 So as I said, myself and my colleagues Suzanne and Claire are going to share a few tips with you around embedding Universal Design for Learning in your Moodle practice. So many of us might be familiar with the concept of Universal Design for Learning or some of us might be new to it but essentially it's sort of a broad framework that aims to reduce barriers to learning for learners. And it's something we were just quipping about this before you all came in. It's certainly a topic or philosophy that has really gained a lot of momentum in the last few years and awareness has really grown around UDL and lots of communities have sprung up to help support people to integrate UDL into their practice. And I like to think UDL is a journey and you know you can't just become expert in UDL overnight and I'm still learning lots about UDL and how to integrate UDL into my practice. And the common thing I've heard is this mantra of kind of one small thing, you know, try and do one small thing in your practice that helps reduce barriers for learning. That's the intention of this presentation which is that you might pick up one or two small things that you can implement in your own practice. There are some really useful guidelines that have been developed, principles and guidelines that have been developed by CAST, a US based organization. And these offer some really, really practical tips and advice for implementing UDL and we're going to refer to some of these throughout our presentation. So unfortunately our colleague Suzanne wasn't able to make it here today but she has pre-recorded three very quick clips, three very quick tips around embedding UDL so we're going to play that back now and hopefully that should work for you. Hi there, my name is Suzanne Stone, I'm an academic developer with the Teaching Enhancement Unit at DCU and I'm going to share three very simple tips for using UDL with reference to universal design for learning principles. So tip number one is to use marking guides and or rubrics to offer clarity and transparency to students and to clarify expectations around assessments for students. So I'm sure that many or all of you are familiar with marking guides and rubrics on Moodle. But just to tie it together to universal design for learning principles, what you are doing when you're using marking guides or rubrics in respect of UDL is you are removing a potential barrier to the assessment for students and those barriers might be something that relates to a lack of clarity on the expectations. So that's really the usefulness in terms of UDL in relation to marking guides and rubrics. So tip number two then is to, it's a really simple one, it's just to highlight tools, assistive technology tools that are available to students on your Moodle pages. And in respect of UDL what you're doing there is you're optimizing access to those tools. In some cases in some institutions, you students may have to register with the disability and learning support service to avail of certain technologies but there are assistive technologies that may be open to all students. For example at DCU we have census access, we have Google apps and you could highlight the kind of capabilities within those tools to students simply by adding links and information on your Moodle pages. So very, very simple tip that relates back to the UDL principles again. Okay, and then finally tip number three relates to group work. As we all know group work can be very challenging and there are many kind of tools and functionalities within Moodle that can support group work in terms of your own efficiencies, and in terms of supporting and scaffolding students. But this suggestion is based on UDL principle, multiple means of action and expression, and one of the kind of breakdown guidelines or checkpoints within the UDL framework relates to scaffolding learning relating to assessment and that might be when we speak about building fluency, you're really building fluency around engaging with group work in this context. And a very simple suggestion is to use a discussion forum to allow students to voice their concerns around group work because students often have a lot of concerns around group work particularly in terms of fairness of the grading process. And once students have voiced their concerns or any concerns that they have around group work, you could draw on these discussions to create or help students to create a group work contract, which would inform the group work assessment process. And hopefully again, when we refer back to UDL, you're talking here about removing a barrier to learning, which may be the concerns around engaging with group work. That's it for me. I hope you enjoy the rest of the session and thanks for your attention. And again, thanks very much to Suzanne for pre recording that clip for us as she was unable to make it here today. But now what I want to do is hand over to Claire who's going to share a few tips with us. And it's good to be here. So look what I'd like to do over the next few minutes is just share a few UDL tips that I've implemented in a module that I co-teach with the Bob Rob here. And the module is a blended one. So moodle is used very extensively. The students use it to access resources and engage in a whole wide variety of activities ranging from quizzes to HP interactive content. Including the moodle workshop for peer assessment activities. And there's also things like discussion forums and lots more. So because of this because of this very broad range of technologies, it is important for us to think about and consider how we might incorporate the principles of UDL into into this. So when it comes to learning with moodle, whether it is in fully online mode or possibly even in blended mode, it is regardless of circumstance. As I think we all recognize it's important to foster a sense of community between the teachers and learners and indeed between the learners themselves. So this really helps students participating on a course feel like they belong and that they have an association with both the course and the institution. And this sense of