 Hello, and welcome to the Outlander Conference. We are in the final hours here in our online program today, and I'm really truly delighted to introduce our next speaker rather, Dara Coakley, who's gonna speak to us about online hybrid and high-flex delivery through the lens of UDL. And Dara, if you're ready, I'm gonna hand over to you. That's great, thank you so much, Maya. Hello, everyone. Thanks very much for making the time to come along today, I really genuinely appreciate it. So as Marin mentioned, my name is Dara Coakley. Marin, very wisely asked, is that a silent GH, and it actually is awkward Irish kind of name. But look, I'm delighted to be here, and as I said, thank you so much for coming along to the session. Something that I mentioned in one of my pre-recorded sessions is, yeah, I'm from basically in Ireland, the same place that Roy Keane is from, and I'm a very proud corkman, but I'm aware that the accent can be a bit of a challenge. And when I present as well, I have a tendency to speak faster and faster, and the accent becomes like more and more cork, you know what I mean? So if at any stage I become unintelligible, I might ask one or all of you to let me know. And you might also forgive any technical glitches. Something that I put up in the discord on Tuesday was that I have an awful, awful dog wandering around somewhere here as well, so please do forgive any technical issues. And just to note, I'm from the Department of Technology Enhanced Learning in Monster Technology University, the core campus, and it's www.mtu.ie, if you'd like to know more, but I'll put up relevant kind of links and so on and so forth at the end of the session. And I also just, FYI, started a timer on my phone because I'll get into it at the end, but I really would welcome feedback and your own thoughts and perspectives and experiences for what I'm about to talk about today. So look, without wishing to reach the right ground that's been gone over too many times, I think maybe a good place to start for this session is at the origins of UDL. So in their book Reach Everyone by Bailing and Tobin, they identified that universal design for learning was actually inspired by the universal design movement in architecture and product development and in universal design for learning, guidelines for accessible online instruction, Roger Shaw's also identified that it applies, Roland Mace's universal designs in architecture to teaching and learning. And essentially what that means is that the term universal design or UD, which was coined by the architect Roland Mace and his colleagues in the Center for Universal Design, they identified universal design the design of products and environments to be usable to the greatest possible extent by people of all ages and abilities. So this notion that kind of building design and any physical infrastructure design should be accessible to all. And Hitchcock and Meyer have a good, I suppose way of tying those two together. And they mentioned that the UDL framework helps us to see that inflexible curricular materials and methods are barriers to diverse learners. The same way inflexible buildings are barriers to people who face physical challenges. So I thought that was quite a nice way of joining the two. And in researching about this, there is kind of an interesting history about the UDL movement and how it kind of grew from this range of additional elements starting with in the state's legal access to education, to physical access to buildings, to the individuals with Disability Education Act, which is mentioned there, which identified that students with disabilities are entitled to access participation and progress. But that whole history is maybe for another presentation. But in terms of the current iteration of UDL, it really has its roots as is identified by boys in there in the Center for Applied Special Technology, who in the 90s began to design or promote instructional methods designed to equalize accessibility for K-12 students with disabilities. And so CAS have developed a very useful set of guidelines in terms of universal design for learning. And those really are kind of identified there. I'm sure they're familiar to a great many people, but those are really based on three core principles, which is providing multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation and multiple means and actions of action and expression. And it was one major change, which has happened to the kind of CAS guidelines, to the UDL guidelines, is that they have come to go beyond just access to education. They now, I think also very much include pedagogical guidelines and pedagogical elements there. And if we look at the provision of one of the guidelines under the provision of multiple means for engagement, it also specifies in guideline eight that there should be options for sustaining effort and persistence included in curriculum design. And you can see there in the kind of sub points, kind of the heightening and salience of goals and objectives, sharing demands and resources, so on and so forth. So they really have gone beyond just access to education. And UDL obviously has expanded greatly, I suppose particularly noticeably recently, and Boysen identifies that what began as a strategy for the inclusive education of school children with disabilities has expanded into a movement that claims to improve learning for all students in all settings. And certainly there's, in terms of the growth of UDL, there's a number of different elements that kind of, or there's a range of kind of research that does indicate that this is happening at quite a pace. So Fornauf and Ericsson have identified that the variety of UDL research identifies as a growing interest in transforming access and pedagogy in post-secondary settings. And in Ireland, there's a paper, Universal Design for Learning, is it gaining momentum in Irish education by flood and banks. And