The Universal Design for Learning framework is often adopted by individual faculty for particular courses. In this episode, Tom Tobin joins us to discuss the potential benefits associated with an institution-wide adoption of this framework.
Tom is an internationally recognized scholar, author and speaker on technology mediated education, especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practices, academic integrity, accessibility, and universal design for learning, which is a topic we’ll be talking about today. He helped found the University of Wisconsin Madison Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring. Tom is on Ed Tech Magazine’s Influencers Dean’s List, and has been honored with the Wagner Leadership Award in Distance Learning Administration, and he is one of EduFlow’s global top 100 learning influencers. Tom serves on the boards of Advances in Online Education, The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, and the Oklahoma University Press: Teaching, engaging and thriving in higher ed series. We’re very glad that he’s made time to be with us with all these activities. His books include Evaluating Online Teaching, The Copyright Ninja, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Education, Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, Implementing UDL in Irish Further Education and Training, and what we’ll be talking about today, UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning, which is coming out this summer.
Show Notes
- Tobin, T. J., Mandernach, B. J., & Taylor, A. H. (2015). Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices. John Wiley & Sons.
- Tobin, T. J. (2017). The Copyright Ninja: Rise of the Ninja. Saint Aubin Comics.
- Tobin, T. J. & Behling, K. T. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press.
- Tobin, T. J. & Heelan, A. (2021). UDL for FET Practitioners: Guidance for Implementing Universal CAS for Learning in Irish Further Education and Training. Dublin, IE: SOLAS.
- Linder, K. E., Kelly, K., & Tobin, T. J. (2023). Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers. Routledge.
- Tobin, T. J. (2026). UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning. University of Oklahoma Press.
- CAST
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
- Accessible Canada Act
- Web Content Accessibility Group Standards (WCAG)
- Tobin, T J. & Hromalik, C. (2026). Universal Design for Learning in Project Management. The International Journal of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning, 1(2).
- ThomasJTobin.com
Transcript
John: The Universal Design for Learning framework is often adopted by individual faculty for particular courses. In this episode, we explore the potential benefits associated with an institution-wide adoption of this framework.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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John: Our guest today is Thomas J Tobin. Tom is an internationally recognized scholar, author and speaker on technology mediated education, especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practices, academic integrity, accessibility, and universal design for learning, which is a topic we’ll be talking about today. He helped found the University of Wisconsin Madison Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring. Tom is on Ed Tech Magazine’s Influencers Dean’s List, and has been honored with the Wagner Leadership Award in Distance Learning Administration, and he is one of EduFlow’s global top 100 learning influencers. Tom serves on the boards of Advances in Online Education, The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, and the Oklahoma University Press: Teaching, engaging and thriving in higher ed series. We’re very glad that he’s made time to be with us with all these activities. His books include Evaluating Online Teaching, The Copyright Ninja, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Education, Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, Implementing UDL in Irish Further Education and Training, and what we’ll be talking about today, UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning, which is coming out this summer. Welcome back, Tom.
Tom: Thank you, John and Rebecca, it’s a pleasure to be back on Tea for Teaching. Thank you for having me.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Tom, are you drinking tea with us today?
Tom: I am. I have some Pure Leaf Unsweetened Iced Tea. So that sound of ice cubes that you hear that’s my preferred form of my iced tea.
Rebecca: Sounds nice and refreshing.
John: And I have spring cherry green tea today. Given that we are apparently in spring, the snow has stopped at least for a few days, so we’re moving into spring here.
Rebecca: I have Lady Grey today.
John: Very good, one of my favorites. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss UDL at Scale. While most of our listeners are familiar with UDL to a greater or lesser extent, could you at least provide a brief overview of the UDL framework to help set the framework of the discussion?