belonging, it's been proven can help towards student success. And we may also have come across or heard of there is a well known model called the community of inquiry model and it's a fairly seminal model used in learning design, which also drives home this very same point of establishing teacher presence within a course and it really emphasizes the value and the importance of making the teacher visible and present in lots of different ways throughout an online learning environment. And so a very simple way that we've tried to if you like manifest this principle is to incorporate a static block in a poor in a prominent location on the course page. So on our course page, this contact block appears as you see on the slide that appears in the upper right hand corner. Students log in the first time and indeed in multiple times, they're going to see my name, my photo and email address throughout the immediately know who the teacher is and how to contact them. This is just a very simple HTML block with an image and text is very straightforward and you can use it to share office hours or include a link to a calendar highlighting when you're free and and when you may not be. So adopting a simple as uploading a photo to your mood profile can help with this idea of establishing teacher presence and many many teachers in our experience don't seem to do this they don't seem to upload their profile photos but it really can make a big difference we'd argue, because whenever you post an announcement or send a message or leave a comment anywhere that photo is going to appear. You can see the consistency and reminder of who you are is going to help strengthen your teaching presence and community. So, Rob, if you don't mind next I thank you very much. And so another tip that we would recommend is this idea of helping to guide your learners to engage with the content. So whether you're using moodle for online modules or blended ones or if you're just using it now and then to share resources for students, you cannot we would argue cannot underestimate the importance of keeping all your courses and sections structured and neat and tidy. So we've all heard the metaphor of moodle being rather like say filing cabinet, where you know students go to this sort of central repository to access files. And you know and engage with the resources in that way and obviously that's not something we would particularly recommend or aspire to as we want to ensure lots of enter interactivity and a good use of moodle on on our courses. But even if you were if you think if you are using Luke primarily as like a filing cabinet or repository, you wouldn't have a filing cabinet where, you know, all the files are thrown together in no particular order no alphabetical order or there's no tabs on the folders and there's no way of per anyone to figure out where to find the stuff that they need to so we would say there's some simple tips that you can implement that can help guide your learners towards what they need and understand what's involved in them without them spending enormous amounts of energy trying to figure out what's going on in your head. So one thing we would say is labels or as Rob advised me text and media areas as they're known in noodle 4.1. We would say that those are very handy for having to organize resources and activities. You know within within a course or indeed a section. So, in this module in our module, I use a label to organize resources and to guide the students towards activities that we want them to engage in before during and after the course itself and so using something like a little bit of HTML code and labels can help to really draw attention to particular aspects of your activities and may help, you know, if you include an icon of some kind to help the student to understand and to visualize the types of activities that are contained underneath that label if you like. So that's one tip we'd have. I would also say as well, and perhaps this is somewhat underutilized that all moodle activities and resources do come with a descriptive field, right, which is almost never used or very seldom used. And we think it's really important to use a description field, obvious as that may sound and it's an ideal place to include a line or two on what the resource activity is all about and how students might engage with it give them some little bit of extra guidance around the activity. So we'd always recommend that you tick the box you've seen this I'm sure before you tick the box to display the description on the course page. And that means that that would really help your students get a better understanding of what's going on in all the activity that's going on on your page. And really, even apart from all that use very simple, clear and direct titles on your courses and resources and activity, short as you can do it. But simple as it may sound that can be that can be a very worthwhile to make sure that everything is clearly labeled. Okay, Rob, if I could ask you that the next slide. So another tip which we'd highly recommend is to share your slides before the class. Okay, so for better or worse, so many academics are using slide decks it's become in a sense every every teacher's best friend. And in almost every classroom and learning experience, you're going to find people using different kinds of presentation software at some point. And this is meant that students really have come to expect slide presentations or slide decks as key learning resources that they can, you know that summarize the key points at hand, and which they can revisit potentially afterwards to remind them about key points and to help them revise. And in fact there are some institutions which we'd be aware of which require students to give a copy of their slides if they've used them. It's not happening here, here, but it is something to be aware of. So slides and readings are probably two of the most common or popular types of resources which teachers upload to Moodle. But very often we found that lecturers will tend to upload their slides after the class and we're going to encourage you to think about