL is not simply about developing content masters, but developing students who know how they learn, who are purposeful and motivated and resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic, and goal directed. Those qualities as a learner will not only transfer to your classes and other classes, but will follow them as they become professionals in the field. 

I would argue that all of you in this room are professional learners and expert learners. And I know that's true because you're faculty. Because in spite of poor instructors somewhere along the way you learned anyway because you're strategic, you're resourceful. I took a class where things weren't presented very well, but I was able to figure out what I was supposed to be learning and go find that information on my own. That was being strategic and purposeful and I was able to learn in spite of it. We cannot expect that students already have those skills. And they're worth developing. When we develop this type of expertise in our students, content learning becomes much easier. Content mastery is a by-product of being an expert learner. We want to develop expert learners in these domains by helping them through these different aspects. And we have flexible means in helping them get there. Now I want to make sure that you understand, in UDL I'm not suggesting that you apply 31 checkpoints every time you design a lesson. That's not what this is. This is just a way to organize these best practices and you then choose what is relevant in this particular situation. 

So for example, if I know that my students are going to struggle with motivation in this class, it's a 100-level class, a general education course, and my students are coming from all different kinds of disciplines and I'm teaching geology. Geology people in here, I have nothing against geology. I'm just using it as an example. I know that some of my students are not going to find geology particularly interesting. I have a real recruiting issue that I'm going to have to deal with very early in the course or I'm going to lose them. And then I can look into this and I can look into the strategies that are behind there, which you can find on the website that I talked to you about. Research-based practices for how I can recruit interest. And it doesn't stop there. I need to build on it. So moving on in the semester, I'm going to be looking for students to provide options for sustaining effort and persistence, because it's going to get difficult when the course continues and they have to be motivated enough to persist. And ultimately I want them to be able to self-regulate. That even when the course is getting difficult, even when you're not particularly interested, that you have beliefs to optimize motivation, that you know how to cope even when things are not going your way, et cetera. And that by this point will transfer. Not just about geology, but across the board. Flexible means and clear goals. 

The other way to look at UDL is through this idea of backwards planning. Backwards planning or backwards design is about beginning with the goal and working back from there. Oftentimes in higher education, the way that we design courses is we start with materials. We might say what is the textbook that I want to adapt? And I find a textbook that's 12 chapters long. 16 weeks in the semester. Great! 12 out of 16 weeks covered already! Throw in an exam here and there, we're good. Really beginning down here and then we work our way up to here. What UDL suggests is because we want clear goals and flexible means is we have to start with where am I going? What am I going to achieve with my students? And this gives me focus for how I'm going to design the learning experience. Once I know where we're going, I then think how am I going to know that my students accomplished what they were supposed to accomplish? And then how am I going to prepare them with methods and materials that will get them to the point where they in fact learned what they were supposed to learn. And this may or may not be that 12-chapter textbook. It may be just chapter one and chapter 12 are spot on for what I'm looking for, but I want to mix in some other stuff. Or maybe I'll say you can read chapter one or watch this Khan Academy video. Either way. And they have the option of how do I learn better? Do I want to read it? Or do I want to watch the video? And either are fine. So it's backwards planning that introduces the idea of flexible means in the process of how students get there. 

So what is UDL? UDL is a set of principles applied in a design framework to optimize learning for everyone. Questions so far. Or another way to look at it again is to take away one thing that's easy to remember, clear goals, flexible means. Okay. 

So we can basically explain what UDL is. Let's take a look at using UDL design thinking to design courses. So we went from the what is UDL to how can I design with UDL? I want to give you a quick guide for those of you who can't stay past 4 o'clock. What I would suggest doing is to begin by looking at your syllabus. This is a great way to take your course as a whole, this is what the syllabus is for, and it's a good place for you to start. Take a look at your course goals and reflect would these be clear to the students? Do they know what they're going to be accomplishing here? I've seen syllabi that have 15, 20 course objectives. I suggest shrinking that down to three to five. The point is to give your students an idea of what they're going to know or be able to do by the end of this course. I can't focus on 16 things. If I can combine those into some big ideas, 3 to 5 is a good number for them. I want them to be accurate and disentangled from the means. By accurate what I mean is when I say to my students that they're going to be able to write about how management principles are applied in real world situations, it's not really writing that I'm looking for, but if I'm really looking for them to understand what I'm saying, I want them to be able to apply these things. I want to be clear in terms of what it is that I want them to accomplish. And disentangled from the means, means I'm not going to give them an objective that has built in a completely unrelated method for expressing it. If I were to say students will present on the effects of deforestation on climate change, what I want really want to know is if they understand the effects of deforestation on climate change, not if they can present, which is not what I'm going to be teaching them in class. So instead of saying present, maybe the world should be analyze or articulate. 