Tom: Absolutely. Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, is a framework based on how we learn as human beings. So it’s based in neuroscience, fairly loosely, if I’m being honest. That when we learn anything, we have to activate three different chemical pathways in our brains. We have to have a reason to learn something. We have to have the content that we’re learning, and we have to be able to reinforce it, practice with it, tie it to other things that we already know. And so these three phases of the learning process, which are themselves a pretty good simplification of very complex chemical cascade in our neuroanatomy, they correspond to three different things that we can do as designers to help people to get started and stick with us when things get challenging, have the information to be able to learn it, and then to show what they know and practice with it. The neuroscientists at CAST in Boston, way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they discovered that if we give people one way to get started or take in information or practice, then we’re leaving out other ways that people could engage with that stuff. So what they said was, make more than one way, make multiple ways for people to get engaged, for people to take in information, and for people to practice, and people will choose which one seems best to them in the moment, and that helps the learning to stick. So Universal Design for Learning asks us, as instructors, developers, designers, to make multiple ways that people can get engaged, take in information, and show what they know.
Rebecca: Can you tell us the origin story of your new book, UDL at Scale, and its relationship with your previous work?
Tom: This is a very different book than my previous two books on Universal Design for Learning. When I did Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Education with Kirsten Behling and then when I did the Universal Design for Learning in Further Education and Training for the Irish government, those were practical application based books. People were hungry to have, how do I do this in my own classroom or my own institutional design? That was at an individual level. People wanted to have the nuts and bolts of, what do I do when I’m designing a lesson or an activity or an assessment? One of the big challenges that you started to see over and over again is that whether it’s by law or by policy or by people adopting good ideas, we’ve been putting the burden of making things accessible on the shoulders only of instructors. And we also have not been giving them any release time or extra money or a graduate assistant, or we’ve not taken any work off their plates in order for them to be able to make their materials and engagements more inclusive and more accessible. So it’s not actually a wonder that only about 10% of instructors, wherever we look, have adopted inclusive design techniques of any kind, let alone a specific one, like the Universal Design for Learning Framework. Because of that, when I would talk with boards of trustees, college presidents, provosts, deans, campus leaders, and I would say, “You know that you have these legal requirements.” In the United States, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. In Canada, it’s the Accessible Canada Act. Worldwide, there are laws that apply to the design of content and materials, and we’re not even doing that really well. So when I would talk with campus leaders, and I would say, you recognize that there is this requirement there, but there’s also an opportunity there to lower access barriers and keep our students with us at greater rates, helping with student persistence, student retention, their satisfaction as alumni. Everybody said, “yeah, those are great ideals, and you know, they’re part of our mission and our values, and we just don’t have the people or the time or the funds to be able to do that widely.” So I wrote the book UDL at Scale as an advice guide and a how-to-manual for campus leaders who think they don’t have the resources to actually get that stuff done. They do, and it’s actually when we think about lowering access barriers, not just in the classroom, not just putting the burden on instructor shoulders, but when we think about training everybody across all of our service touch points: the library, mental health counseling, academic counseling, IT, the media services team, you name it. Training all of those service touch points, to be a little bit more inclusive, to give a few more options, to lower accessibility barriers. It turns out that’s a really good financial decision. And so that was the genesis of the book.
John: In terms of that financial decision. What does the research tell us about the effect of UDL on student success, completion, retention, etc.?