that identifies that UDL is definitely on the rise within Irish education from primary to secondary to post-secondary to higher education. But, because as I was a but, one paper which was developed in 2021 was by Boysen. And that paper was, I won't say scathing in terms of its analysis of UDL, but it did identify a number of similarities with UDL and I guess the now discredited concept of learning styles. And that is a paper by Guy Boysen, lessons not learned to troubling similarities between learning styles and Universal Design for Learning. And he identifies that if the premise of UDL sounds familiar, it is because it also happens to be the central idea of learning styles and that UDL shares a startling number of similarities with the now discredited concept of learning styles. For anyone maybe unfamiliar, learning styles is essentially identified there by Felder as this notion that students preferentially taken a process information in a number of different ways, specifically seeing and hearing, reflecting and acting and reasoning and logically so on and so forth. And it led to this idea of what kind of learner are you? Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner or a kinesthetic learner? And there was this notion in kind of a learning styles movement that learning is best done by appealing or supporting or personalizing learner for these different kind of learning styles. So if you're a visual learner, you should be providing the learner with visual elements, video images. If they're a kinesthetic learner, you should be providing learning by trial and error, hands-on activities, problem solving. Generally learning styles has over the last number of years gone a bit out of fashion and kind of been fairly widely discredited. Boysen identifies five similarities between learning style theories and UDL, a lack of evidence for effectiveness, inadequate upper tonalization and over-emphasis on diversity and learning, over-emphasis on matching instruction to diverse ways of learning and over-generalized neuroscientific justifications. But again, because there's a second but, Boysen does mention in that paper that although the purpose of the paper is to present a critical analysis, there's specific parameters to that criticism. So he identifies that the paper does not analyze universal design as a general approach to education. And there are other kind of, there is other research and approaches such as universal instruction design and universal design for instruction, which have similarities and differences with UDL. The paper, he argues, he does not argue that UDL is an effective note that it should be abandoned rather that it would benefit from some established best practice like setting clear objectives, encouraging collaboration, providing feedback. And he identifies that the paper is not a criticism of using universal design to increase educational access for students with disabilities. And he has a line that I like, which is providing students with instruction materials that can process and respond to is educationally, ethically and legally necessary. So my own interest and my own kind of confusion, I guess, around this was somewhat peaked by something that I had actually seen come up in terms of the growth of UDL in Ireland. And I guess for me, and this is entirely subjective to my own experience, something I'd seen at times here was occasions that when people spoke about UDL, people in higher education, when they spoke about UDL and UDL principles, and the measures that should be put in place to support learners, it became a little hard to identify what exactly and ultimately was being provided for learners facing genuine challenges. In particular, learners facing geographical, physical, mental health and economic kind of challenges. So the learners essentially who need support the most. And that did make me consider if as boys and argued, UDL was looking to meet all requirements, was there a danger of people interpreting UDL and providing measures and approaches that were too general, almost like learning styles, and ultimately forgetting the original intended purpose of UDL and who the origins of UDL were aimed at, which were students who had physical, mental health, geographical, shamefully more so nowadays, economic barriers, getting between them and effective education. So I guess the analogy that I might use is that there maybe kind of couldn't see the wood from the trees. Within the Department of Tale, I suppose this was important to me and it was important to us in the Department of Tale because we would pride ourselves really on being very strong believers that online distance education and the use of technology and education can be in egalitarian force and it can break down personal social and economic barriers and that's something that we would put in our strategy and in our mission statement. So it really bothered me this notion that kind of UDL might become this kind of tick box exercise and that those learners who should be getting the most support would almost be afterthoughts to these kind of discussions. So what I wanted to do for this lesson was I wanted to examine high flex and hybrid delivery methods and to see whether these would be effective mechanisms for providing and supporting UDL, in particular for those learners who I mentioned were facing physical, mental health, geographic, economical barriers. So kind of, and I guess my interest in kind of high flex and hybrid also was developed based around, I was also developed kind of based around, I suppose post COVID, what are mechanisms and what are things we could build upon after I suppose particularly in Ireland this kind of rush to kind of go for everything to go back to normal, go back entirely to face to face. And some of this was supported by a survey that we did in the Department of Tel post COVID for both staff and students across the entire university trying