And the second thing is looking back through your methods and materials and looking for opportunities of plus one thinking. Looking for ways to adjust just one option whenever, wherever, and however you can in accordance to UDL principles. If I tend to present my materials in text, I might think is there a different way to present that in a different material? If I have PDF documents, I can use software called Read & Write where I can convert it into an MP3 file, which takes about 10 seconds. So now I can give them either or both of these. You'll find students who have dyslexia are going to listen to the MP3 and some students who are commuting in traffic will listen to the file. And some students will just find that it helps them learn better. What was designed for the margins is benefiting everybody. When it comes to assessment, it might mean if my goal is for them to demonstrate understanding and I've always had them write an essay, maybe the essay is irrelevant. So maybe I can say you can demonstrate your understanding by writing an essay or you can deliver a presentation, or you can build a model and explain it to me. Whichever one you're doing, I have a rubric. I'm looking for these four things. You choose the method that best allows you to demonstrate that. Imagine, for example, if I were to have you guys define for me what assessment is. But if I were to say take out your cell phones and record a selfie video and you have a minute and third seconds. A lot of you would be unsuccessful. It's an awkward environment for that. Or because you've never made a selfie video in your life. If I can provide you options, it actually improves the validity of my assessment while also enhancing your outcome. We're going to go a little bit deeper into that. It doesn't always mean providing different types of assessments. 

And the third thing I would suggest is to use the UDL guidelines as a tool to address known barriers in your class. Most faculty if pressed can say I know that there are problems in my class. I know the students struggle with this particular assignment. It seems like they never really get to my expectations with it. I know that my students are falling asleep whenever I go through this particular topic. I know that the students are getting distracted by their laptops. We can point to barriers and I'm encouraging you to breakthrough that old mindset the problem rests fully on their shoulders and begin thinking what is it in the learning experience that's not engaging them? What is it in the learning experience that is preventing them from presenting them well in this assessment? Can I find different ways for expression and different options for engagement that will address that issue? And drawing from those guidelines from research-based principles to tackle those specific issues. 

As far as resources, I mentioned I would give these to you. I suggest that you check out UDL on campus at cast.org. It's based out of Harvard. They're the ones who first started presenting these ideas of UDL back in the '80s and '90s and it's really taken off in the last 10 years. This website the relatively new, as UDL has just begun the last four or five years really catching on in higher education, and that's what this website is for. Applying UDL on campus specifically. The course that I've developed, this is a massive open online course. But there is a version that is built into the Clemson ecosystem so she can share that with you, as well. UDL theory and practice, which is UDLtheorypractice.CAST.org is a digital textbook that goes through the theory of UDL. And in addition to being a great source to learn more about UDL in general, it does a great job of modeling of how to present something as innocuous as a textbook to present multiple means of action and expression and engagement. And the tools that they use to make that you can actually use to make your own OER material. So it's a cool thing to check out. So how do you practice UDL? You think in terms of a design framework, backwards planning, from clear objectives, back to flexible means with assessment, methods and materials, drawing from the UDL guidelines to address known barriers along the way so that your diverse students can all accomplish your rigorous outcomes. For those of you who need to leave at 4, I want to open it up for one last opportunity for questions, and those who want to stay longer, we're going to dig a little more into an interactive element where you get to practice some of these things. Any questions so far? Sir? 

>> For situations where you already have multiple ways of communicating information. Let's say you have an e -- and you have a lecture and recorded videos. And students who lack that motivation aren't taking advantage of those materials that are already available, what advice do you have? 