Tom: Oh, this one’s great, because we actually do have research about the impact and effect of inclusive design changes, and every leader at every campus has been tasked with being a change agent. We want to move our institutions into spaces where we are making changes because they are driven by the needs of our employer bases, the needs of our students, the needs and vision of our institutions. So here’s the data, folks. Students, are five times more likely to earn a credential when they feel that they have a voice in their education, when they feel that they have a choice in how they move through their educational paths, when they feel a sense of belonging, that they are a part of the institution and its culture and its community, and rather than apart from it, when they feel like they have some agency, like they’re not just being told, “do this, do that, do the other.” That they have some say in how they move through their conversations with a college or a university, and when they have a sense of safety, that they are psychologically okay to be wrong, to explore, to get things wrong, to fail at things and come back to them. Those five things: voice, choice, belonging, agency, and safety. When students say “yes, I felt these things” during their educations, those students are five times more likely to persist and earn a credential with us. So when we think about all of the touchy feely aspects of it, that actually translates into money, that translates into tuition dollars, that translates into students not dropping out or stopping out as much as they otherwise might. And a lot of different ways that we can approach that have to do with access barriers, and we’ve talked about this in other books, but instructors aren’t the only teachers on our campus. Your media services people are teaching students how to engage with materials and content. Our librarians are teaching students how to discern good information and reliable and trustworthy information from slop that’s out there on the internet. and on and on and on, right? So our registrar is teaching students how to navigate the systems of the college or the university through the catalog and the various programs that we have on offer. So wherever we look at engagement with students, they are, in many cases, teaching engagements, and so we can design for those engagements in order to give people the kinds of choices that you heard about as we started our conversation. Multiple ways to get started and stick with it, multiple ways to take in the information that they’re learning about, and multiple ways to take action or express themselves once that they’re engaged with our service areas across all of our service touch points.
John: When you talk about people being five times more likely, is the benchmark of that students in high school or middle school and so forth, in terms of the probability of going to college and acquiring a degree? Because we do have over half of the students who enter college leaving with some sort of a credential, at least, on aggregate. So to get that number, it would seem like it would have to go back a bit to an earlier stage.
Tom: Oh, I’m actually not even talking about being that ambitious in our research. What I’m talking about is of all the current students who enroll right now, regardless of whether they are 18 years old and coming out of high school, or whether they’re 50 years old and coming back to re-skill. Out of all of those folks, you are correct. About half of them end up with a credential after 6, 7, 8, years usually. So the myth of the undergraduate who gets the degree in four years, that full-time student, is kind of a unicorn. At the same time, when we think about the 50% of students who drop out temporarily or stop out altogether, the number one reason why people don’t receive a credential is financial, “I can’t afford to continue now, or I can’t afford to continue at all.” And the research is fairly clear on this one, that the majority of people who stop out or drop out by financial reasons, it’s for $500 or less. So a lot of colleges and universities have now implemented micro-forgiveness programs, where if you owe less than $500 we’ll just write that off, and you keep going. And that’s an investment in the student, and it turns people into degree earners at far greater rates. But what’s the number two reason? If the number one reason is financial, what’s the number two reason why people stop out or drop out? It’s time, it’s the clock. We are all trying to put our educations into busy schedules. We have work responsibilities, caregiving responsibilities, military service, we just live far away from campus, whatever it is. If there’s a reason why people are busy and trying to put things together, and they don’t really fit all that well into the 24 hours of the day, those reasons are out there. So universal design for learning helps make processes go a little more smoothly. Helps students not to have to call back three times to get their question answered with IT. Helps for there to be less rework, and that’s actually one of the central arguments of the book, is that we’re actually making things a little bit more efficient for us as providers of services, and we’re also making things smoother and easier for our students in terms of process. We’ll talk about academic rigor later, but your question is an astute one, and the research that I’m citing in the book is fairly narrow, taking our existing pool of people who start, how many of them will finish?