making the slides available before the session itself. There's two main reasons for this. First of all, those who have students with, you know, who may have particular needs or preferences can access the slides beforehand and then customize how they are presented so they can work with them more effectively. So that could be something like changing the font size or changing the color or possibly even using a text to speech tool. And it'll make that process that will make it easier for those students to follow the slides and for those to engage in the learning experience if the slides are more tailored and suited to them. The other thing that would say is giving advanced access also has another benefit, which means that students can follow along on their own devices in the event of an issue of some kind with the projector. And this happened very recently where we were not able to share slides in a course and we had to revert to a plan B. We were fortunate that we had the slides available on Moodle beforehand because people instead of looking at the screen behind us, they were able to, students were able to follow along in class and use the slides as a useful aid within the class itself. And indeed several students within their reflections and in the feedback afterwards came back afterwards to say that they found that particularly useful and they enjoyed following along with the slides in that way rather than looking on a large screen behind us. So the other thing just one last thing actually to mention on the slides is do try to remember to do descriptive text on any images that you're using so that you know students those students can have a better understanding of what's contained within the image image and you know these days, PowerPoint and Google slide make it very easy indeed to enter out text. So just one more slide please. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. The last thing that we just wanted to mention last tip for me really is to give a little bit of a shout out to using audio feedback in your assignments and as you all know here probably one of the UDL principles that's recommended is to provide multiple means of engagement. And one of the most common ways people try to enact this principle is by offering a variety of text or video or text based or audio based content I should say. But sometimes people will do that through the content itself but when it comes to the actual graded activities or the assignments on models. So those teachers are depending on text based methods. So we'd like you to think about maybe the possibilities of using audio and or video based feedback. And this can be very easily created using build models built in recording features, which are available and any text rich area and that will very quickly allow you to create short snippets of feedback up to two minutes in length and this is something that's a personal interest in me and it's something that I try to practice when grading my students assignments and really I just mentioned a few there's lots of benefits to audio feedback, but just a very few that have been proven is that audio feedback helps to strengthen that connection that sense of connection between the students and the student between the student and the lecture so it's very very beneficial in fostering a sense of belonging again to go back to that point from earlier. Also helps in many cases of course depending on how it used certainly can help to foster a greater understanding of the feedback and who wouldn't want that can help to promote cognitive understanding of that. It can be much more nuanced as you can imagine and you can imagine again you can be less blunt shall we say in the audio best in the audio based response to a particular assignment. And as a result, the feedback can be more conversational and supportive. And the quick thing to mention is that audio feedback, we actually speak a lot quicker than we can type so you can actually get, you know, you know one minute of spoken word can equate to about six minutes of written so it is another way of getting a lot said in a relatively quick pace of time or a quick period of time. I would say I'm just looking at time here I'm conscious of not going over the time here. I would just say, you know, lastly on audio feedback just to say, using a combination of different kinds of formats in your feedback, whether that be text based and audio can really help to foster a more inclusive diversity sensitive university and it can help your students to engage more effectively with the with the feedback that you provide. So enough from me for now I think over to you Rob for some additional UDF. I'll just take another one minute just to share as our last few tips for you. And we all know students juggle many, many different tasks and goals in any one module never mind across the modules that they are taking in any one semester lots of different deadlines of different things to juggle. Providing them with some extra guidance or nudging really help them to stay on track and really help them to manage the workload that they have to do. We know almost all activities on moodle that carry a grade or a deadline appear in the calendar so I think it's really useful. It's really good to make use the calendar block on your course page and direct students to the moodle calendar to help them stay on track with goals and tasks and so on. Also good to use the calendar to kind of remind students about maybe gold or deadlines that they need to be meeting. Other ways of issuing reminders are things like announcements and discussion forums or sending out messages directly to students or we have a bespoke reminders block on our version of moodle that it's automatically sends out reminders to any students who haven't submitted a piece of work. It kind of one or two days before the deadline and then one or two days after the deadline if they still haven't managed to do it. So that's something to think about. Another thing to think about from a system level and I think one of the greatest strengths about moodle is its openness and its versatility and its potential