>> ERIC MOORE: Good question. For those who couldn't hear him, he was saying you might already have multiple means of representation, but the students might not take advantage of it. They could listen to it or read it and they do neither. So that barrier in that case is not a representation barrier. At that point it's an engagement barrier. I would be starting in that column looking for what are the guidelines and research-based practices to improve engagement among students in the top level. In a little more detail, I would look at this idea of coaching. Coaching is actually a really important part of UDL. When I first started practices UDL and first started thinking about how to give my students options for expressing themselves and it was teaching pre-service teachers. And they had already delivered the specific assignment about meeting the needs of students with specific disabilities with a PowerPoint presentation. It was just how we did it always. And they were used to it. And this time I told them you can do different things. You can do the PowerPoint presentation, you can do a newscast, like a pod cast in a more creative fashion. I gave them some really neat options and 90% of my students delivered PowerPoint presentations. It took me a little bit to realize here that they were doing that because that's what they knew. They were expert students, not expert learners, and there's a big difference between the two. I started introducing this idea of coaching where all I did was when I presented the option to the students and I said you can choose among these, and I want a paragraph in which you tell me why this option is the best option for you in this case. And all they had to do was articulate I'm choosing this because I feel like I'm best expressing myself creatively in this format or I make really awesome PowerPoints. And in some cases it was I'm a terrible public speaker but I'm going to be teacher so I'm going to push myself by doing the PowerPoint presentation. And that's fine. I want them to express their logic behind that and coach them through in making choices. We're going to be looking at those principles, those best practices and figuring out how to use those to get students motivated. And the other thing is we're going to then coach them in recognizing I've given you an MP3 file and closed captioning. You might not know to use closed captioning. Let me tell you really quickly about what the research has shown about this and why you might want to try it. Introducing those little bits of coaching is a critical part in getting them to that level of being expert learners. Does that answer your question, sort of? Sir? 

>> So in the example that you just shared where people can do a PowerPoint or pod cast or whatever they want to do, what does evaluation and assessment of those types of things look like so it does feel equitable in this standardized test kind of world? 

>> ERIC MOORE: Great question. And we're going to go more into the assessment portion of it in the last part. But in general, I would only provide options for different types of expressing themselves if what I'm looking for is lower order. There's a lot of way to show understanding. When it comes to application of a specific skill, like if I'm trying to teach you to write an essay or a research essay, then you have to write a research essay. Right? That's higher up and I'm not going to give you different ways in terms of the final product than the flexibility might come earlier in the process. But if we're trying to measure understanding so I say you can do a PowerPoint presentation, a pod cast, or whatever, then we have to have a clear outcome. I suggest using rubrics. What does understanding mean in this context? What kind of things am I looking for? Make that rubric and then give them an example of the different ways that it can be done and mark it together with a rubric so they see this is what this aspect of understanding looks like in a pod cast or in a presentation and so forth. So then it's clear to you, it's clear to them. They know what you're looking for, whatever option they happen to choose. 

>> I have a question. What presentation platform are you using? 

>> ERIC MOORE: Keynote. Yeah. Okay. So if you need to go, we'll miss you. Otherwise I'm going to move forward a little bit into the more interactive aspect of this. So we talked about backwards planning and starting with the goal. In the case of designing learning experiences, the goal is synonymous to course objectives or unit objectives or lesson objectives in different levels of the design. So if we think of course objectives, I think of quality indicators. They should be clear, appropriately rigorous, observable, measurable, meaningful, disentangled from methods of expression. Things we already talked about. Let's imagine you're a faculty teaching a 200-level introduction to management course. So for management students, this is the first management course they're taking. And you have a course objective in your syllabus right now that says understand the basic principles of effective management. And looking at the criterion here, would you say that this is a good objective? Raise your hand if you're pro this objective? Okay. So it doesn't look like anybody thinks this is a great objective. What's wrong with it? 

>> It's not clear to them. They don't know what effective management is. 