Rebecca: Well, it’s certainly a compelling argument to implement, and we were talking about the time of not implementing. It costs a lot of time if we have inefficient and terrible processes. [LAUGHTER] We also talked about the burden on faculty trying to meet accessibility requirements, or introducing or rolling out UDL on their own. So if we think about institutional rollout, you can think about is there like aggregate benefits by rolling it out, but there’s also, seems like there might be some startup costs there too, in terms of time and effort. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tom: Oh, Rebecca, that’s an astute question. Because right now, listeners, we’re recording this in late April of 2026 and in the United States, we just had a deadline to implement the Title II updates to the Americans with Disabilities Act. For those of you not familiar with that, by the end of April in 2026 we were all, colleges and universities, supposed to have all of the materials that we host in internet and in mobile formats comply with the Web Content Accessibility Group Standards. So there are 50 different standards for web hosted materials. And absolutely no one, and I mean no one, was going to be compliant as of the deadline. So the United States Department of Justice and Department of Education pushed that deadline back a year, and now it’s April of 2027. And it’s going to be April of 2027 and we’re going to be wringing our hands, going, “Oh my gosh, we’re not compliant still.” I guarantee that. So there’s a prediction for you, listeners. But Rebecca, your question has to do with that kind of situation. So when we, as colleges and universities, think about compliance with the law around accessibility, that means that that compliance usually falls on individuals’ shoulders. You, instructor of this biology course, you created all these materials, now it’s up to you to make them accessible. And when we think at that individual level, every individual has to be perfect in order for an institution to say that they are compliant. So if you’ve got one department that doesn’t get there, then the entire institution fails. So let’s turn that around, and when we think about Universal Design for Learning, when we’re applying it in an individual course, I actually want people to do a little bit less when we’re thinking about institution-level application. And one of the reasons why people are a little panicked now about those WCAG 50 standards is that we are asking communications professors and art historians and chemists to suddenly become experts in web design, and that’s not what the idea is about with that legal compliance issue. So when you think about people engaging in Universal Design for Learning at the individual level, the impact doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to mean everyone does UDL to some perfect level where you get green check marks all throughout your learning management system with a particular tool. Imagine, and I’ve used this analogy before, it’s a good one for this conversation, too. Listeners, imagine that there are 20 steps to shining perfect, accessible content in your courses. There aren’t, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say there are 20 steps. Most places will spend some time, money, and effort to train a couple dozen people to get to step 18. And then we say, “You are our champions. Go train everyone else.” That’s where it breaks down, the “go train everyone else.” Other people are not being given extra time or time off, or they don’t get any support to actually focus their attention on these issues. What I wanted to do with Universal Design for Learning at Scale was to offer ways that we not get everyone to step 18, 19, 20, but to get absolutely everyone in the college or the university to step 2. What are some simple things that everyone does that become part of our everyday workflows? And so I’m indebted to our colleague Jordan Cameron at Kennesaw State University. Years ago, she came up with what she called “The Basic Four,” and that was if everybody did these four things, then some people on campus who were specialists could help with the really tough or knotty or detailed nuanced affordances, but everybody would do these four things. They would make alternative text for images that are displayed on websites in the learning management system and elsewhere. They would use semantic structure, so the heading level. putting things as titles in text-based documents. They would use captions or transcripts for video resources. And they would engage in inclusive procurement. They would engage in a process where, if the college or university is buying and supporting technology tools, they would only buy and support tools that were accessible and met those legal requirements. And if everybody did just those four things, it would, One, spread the workload around. Two, it would make sure that the expertise was available for the really challenging cases of accessible design. Three, it would allow everyone to adopt inclusive practices in a low-stakes way across their everyday workload. Meaning it’s not extra to do inclusive work, it’s actually part of our jobs, and it’s not a huge part of our jobs that we would need to fold in new things. So when we think about “the individual has to be perfect, but the collective only has to be good.” That’s what I’m aiming for. So when we think about individual courses with UDL, yes, institution-wide adoption is a little bit different than the sum of everyone just doing UDL in their own space. In fact, I don’t want to turn everyone into experts in the three principles and the nine guidelines and the 36 considerations of the Universal Design for Learning Framework. There should be people on campus who do that and know that. At the same time, everybody should have some real simple principles and practices that they can engage in that are consistent throughout all of our employees in a college or a university. So, excellent question. Thank you.
John: Have any institutions committed to a UDL-at-scale approach?