to identify what was helpful, flexible, beneficial during the ERT or emergency remote teaching period. And if you'd like to know more about that survey, there's a data set by my colleagues, I wrote a solo one in Tom Farley and so on Lacey, data set on student experiences, perceptions of emergency remote teaching, ERT and then Irish university. So looking at high flex delivery, I want to refer to high flex for the purposes of this session, at least I'm referring to what BD identified as multimodal courses, which combine online and on-ground or classroom based student experiences. So high flex for me, I suppose the big differentiator between high flex and hybrid is the additional flexibility that hybrid provides, both from a location geographical point of view, but also from I suppose a chronological point of view in terms of when learners can actually attend access material and kind of classes. And that book developed by BD, hybrid high flex course design is a really fantastic resource for anyone looking to know more. So on talking about a high flex design, BD identifies four kind of key principles or four values and principles of hybrid flexible course design. And those are learner choice, equivalency, reusability and accessibility. And what I was interested in was in taking those very useful guiding principles, trying to compare those and see where those might overlap with UDL principles. So UDL principles identified there. So like without going too into depth because life is too short in terms of each and any of these and listening to me droning on there. I did find that there was quite a bit of substantial overlap between the UDL, a number of UDL principles and learner and in a high flex classroom, learner choice, which is about providing meaningful alternative participation modes and enabling students to choose between participation modes daily, weekly or topically between UDL principles and equivalency, which was about providing learning activities in all participation modes, leading to equivalent learning outcomes, reusability, which was about utilizing artifacts from learning activities in each participation mode as learning objects and accessibility, which is equipping students with technology skills and equitable access to all participation modes. So I did find there was substantial overlap between the UDL principles and the values and principles BD identified for hybrid flexible course design. And a very useful research paper from here in Ireland was developed in Dublin trialing high flex at TU Dublin, stakeholders, voices and experiences. So this is essentially a evaluation of a high flex kind of delivery kind of initiative from the point of view of all different stakeholders, students and lectures and support. And there were some very interesting findings in that which I feel are pretty relevant to the discussion at hand. So when talking about student barriers and access to education and that paper identified that 92% of students would recommend a flexible attendance mode and they identified that issues such as distance from the campus, travel costs, health, general flexibility and inclusiveness all factored into kind of that decision. And additional consideration is the effect that students identified, excuse me, which the high flex mode had on the world being, for example, it improved their grades. I used to be exhausted after work, I went to college, sometimes fell asleep in class, I wasn't alone. And another student identified it allows for a better work-life balance. And a number of students who self reported disabilities felt that the high flex mode added a lot to them in terms of equal opportunity. And in particular individuals with ADD, ADHD and as identified there, people with neuro diverse brains learn better in their own pace in their own safe environment. And that was reflected as well in terms of the stakeholders within the paper they have these vignettes from a number of learning support officers who identified a number of benefits that were reported to them by students with a view to high flex. And I like this kind of almost as a summary quote at this point I went from a student at this point I wouldn't even consider going back into the campus wild horses couldn't return me to that way of life. It's had a profound positive effect on my mental health. So that was quite a strong, quite a strong statement in support of high flex. So in terms of hybrid delivery then for the purposes of this session I'm referring to hybrid as a combination of synchronous in person and online learning experiences. So that notion I suppose where I would separate it from high flex is the requirement to attend a live session but that option being kind of in person or online. So in terms of hybrid design I didn't have a book like Beattie to kind of draw from in terms of in terms of kind of guiding principles but a paper that I did find which I found very useful was this paper Expanding learning opportunities for graduate students with high flex. And when they say high flex for the purpose of my presentation it's much more aligned to actual hybrid. So they say high flex, I say hybrid. But the point is that they identified within this paper four positive teams and one team of concern. So could hybrid classes help accommodate student needs and life circumstances? Could they help meet students, different learning styles and strategies? Could they help increase access to course content and instruction? And could it help encourage student choice and control through choosing the mode of participation? And I was fortunate enough that we had a initiative in MTU in 2022 called Student Inc. which is about kind of encouraging student entrepreneurs to assess the feasibility of their business ideas essentially giving them funding and training to take them from budding entrepreneurs to actual entrepreneurs. And this in 2022, this initiative was delivered in a hybrid