>> ERIC MOORE: It's not clear to the student and maybe it's not observable or measurable. How do I observe understanding? That's an implicit quality, right? Yeah. And I'm not really sure. There's a lot of different types of understanding. What exactly are you looking for? So there's some significant problems here. So how could we improve this? What would you change about it generally speaking? To make sure I understood you right, being explicit about -- 

>> (Away from Microphone) 

>> ERIC MOORE: Okay. So for example if I were to say something like explain basic principles of effective management and the relevance, is that understanding for you to explain it? Okay. Kind of a visible mechanism of explaining understanding. If you can explain it, you can understand it. But is it clear to you what I'm asking you to do? This is an objective, not today's plan. So you'll figure out what these basic principles are later. But you know what you're going do with them once you have them. And I'm not telling you to write about them. I'm not telling you to present about them. There's a lot of ways that you can explain something and leaving that door open for me for later down the road. How about this one? 200-level intro to management course. You will be able to by the end of this course create solutions to contemporary problems in management theory. Those in favor? Opposed? Those in favor of it, what do you like about it? It seems pretty valuable and meaningful to me. It would be a great value if you could do this. That's a very rigorous kind of thing. Yeah. So you get to be very creative. Those of you who are against it, what's your problem with it? 

>> It's their first time learning about management and you want them to create a solution. 

>> ERIC MOORE: Okay, maybe this is more appropriate for a master's doctorate-level course not a 200-introduction. Appropriately rigorous doesn't mean we're it in the stars all the time. But maybe it's not appropriately rigorous. But I do want you to deal with appropriate problems. We can salvage it. Imagine that we said for example evaluate different case studies of management. This is very clear what they're going to do. It's still valuable and meaningful. Now they're going to have to draw from management theory to do so. So we're working towards something pretty rigorous, but not just that rigorous. But it's doable. You will write a report regarding the implication of laws and policies related to management. You're onto me now so you know what's wrong with this one. What's the problem? 

>> It limits the expression. 

>> ERIC MOORE: Okay, yeah. It definitely is not disentangled from an irrelevant means of expression. What do I really want in this, do you think? Let's replace it with something. What is it I'm going for? Is it understanding application analysis? There is not a right or wrong answer here. What are you going for? You need to be clear about this. Because if I have it like this, it could be any of those. You're not clear. You don't know how to prepare your students for it, because evaluation looks very different from understanding. And so the methods you choose, the materials that you choose will be different depending on which one of those it is. The assessment you choose will be different, should be, depending on which one of those it is. All of those are appropriate, but you got to choose early on. And that's a flaw of a lot of the time we see this kind of thing. So I'm just going to say analyze laws and policies regarding the implications for management practice. Are any of you familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy? Okay. A lot of you are. What we've been kind of dancing around is we use Bloom's Taxonomy which looks at different ways of learning. Remembering. If you recall or identify on a multiple choice, for example, that's remember. But we talked about analysis and create is much higher levels of that. And we talk about being appropriately rigorous. This is a helpful tool for me to use. So for example, the three modified objectives we've created were explain basic principles of something or other, which is understand level. Then we had analyze policies, which is analyze. And then we had evaluate case studies. It's not going to always be analyze or evaluate. There's different verbs you can use. Compare and contrast is analysis. You have to look at the smaller pieces and compare them. This helps me think about the order that I'm going to have to teach things in my course. They're going to have to understand basic principles before they can analyze policies using those principles. If they can't analyze principles, how are they going to evaluate case studies? This gives me a nice constructive way in which I go about teaching the course. Moving from bottom to top. Would there ever be a situation in which it would be appropriate to have objectives that look like this? One analyze, two evaluation, three create. Would this look appropriate in think situation? 

>> Higher level course. 