Tom: There have been, to my counting, 13 institutions who’ve actually gone from, “Hey, that’s a good idea” to “our institution is actually doing it.” I had the privilege and the pleasure of working with five of those. And I actually want to highlight one where I wasn’t the consultant, and they did it all on their own. This is Atlantic Technological University in Sligo, Ireland. And for listeners here in North America, they are a cross between what we would call a technical college, a community college, and a four-year undergraduate college. They do all of those things within their technological university mandate. What they discovered was that they were serving learners who lived all over the place in northwestern Ireland. So folks were living a 45-minute or an hour commute away by car, and a lot of their students were driving very long distances to be able to come to one of their many campuses. So what they did was they adopted an inclusive mindset, and of course, in Europe, they have the United Nations Strategic Development Goals, or SDGs. Inclusion is one of them, lowering access barriers is another one of those. So they used those as their guiding principles, and then they adopted Universal Design for Learning as a framework that allowed them to operationalize those aspirational principles. When we think about how that works, one of the first things that they did was convincing instructors and employees and staff members to adopt UDL. And of course, there were a lot of folks with their arms crossed saying, “I got along without this before. Why do I have to do this now? This seems like extra work.” The one change that they did, and I want to highlight this, their President and their board of directors said, “We want to be the most inclusive college or university in the country, and that’s a goal toward which we are all headed. We are going to put resources toward this in terms of time, people, and money,” but they didn’t do the next step that you might suggest. You might think that the next step was, “Here’s our plan, and now everybody follow it.” Their next step was to move away from “you must,” to move away from mandates and compliance and move into support. They said, “Here’s the goal. We want everybody to achieve these kinds of inclusive practices in your support area, in your department, in your study, and you tell us what it’s going to take to get to that goal, and we’ll support you.” So what happened from a top-down level was that the support that people were asking for was very different in different places. Some places wanted time, some places wanted funding, some places wanted a couple of experts to come in and help them think about things, and the senior leaders at that institution did those things. Did they do them perfectly, exactly as asked? No. At the same time, that listening attitude, that attitude of “this is a service that we’re providing to you,” it was great. When instructors would think about, “Oh, I want to make some of my content more universally designed,” and they would go talk with their teaching center folks or their learning designers, the learning designer would say, “Oh, yeah, we can teach you how to do this, or we can do this along with you.” And so that wasn’t perceived as, “Oh, here’s another law that applies to me, and now I have to do things differently.” It was perceived by instructors as, “Oh, the whole place is moving in this direction, and now this is a service on which I can rely.” Doing that actually spread the workload around and made it a slow and incremental change where people could ask questions and voice concerns and they got listened to. So that was a wonderful way that the folks at ATU actually implemented Universal Design for Learning. So now it’s part of their policy manual. It’s part of their mission and vision, and it’s also part of just the way they do things, because they actually shifted the culture.
Rebecca: What I’m hearing you say, Tom, is that the leadership at the institution modeled this practice by rolling out UDL in a UDL way, and gave folks some agency and some choice.
Tom: Yeah, students are not the only people who are five times more likely to stick with something when they feel they have a voice, choice, belonging, agency and safety, correct? So you’re making a connection, Rebecca, that I think listeners, you can also make. We as employees, whether we are part of the leadership team, whether we’re instructors and faculty members, whether we are service members and staff members. We are also learners, we are also human beings who want to have a clear reason why we’re doing the thing. We want to be able to get access to the information and the content that we’re going to use, and we want to be able to take action in a way that is meaningful for us. So we absolutely can UDL the process of adopting UDL. Yes.
John: Now, on your first book on UDL, you advocated a plus one approach to UDL adoption, and I think that’s something that many people have picked up on as making it a little bit more feasible or easier to manage. Do you make a similar suggestion at the institutional level?