format supported by us in the Department of Tel. So I was luckily able to evaluate the students who participated in that who engaged in that hybrid mode with a view to UDL and a number of additional elements. So returning to those kind of five teams as identified in this paper, students were generally very positive in terms of each of the teams which were presented. So the majority identified that they did help accommodate student needs and life circumstances. They did help meet students learning styles. They did help increase student access and maybe to a lesser degree they did help to encourage student choice and control. But through that Student Inc. initiative and through the hybrid experience of the students I was also able to try and evaluate the student experiences according to the actual UDL principles. Now I did, it is a limitation of this study. I did certainly do a little paraphrasing in terms of how I expressed the UDL principles just to try and make them understandable to the student. But I did try and kind of break down the UDL principles and as it gets students to evaluate each principle with a view to their experience of the hybrid classroom. So again, without kind of because life is too short and your time is too precious, I'm not gonna go into detail about every single principle and every single finding. What I would say as something of a summary is that certainly within the UDL principles students were generally very, very positive and reported extremely positively on principles related to access, as one might expect. Less so in terms of principles around building or about internalizing. But I guess those principles, for example, about sustaining effort and persistence, language and simple self-regulation, comprehension and executive function, I would argue those are more maybe pedagogical and the hybrid classroom, no matter how good it is is maybe not going to tie directly into the curriculum design, the teaching approaches or the kind of pedagogical decisions that drive the student experience in terms of content assessment, so on and so forth. But I did manage to sneak this question in at the end of the evaluation and it was the one which personally I was kind of most interested in. And it was that, do you think the hybrid classroom could help support students facing geographical, physical, mental health, economic barriers? And all of the respondents were entirely unanimous in that it could. Again, I won't go into too much detail here, but I asked them from a qualitative point of view about that and some of the feedback was that students from the very, some of the, just for a bit of context, students were dispersed all over the country when they participated in this. So a number of students identified they just couldn't have participated if the lectures went hybrid or online, that the commuting distance was too much, that they had financial reasons, family commitments, that there's a lack of, as I'm sure there is in many places, shamefully, a lack of access to accommodation, some students had medical conditions, some students had family obligations, so on and so forth. So in terms of the conclusions to this, I suppose generally the entire process of after all that research and reading and basically arguing with myself and like this, researching this thing has been kind of unusual for me because it's basically been a couple of weeks of me just arguing with myself back and forth. I've a very unsatisfying set of conclusions is what I'm getting to, mainly because they're very subjective and they're really just coming from a series of arguments I've been having with myself. So genuinely I would very much, I suppose the conclusions that I'm offering here, they're a bit of a side note. What I'd really be interested in is your own experiences, your own perspectives and your own thoughts on this. And I would like this to be a conversation rather than any kind of conclusion because the conclusions that I'm offering are not particularly satisfying to me or to anybody. So maybe just a disclaimer as a bit of a start. I am conscious that with all the moaning and the liberal referencing of boys and so on and so forth that I might come across as disparaging of UDL, that's really not my intention. I would say that all UDL measures and considerations, even the kind of ambiguous ones that I spoke about earlier, the kind of tick box ones, tick box ones, I would argue they're all worthy. I would argue none of this is unimportant and none of it should not be pursued no matter how minor a measure towards the UDL principle is. I would argue that it absolutely has its place and it absolutely should be put in place. I guess for me what it kind of boils down to is that the issues that I see and my own subjective experience of what I mentioned earlier about kind of reducing it to reducing UDL implementation to this kind of tick box activity and leaving out the students who need the support the most. I don't see that as a fault of the framework. I see that as a fault of people's interpretation or the application of it. And I don't think it's a deliberate thing but I would say that certainly some situations I've seen people are relatively selective and self-serving in their application of the UDL principles. And I feel when we are selective and self-serving with our application of the principles that is when it does resonate with me in terms of what boys and spoke about in terms of UDL and learning styles and the overlap there. And I suppose the entire thing for me is a desire for UDL to not become this tick box activity. That it becomes that there's a lot done in terms of measures which is essentially for personalization of the learning to students. And then there's very, very little being done for students who literally can't attend or can't access education because of, as I mentioned, geographical, physical, economic barriers. One thing which did cross my