for for growth. And one kind of system feature that I prompt any administrators to take a look at is creating custom roles the roles are a great way to cater for different types of people obviously we have a default student role default teacher role. But you could create a you know custom parent role or a mentor role for any student maybe needs additional supports or additional needs. Or one thing we've done with our disability support service here in DC was created a note taker role for any of our students that have a note taker assigned to them. That person is able to access moodle. They don't appear in the grade book they don't appear. You know as a real student but they have all the student level access to access notes and material and so on is very useful for our students or registered with disability support. And lastly another very underutilized area of moodle I find is the profile and on a student's profile that can really express so much more about themselves and put themselves out there and create that identity which connects to that sense of belonging and sense of identity is very well populated profile fields can help learners get to know one another and identify common areas of interest as well and you know, two things that we recommend our students to do is to use the audio recorder in the profile description and to share a little bit about themselves, or even share how to pronounce their particular name if they have a name that might not be too common to whatever the dominant languages in particular context. It's also great ability to create custom profile fields and one custom profile we've created in DC is that for pronouns so students are able to declare if they so wish, and the pronouns they use and that's a really great way for getting across identity and helping students to put themselves out there in the learning environment. So Chris has talked to a few different tips, 10 tips in total. Even if you pick one of these tips to implement in your practice, and that's a really good way of slowly building and integrating the UDL into your daily practice. So I will pause the recording at this point and take it from there. Thanks Rob. So hi everyone. Thanks for having me. So I am Colin, I'm the technologist with the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and Higher Education in Ireland. So for anyone who isn't familiar with us, we're the national body that aims to lead and advise on the enhancement of teaching and learning in the sector here. So we were established in 2012 and we now operate under the Agents of the Higher Education Authority, and we work to support the implementation of national strategy and policy. So our mission is to lead the enhancements in partnership with students, staff, leaders to develop an inclusive, collaborative and innovative culture that maximises learning impact for the success of all our students. So as part of our mission, we've developed the National Professional Development Framework for staff we teach in higher education. So this framework provides guidance and support for the PD of individuals within the sector. Sorry, my slides have just frozen. There we go, we're back. So we published this framework in 2016 and it focuses on promoting an evidence-based, flexible and inclusive opportunities for teaching and learning. So the framework aims to empower staff to create and to discover and to engage in meaningful PD. So it encourages peer dialogue and support to enhance pedagogy within and across disciplines and more broadly contributing to the quality assurance and enhancement of the student learning experience. So the framework is available for use by individuals who teach, teaching and learning support centres and units and senior management. So the framework includes a typology of professional development opportunities that include both non-accredited and accredited activities. So that's where these open courses that I'm going to speak to come into play. So open courses offered by the National Forum, including the UDL open course that Dara will speak about shortly, align with the framework and provide a structured, non-accredited PD opportunity, meaning that while there are no ECTS credits, they are light touch, they're short and they come with a digital badge as a form of recognition. So the premise of open courses started out at the early stage of the PD framework consultation. So the National Forum established 15 pilot groups working on different work packages now known as open courses. And these PD opportunities aligned with the framework and it's great to have listened to Claire earlier, who was a developer on the reflective practice and teaching open course as part of the pilot at that point. Even Rob more recently involved with getting started with personal and professional digital capacity. And it's great to actually see, I just seen Natalia and Ken out in the audience there as well. And I'm sure there's more who have been involved in open course delivery in different ways and involved in the badges. But as part of the early pilot, the groups would each deliver a PD workshop face to face at that time. And I kind of a train the trainer format. So the idea with these PD packages in the different areas was that we would build capacity in that way of the train the trainer that then facilitators could go forward and deliver these themselves in their own institutions locally at any time. And so the idea was to be able to scale up in that way at that time and the workshops and the pilots were great success. But then we needed to find ways to scale further so while there was an activity going on locally in institutions. We had to look at other ways. So one of the ways that we looked at scaling further was that as part of the development of these open courses we stipulated that all the materials would be packaged for reuse. So they would become under a creative comments open license so that they could be reused by all our newly trained facilitators to roll them out. And also they could be used by any one anywhere. They could use these materials in any way they could take any