Tom: It’s an unfair question, John, because I didn’t predict when I wrote, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone with Kirsten Behling, that my idea of approaching Universal Design for Learning, not as here’s three principles that turn into nine guidelines that turn into 36 considerations that we should just approach that as plus one thinking, if there’s one way for an engagement to happen, now make one more way. That was always meant to be a starting point for UDL practice, not the entirety of everyone’s understanding of it. And I’ve been very honored and pleased to see that that plus one idea has really taken root. People know plus one as a way to start Universal Design for Learning, because it’s simple, it’s easy to understand and it’s easy to get your brain around it, and it also is small. Take one action, try one thing, do one experiment, and see what happens. Now you’re asking me to predict which of the ideas from my new book are going to take off because they are so simple or so resonant with people that they’re just going to latch on to it. I don’t know which one of those ideas is going to take off. If I had to put forward two candidates, though, one of them, we just talked about, shift from compliance to support. It seems like a very small and philosophical change. At the same time, changing the messaging around the activities that you’re doing as an institution, changes people’s perception of what those things are. It goes from “Oh, this is required of me,” to “Oh, this is a service on which I can rely.” And shifting from compliance to support narratives, those are the kinds of things that actually shift cultures and change people’s minds. So that’s one. And then a second one, I have a diagram in the book. Listeners, you can’t see it, but I’ll describe it very briefly. Think about a rectangle that is wider than it is tall. Over on the left-hand side, we’ll put “beginner” at the bottom of that. We’ll put “proficient” in the middle, and then we’ll put “approaching expert” on the other side. That’s a timeline of the learning process when people are beginners, when they’ve got a few ideas, when they’re getting it, and they’re almost experts with us. Now draw a line that starts at the very bottom, over by beginner, and goes to the very top, near proficient. We’ve just divided our rectangle into a growing and a diminishing triangle. The diminishing triangle is UDL, Universal Design for Learning, and it’s designed UDL. This is where we, as instructors, designers, developers, facilitators, when people are beginners, we want to design almost all of the boundaries and the possibilities for our learners. We tell them what to read, what to look at, what to do as exercises, so that they will get all of the foundational information. And then, as that triangle gets smaller and smaller over time, we start taking our safeguards and guardrails and left and right boundaries away. And then, by the time people are almost experts, we’re not giving them hardly any guidance or structure, we’re asking them to do. Now, the triangle that’s increasing over time, it starts out almost at nothing when people are beginners. That’s tool use. This is using AI tools, this is using calculators, this is any kinds of tools that people can use to support their learning. When they’re beginners, we don’t want them using any tools. We want them to learn things the hard way, the manual way, the long way, so that they actually struggle with and get the foundational concepts and the practice that we’re doing. Then by the time they’re proficient in the middle there, tool use grows and we start saying, “Okay, now here use tools to help you learn.” This is telling people not to use artificial intelligence to summarize their reading, but to use AI to make study questions about the reading and to use AI to help the learning process itself, but then by the time they get to be proficient, and, after that, when they get to be expert with us, then we say, “Okay, go ahead and use the tools to skip some steps,” because we’re going to use those AI tools, perhaps, to do easier or introductory level kinds of things, so that we can use our human brains to start working on more nuanced or more complex thinking processes. Now, readers, take one more line up at the top of this rectangle, start and draw a rising line from left to right, and we’re going to put one lopsided triangle on top. That is agentic UDL. And it has to go in lock step as our designed UDL diminishes over the learning process, we have to start replacing it with learner agency. We tell our learners not go read this thing and do this activity, but we say, “What kinds of resources do you need or want now? What kinds of activities would help you to learn better on this?” And we become more guides rather than dictators of the things. So when we think about that lopsided house, my hope is that that diagram will take off, because it’s a simple way to think about the entire learning process and what goes into it. And spoiler alert, listeners, it’s fractal. That learning process can happen over the course of an individual lesson, over the course of a unit, over the course of an entire class offering, over the course of an entire credential. So we can go through that process at lots of different scales. So awesome question, and even though it was unfair, I do have two candidates for the things that I hope will take off.