mind was that one possible measure in terms of avoiding that situation would be to take a very extreme interpretation of the UDL principles. So to be absolutely firm that each of the principles should be adhered to the maximum degree in terms of the implementations that are put in place. So when we say multiple means of engagement that is not simply putting subtitles on a video which someone might put up, it's asking, okay, well, what means of engagement, what means of access, are we putting in place for students who can't come to the live in-person sessions? The research and the kind of feedback that I would have gotten is that certainly does indicate that hybrid and high-flex do come with elements of UDL baked into them. Particularly in terms of the comparison that I mentioned there, in terms of access for students facing challenges and also for how hybrid and high-flex can align and kind of meet many of the important elements of the UDL principles. That's not to suggest that UDL actions must be hybrid or high-flex or they don't count, but certainly hybrid and high-flex should be given serious consideration in terms of meeting UDL requirements and that is not something that I've seen much of in my own experience. And just as a semi-final point, I'm aware that hybrid and high-flex require time, investment, a massive change of systems, but if you are rigorous and adhering to actual application of the UDL principles, so does everything else and there's a quota like there. Some scholars have suggested that UDL must actively dismantle ability-central practices that permeate formal education. So when you consider that putting in place hybrid and high-flex technical measures and technologies is actually probably the easier kind of part of the job. This is a final thing. Larry Phipps, who is an individual and an ed tech I greatly admire, had a wonderful way of summarizing this. Speaking about kind of working with JISC around kind of supporting learners faced with disabilities, he identified that when you set a minimum standard, that is what people achieve and that is something I would not like to see happen with UDL, that it does become, as I mentioned earlier, this kind of tick box activity that like Eric got them to throw subtitles on a video, I'm sure we're adhering to the UDL principles that at the core of the UDL principles and the interpretation of them, students who need the most support who are facing the most challenges, they should be front and center and I do feel that hybrid and high-flex are very effective mechanisms for meeting those student requirements. So I spoke for way longer than I attended to and thank you so much for your time and your attention. If anyone wants a copy of the references or slides, I'm happy to provide those. Otherwise, if you'd like to know more, our website is tel.cat.ie. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Wow, thank you, Dara. That was a fantastic presentation and there have been multiple requests for the slides. You have also been signed up to a prolonged workshop for ALT because there is a lot of demand to hear more from you. So there's been lots of comments in the chat for people who'd like to hear more from you. Just to give you an opportunity to pick up maybe one or two of the comments here. So I know Vicky Dale has posted a couple of comments around earlier part of the presentation and also Peter Hardley made quite a lot of comments regarding just picking up one of Peter's questions around interested in ways that ideas and movements are changed or developed and the often unrecognised consequences. So maybe, Dara, just as a final reflection, what are your thoughts on the future for UDL? Thanks very much for that, Peter. It's a very good question and it's a very unsolvable answer. I really don't know. I do think that UDL, certainly within an Irish higher education context, UDL is definitely being pushed very hard, which is great in one way, but it does present that potential situation that I spoke about where, oh, we're great at UDL because if a lecturer puts up a video, which they might do once or twice over the semester, the subtitle is there. I would like to see genuine engagement and I think I would like to see in any discussion around UDL principles and measures being put in place, I would like to see a question, the question to be repeatedly asked, what about students who are facing physical challenges attending live sessions? What about students facing economic challenges, which, shamefully, is more and more so the case in Ireland? What about students who have mental health issues? I would like to see those students put front and centre and kind of anything that kind of comes, I suppose, after that for the vast majority of students who are fortunate enough to be able to attend live, to be able to kind of come into a bricks and mortar institution and sit down in the classroom, anything that serves their needs is absolutely fantastic. But I feel like, almost like there should be a priority in the application of UDL guidelines and measures for the students who need to support the most. Hopefully that made some kind of sense. Like I said, I've been arguing with myself, my relationship with myself has been terrible while I've been researching this. So you're probably privy to another argument and be unfolding in front of you. Well, I think there was a lot of appetite to delve deeper into this and to expand on that. Dara, it would be fantastic if you were happy to share the link to the slides, either on Discord or on here. There's been so many comments and rich discussions and reflections, but unfortunately, we've run out of time. So from all of us here, I can see lots of people putting their hands together for you here in the chat, but also from us here at the El Daniel Conference. Thank you for joining us and have a really good very last session of the conference, everybody. Thank you, Dara.