elements of the materials to enhance their teaching practice. So by using any elements of the materials, not necessarily with the award of a badge without the more structured open course. It just meant that these materials could just be used at any point. And what we've done is we hosted a lot of these materials openly online on our national forum resource hub. And we needed to be able to support those facilitators to deliver these I suppose online as well. And that's where we thought, God, okay, so now we have these open materials out there to be delivered out with face to face workshops, but we need to look at scaling further. So we're going to look at online and hybrid models as part of that and that's where Moodle came in. And it kind of frightened us as to how we would do this because while in the institutions, you were used to using VLEs at that stage so we're in 2018 at this stage. We're like how are we, how the hell are we going to do this. So I have to give a special shout out to Mark Lynn who was a DCU and own Campbell also to Dublin who were a great support to me in setting up this platform. But we knew that we needed to set up a national platform, because we knew that without that support, a significant barrier to entry at a national level would be that I'm trying to deliver these out cross institutionally. In 2018, we were ready to go with a pilot, we set up our Moodle instance, and we're ready to go with a pilot, we piloted it out packed. And again, it was a great success. So now fast forward, we have our platform available, we have three modes of delivery available, our facilitators out there can deliver these face to face in a hybrid format or online. And we now have 25 of these open courses including UDL, and you can see a small selection on screen of some of those and some of our partners. And our latest one is education for sustainability that rolls out this spring, but we still see a challenge so we still see a challenge in terms of that scalability we're heavily oversubscribed every time. And so we still see an expression of an expression of interest call goes out for these. So we still need to look at models to scale further. And that's where UDL has been our exemplar with Dara and his team at ahead, as we seek new ways to scale further So Dara and his team have devised and tested this model, where our course organizers are previously trained facilitators from previous iterations can now facilitate hundreds of participants through smaller engaged cohorts working collectively. And we find to a trained facilitator. And we hear the importance of having those smaller cohorts and that idea of the community and engagements from Claire earlier and the importance of that and that's why Dara's model has really been an exemplar in terms of this. So in terms of the future of open courses and scaling up we expect to see more local activity. So we have a large network of trained facilitators and the potential now to be able to tap into this now tried and tested more large scale national roll out that the UDL open course has been leading on, and more generally more individuals engaging with their own PD. So we now have over 5000 digital badges issue to date, but I'm going to pass you over to Dara now at this point to speak a little bit more about his experience of rolling out this open course and more about UDL thanks. Thanks very much, Colin. We just take over the screen share if that's okay. Everybody sees that okay. All good, Dara. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, so as Colin mentioned that we're part of this open course system ourselves ahead is an independent NGO focused on creating inclusive environments in education and employment for people with disabilities. And then this course in particular is actually a partnership that's been delivered between ahead, the University College Dublin, and of course the National Forum but in reality as Colin has kind of alluded to. It's actually a partnership with the hall further and higher education sector here. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that. And I suppose just touching on what was said earlier on by both Suzanne and Claire, we're actually leveraging the UDL framework within how we've actually designed the model of this in terms of the fostering collaboration and community is a big part of this whole model. And so, first of all, what is it I mean it's we mentioned it previously that these courses have a 20 to 25 hour commitment so that's all of the open courses within the forum system have that this local facilitation is encouraged. The open source facilitator pack with all the materials as Colin do to is provided, and that whether it is a structured and recognized program you do get a digital badge from the National Forum as an award at the end of this process. It isn't an accredited program so it's kind of light touch if you like in that sense. And one of the really important pieces that runs through all of the forums programs is that the peers play a big role in the completion process so whether there is any assessment of some kind, the peer verification is really important in terms of the peers saying to each other that they believe they are arguing to each other they believe that they've met various course criteria so we'll touch on that again a bit later. So what's the course criteria for our UDL badge well one students have to reflect on the diversity of the student of students in their institutions. They have to gain a good understanding of the UDL framework and how it can support the various learners. They have to deepen their understanding of UDL true peer engagement so we're seeing that as a key kind of criteria of engagement with the course. They have to redesign some elements of their teaching practice based on their knowledge of the UDL principles. So Rob mentioned that kind of plus one approach to UDL that's very much something that we're encouraging as part of this short course. So we have to consider more broadly into the future how they will change their practice post course as well so all that reflective practice is happening throughout