Rebecca: But I think you also reiterated the idea that the plus one can help an institution get started, because it’s iterative, it changes over time, it’s scaffolded, it’s all the things that you’ve been describing.
Tom: And that’s 100% on purpose. I try to offer ideas that are easy to put your brain around, and then get really nuanced and complex when you start implementing them, because you have the agency and the choice to be able to do that design in a way that works well for you and for your learners.
Rebecca: In addition to the support model that you’ve been talking about, as institutions begin to commit to UDL, can you talk a little bit about what kinds of incentive structures they may want to consider to help faculty employees stay aligned with this framework?
Tom: Ooh, can I turn your question inside out a bit, Rebecca? You talked about incentive structures. And incentives are things that we give people when they’re doing things that they don’t normally do. What I want to do is I want to make Universal Design for Learning just part of our everyday workflows. So an incentive would mean “I’m going to pay you extra to do some extra thing” or “I’m going to give you release time, because this is hard and you need some time to do it.” Initially, yes, those things need to be in place because it’s different from the way that we do things now. The goal for me, though, is that we’re not creating incentives that mentally label UDL as extra or on top of the work that we should be doing. So I want to turn the question a little inside out and say that my advice to everyone who’s a campus leader is the very first thing you can do is to put Universal Design for Learning into job descriptions for new hires and into the performance evaluation process. Make Universal Design for Learning expected of people who come into the institution as new employees, and make UDL practices part of the measurable criteria by which people’s jobs are assessed. That’s not exactly an incentive program. And if you just put them into the job descriptions and new hire offerings without actually training people on what that looks like, then you’re setting them up for failure. So having the training available before those changes happen, having an opportunity for people to be assessed on Universal Design for Learning once or twice through the cycle without it counting, so that they get the feedback, but if they haven’t been doing well with it, that they get an opportunity to say, “Oh, wait, I probably need to go attend the workshops or get some coaching or work with a mentor on this.” But I’m a big fan of letting people fail without consequences.
Rebecca: Jeez, that sounds like another UDL principle being highlighted right here.
Tom: It’s not technically in the UDL guidelines, but it does absolutely show up in guideline eight, and we can nerd out about that later. [LAUGHTER] But listeners, what we’re thinking about here is when we think about giving people the opportunity to try things out, work with them in their own fashion, but also holding them accountable, like accountability is a key driver to scaling up any change at any institution, and with Universal Design for Learning, it’s no different. The difference here is that I want to suggest give people an opportunity to have a minute to get in touch with and apply these ideas and then assess them, but don’t ding them if their assessment is poor. Say, “Okay, this didn’t work,” or “You need more time on this,” or “You need this a different way.” Let’s work with what actually is going to help move the needle here. I also want to share, the bar should be incredibly low. We’re not looking for a 100% or a green score in the learning management system on Blackboard Ally, where it’s checking all the accessibility. Universal Design for Learning and accessibility are actually different. Accessibility just means that that’s sort of the floor that’s where everybody should be doing this as a matter of course, and Universal Design for Learning is a framework that allows us to move beyond just what’s compliant. So excellent question, and thank you for letting me play with it.
John: And by making it part of the culture of the institution and part of the regular expectations, then it does build in a little bit of loss aversion, which is a behavioral economics principle, which suggests that the threat of losing a job [LAUGHTER] by not doing it might have much more of an impact than the possibility of getting incentives for doing something. That’s perhaps an overly harsh way of suggesting that.
Tom: Listeners you heard John say that, and not me, right? [LAUGHTER] But I’m also not a behavioral economist, fairly, though.
John: But one, point though, that I think is worth at least discussing is that many faculty become concerned about new initiatives that are initiated by their current administration in the institution, when institutions have a fair amount of turnover at the top. How can institutions build this into the culture of the institution in a way that is going to persist after the administration turns over?