>> ERIC MOORE: Like 400-level on. Master's, Ph.D. Yeah, this definitely doesn't look like a 200-level course to me. I don't even know what those objectives are. But what Bloom's Taxonomy is letting me do is see big picture where we are. It's probably not appropriate for a 200-level course. When if ever would this be appropriate? Really hovering down on remember and understand. Sorry? Say it one more time? An entry-level course. Okay. So if you're teaching a 100-level literature course, getting the students to remember information and understand information might be appropriate. Okay. So I don't disagree with you. Entry-level courses is we have to build a foundational understanding prior to moving onto higher stuff. But do all of our course objectives have to stay down there for the entire course? And would you find a course like that to be interesting? If all you have to do is remember things and get some basic understanding, you never get to apply, you never do anything analytical. You never get to evaluate things. Those things I think are more engaging or interesting to us. Personally, and I still don't disagree with you. I think those courses need a lot of these. But maybe one or two higher up to give students an opportunity to reach a little bit more. The only time I can see this being appropriate by itself is like "Life at Clemson 101" where you just need to understand where to go to get supplies and whatever. That's pretty much it. But how many of our courses realistically look exactly like this? In fact, when we talk about matching assessments to objectives, the assessment type is most appropriate for this is multiple choice testing. In fact, you cannot use multiple choice testing to measure analysis, evaluation, creation. It's not possible. Multiple choice is for this. So if we have courses in which the only real type of assessment we offer is multiple choice, then probably whether we say it or not, this is what we're going for. And per your own assessment of this, evaluation of this, this is not optimal. We need to find ways to get higher with our students in college in order to motivate them and engage them and supply them with meaningful information. So if you look, we talked about in the first principle taking a look at your own syllabi, this is what I'm suggesting you do. Are your objectives clear and appropriately rigorous and observable and measurable and disentangled from irrelevant means of expression? And then go ahead and use Bloom's Taxonomy and map your objectives to Bloom's. Am I reaching high enough and spending enough time up there without developing higher level order skills first. It gives you a great tool to see how things are happening there. If you spend time getting very clear about your goals, revisiting your goals, fixing them, cleaning them up, then everything else in your course has direction. Once you know where your students are going, then you can begin crafting ways for them to get there. Clear goals, flexible means. Okay, and backwards planning. Next step is to look at assessment. Three big questions that I suggest that you ask when you're taking a look at assessment. First, I suggest you ask do the assessments match with the objectives. And then how can I increase authenticity and where I can increase flexibility to maximize validity. Does your assessment match your objectives. This is the most important question to ask yourself. For example, if I were to after fixing it, I say that my objective is to evaluate case studies. Yeah, okay. Oh, no. It went away. If I said after fixing it that I want my students to be able to evaluate case studies using different theories of management and my assessment, a vestage from which I fixed them up. Which you already saw because I had to cancel a call. We can look at this in a couple of different ways. Evaluate is evaluate. And explain is understand. I'm not actually assessing what I said I wanted to assess with this. And then I want to look at case studies. And there is no case studies over here. So there's a mismatch both in the level of cognition that I wanted my students to express and what I know that they can express when they complete this assignment. And what I'm asking them to do is different from what I told them I wanted them to do. We want to make sure there is a match in these two capacities between the objectives and the assessments. I might fix this saying the students will create a report either written or oral where they will compare and contrast two theories of management and evaluate the strengths and limitations to the specific cases. And the compare and contrast and evaluate match with evaluate. And I wanted case studies talking about specific cases. So this is a match. What this simply does is it gives me a way to convert what was an objective into a demonstration that the students have accomplished this objective. This means that when my students are successful with this, I know that they met my objective and if they're not successful with this, I know that there is more opportunity for learning to occur here. The other one I wouldn't know. They may or may not be able to evaluate. All I know is that they can understand it. All right. So then I want you to check out to your own assessment. So once you've developed these really clear, powerful objectives that are the way you want them, your assessments are almost definitely going to mismatch. Then go and look at them. Make sure they match in the same level of cognition, in terms of content, and whenever possible 9 offer flexibility in the process. We'll talk about that in a moment at the bottom there. So how can I increase authenticity? We were talking earlier today about how the most common forms of assessment in higher ed, and back me up here, are multiple choice tests, essays, and PowerPoint presentations, okay? And now who can name a career where your job is multiple choice test, presentation, and essays? The question that I often ask is are we preparing students for career or to be college students? Do they spend four years learning to be college students only to leave college for the rest of their lives? When we create assessments that are more relevant, we're thinking about what do they need to know and be able to do in the field and can I give them opportunities to practice that and demonstrate those skills now. This increases their engagement because they see the value, the relevance, the authenticity of the assessment, which means they're more likely to learn harder. They'll get to see when I complete this assignment well, not only do I get a grade in this class, but I get to put this in my portfolio to show future potential employers look I know what I'm doing with relevance to the field. Nobody does that with a multiple choice test, right? Whenever we can increase this authenticity, what the research shows in neuroscience is if students see relevance and value in the assessment, they will work harder to accomplish more. I'm not saying you can never use multiple-choice tests. There is a time and a place for that. But if you're teaching higher level courses, then a multiple choice test is not a fit. Look for opportunities to make it authentic as much as you can. Where can flexibility maximize validity. A lot of people get tripped up on this. Like we were saying earlier. Sometimes they have an assessment where they have to do it this way. I can't give them flexibility in the method of assessment and that's okay. There is sort of a continuum here, a continuum of way to offer flexibility. For example, if I'm a composition teaching and my students need to know how to write a literature analysis essay. Then I'm going to have them write an essay, but I might provide them options for how they compose the essay. Introduce them to speech to text software. If they're a student who is like if I could just explain myself verbally, it would be so much clearer. Then do, and listen to yourself and write your ideas out. That's fine. I want an essay in the end, but how you get there doesn't matter to me. Coach them. How do you use your strengths to be more effective. And not only will they be more successful in my essay, now when they have to write a report in two or three or four years, I can go into my office, record my ideas, and write it down. They're becoming professional expert learners and something that transfers well down the road. I might also look for ways to prepare for final assessment. Like maybe I know students are going to struggle with organizing their ideas. When writing a paragraph, it's very easy for them to lose where they're going. Maybe I teach them how to use graphic organizers, linear organizers. Shuffle your ideas around and then write. Maybe I give them options for how to prepare for that and how to understand what to expect, so like a rubric or like exemplars. Or maybe we use a rubric to grade exemplars so you're very clear about what we're going for before you even start. That will head off so many problems that students often face because they didn't know what we wanted when they started working. Or the most extreme on the other end is to offer options for outcome. This might be appropriate for example in a capstone course. What do you want to accomplish with this course and then how are you going to get there? Usually we tell them the outcomes. But there are times where we might be able to say you choose the outcome. That's powerful when you can. And finally we get to the methods and material. Yes, ma'am? 