the course. So what's the actual breakdown what the participants actually do when they go through the course or how is the content delivered. It's delivered through three orientation webinars at different points in the course of different points in the course and those webinars are largely to orientate people that what's coming up next where they have to be in terms of what different aspects and activities are supposed to be engaging with in the coming weeks. They engage with five self directed modules they're done on a weekly basis in the first five weeks in the course and that's really just the basics about learning about the theory of UDL. That's all self directed multimedia interactive content that's delivered. They have to engage with four peer group meetings throughout the course. So they said they're all put into peer groups of between three and five people depending on the course size and the local group size. And throughout that they engage in structured discussions at various points in the course that reinforce their learning share ideas and brainstorm ideas for the activities that they have to engage in as well so it's very much the whole approach of a learning community is taken. They undertake deep reflection activities and UDL redesign activity sort of reflective activities to kind of step back and say where am I at now against the UDL framework what am I doing now that is UDL aligned. And then the redesign activity is where they pick one specific teaching activity were very kind of flexible what people pick as that activity. And we're asking them to make at least one small change or the most two or three small changes in line with the UDL approach and to evidence why they made these changes and what impact they believe it's having on their students. It's quite a short course so we try to get evaluation from students where possible but it's not always possible for all of our learners. So optional weekly UDL drop ins throughout the middle of the course I'll talk a little bit about who does those drop in shortly. And we have an optional facilitators badge so as Colin mentioned, the idea here is a train the trainer model as well as the actual UDL content itself. So this is what the model actually looks like ourselves and UCD as core course coordinators deliver the content and that we get people onto the platform we do all the marketing the communications. So this is the kind of basic students contact pre course, we deliver the main orientation webinars and make sure people have access to the self directed content etc. Then, in each institution and each education and training board a local level, we have previously trained facilitators who manage local groups of peers that they might have four or five groups of peer peers themselves so those groups being maybe three to five all working together to understand the course content better and to brainstorm and support each other as a learning community. And that works really really well. And I suppose the reason it works really really well is first of all everyone's getting that achievable national recognition true to national forum, true to train the trainer model we have this exponential increase. It mills very much UDL out of the access department so that was previously trying people are generally teachers educators themselves and they're taking on the role to share that UDL knowledge, what orders in their apartment. It generates exemplars at a local and national level so these reasons activities that they have to do actually become exemplars that we get to share what orders, and we have a big collection of kind of discipline based exemplars building up as a result of that, and it generates huge local and national conversation which affects both the engagement and conversation within institutions but also, it's having a big impact this community is at a national level with the national policy debate, and it naturally builds those UDL communities at an international level. So, prior to, we've just completed a kind of a semester of this national rollout that we do, and we're in the verification process you're going to see probably another roughly 800 students added to this number in the middle but so far we've, we had 424 previously trained facilitators. We've always come on board every year to help us with the national rollout. In the 2021 model we had 86 helping with that national rollout, and that brought us over the lifespan of the course which has been running for about three years now to 2,111 completers. We're going to hit closer to 3,000 completers once this latest iteration. And what's really interesting is although it's a quite short course, we actually have really good evidence of the impact of it being quite strong. So, at the end of the year, 85% agreed that it had a significant impact on their teaching practices. 80% rated the course as good, very good or excellent. And we had 96% said that a deepened their understanding of UDL. But on top of that, when we look at the qualitative feedback, we can see that you might get some feedback that we might expect things like the program has shown me with small changes across my practice, I can support a more inclusive and engaging educational experience. And we also have this suite of people evidencing a much deeper impact on their teaching practices. You see this person in the middle here saying to completely change my perspective, I'm more critical of my instruction now. We have this person on the right side of the question structures and processes more, introduce more choice for students encourage a more collaborative approach. So we get right from maybe the kind of maybe somewhat surface level impact that you might expect on a short course like this right to people actually questioning and a systemic level. So just on the slide, which I think Rob has shared already hopefully will share if he hasn't. There's lots of different resources to explore, including the Arc courses which I mentioned which are much shorter version of a few of the courses that we talked to it. Thank you very much Darla we just stopped the recording there.