>> In the previous slide, how are you defining validity? 

>> ERIC MOORE: Validity, the way I'm using it is the assessment measures what I intended for it to measure. For example, going back to having to do a selfie video, I want to know if you know what the word assessment means. And when I look at the selfie video and it's fumbling around and barely getting a couple words out. I'm not saying that would happen to you. Just pretend. I would think wow here we have a professional educator who can't tell me what assessment means. That's wrong. It actually measured your terrible inability to make a selfie video and your understanding of assessment. And so that invalidated the assessment. Does that make sense? It's the same with a measurement tool and research. If the measurement tool does not measure what it was meant to measure, then it's invalid. What is assessment other than a measurement tool? Next, the materials. This is where things get a lot more open ended. I don't have concrete things for you to do. I'm assuming you're coming from a wide range of courses. What should be clear now is because you've designed your course from goals through assessments and you're just now getting to this point, there is so much possibility. You don't have to stick to this textbook just because you've used in the past. You know where you're going and there's a lot of ways to help your students get there. You know where they face barriers and you can address those barriers using principles from neuroscience, cognitive science, education research, about how humans learn to allow students to be different in how they get there, but still get there. And that's the promise of UDL. The staff, their full time job is to help faculty work through what methods, materials, what strategies you can use to improve your teaching and learning. You don't have to know everything. That's okay. Universities like yours and mine have great support staff who are here for that reason. Make an appointment, bring in your syllabus. The thing that makes the biggest idea many the world is you're wanting to improve outcomes for your students and are willing to make changes. When you do that, amazing things can happen. Questions? Okay. Well if you come up with any questions later, feel free to reach me by e-mail. I'm happy to follow up with you a little bit. Probably at some point we'll direct you to your very capable staff here. Definitely I've been having great conversations with them. They're very knowledgeable about these things and here to help. So thank you for your time. I appreciate all of you coming out and spending so much time with me. So good luck. As we move forward with these things, I hope it was helpful. 

[Applause] 
>> Thank you, Eric. We actually have some refreshments for you before you head home. And it's just outside around the corner. If you would like to hang out and ask Eric some questions. Also, I would reiterate that you have lots of support. We're in different units. I'm OPI. You can do a help ticket with CCIT and they'll direct you to the appropriate help either in CCIT or Clemson Online, all sorts of different places. Does that sound good? Yeah? All right! Thank you. Please join us after the talk. Thank you again, Eric. [Applause]