Tom: Ooh, excellent question. There’s a very short phrase in higher education that is meant to be ironic or satiric. It’s called “new provost, new priorities.” So every few years, a new senior leader comes in and they say, “We were doing this, and now we’re going to do that.” And in some institutions, it changes every year or so, right? The campus leaders go to a leadership conference, they hear about the next big new thing, and suddenly the funding and the winds change. It’s a reasonable response if you’ve been there long enough to kind of fold your arms across your chest and say, “I’m just going to wait until the winds change again and change again, and maybe I won’t have to actually do an awful lot with all of these big new priorities.” So there’s an individual and a collective way to respond. Individual way is to play to people’s own interests. And we’ve talked about this in other conversations and books. It’s still true. Ask people where they’re already finding challenges or gaps. Where is it that you give the directions for an activity and you get an email 400 times from your students, all asking the same clarifying question about the direction? Where is it that you give a splendid lecture, and then everybody gets that concept wrong on the exam, you’ve got to reteach. Where are those places where people are already going to do a little work to redesign or think again about how they’re approaching a particular idea, concept or process? Those are always good places to start thinking in a more inclusive way, because you can lower some barriers, not only for the learners, but also for yourself. So when we think about UDL, the selling point of UDL for individuals is that a little bit of effort now actually saves you a lot of effort later. And you know where you’re putting in all of that repeated effort that just seems to be a time sink. So in your own career, think about that. And then when we think about, at an institutional level, if we’re going to have leadership change over, there are three things we can do right away, and this is all chapter five, people. One, make sure that you are enshrining Universal Design for Learning in your policy manual, this takes the longest amount of time. When you’re involved in shared governance, things do not move fast. But if inclusive design is actually part of the identity of the institution and it’s part of the mission that we’re on. Folks at Greensboro College in North Carolina actually did adopt this first into their mission, and worked back from that into practice and into making it part of their everyday work. Two, when we think institutionally, we actually talked about this as well. Putting Universal Design for Learning into those job descriptions and performance evaluations means that you’re changing culture by fiat. And John, you said it in a different way than I would have [LAUGHTER] in terms of risk or loss aversion. But when we think about risk, we can think about risk in negative ways and positive ways. So the negative risk is, “Oh, if I don’t do this, I might lose my job, or I won’t get my promotion.” But the positive risk aspect of it is, if we do this, then we are likely to have more students stick with us. If we do this, we are more likely to have fewer students asking the same question over and over and over again or tripping over the same stumbling blocks intellectually or practically. And then the third thing that we can think about when we’re working at scale is that institutional culture, the people who are there the longest typically aren’t the senior leaders, it’s typically the folks in operations. So the folks who are running the departments and the support units, we’ve got the institutional memory. So in trying Universal Design for Learning in your practices at your unit level, put it in the handbook, put it in the manual, put it in the new employee onboarding that you do. That’s where it’s going to stick, because provosts and presidents come and go, it’s a truism in higher education. And the folks who are here for the long haul, Universal Design for Learning helps us do our jobs more efficiently, with less stress, less anxiety, and it helps our students to be more successful. It does require effort and work, and to the extent that we can make time, put money, assign people to those tasks, the better. But even if we don’t have a lot of any of those three things, we can still shift how people act.
John: And if students are learning more, it tends to be much more enjoyable for faculty.
Tom: Wow, I didn’t put that in the book. Seriously, I didn’t put that in the book because one of the biggest arguments that we have for Universal Design for Learning is that it helps students to learn more effectively, and I guarantee you that that is not an argument that moves anyone to open their budget. So this book, like I was saying at the very beginning, is a very different kind of argument to the one that I have produced in other books. In other books, we’re talking about social justice, we’re talking about efficiency, we’re talking about efficacy for the students. In this book, we’re talking about, “Yeah, this actually makes sense, because it means that we’re spending our money more effectively and wisely, and helps us with reducing rework and making processes more efficient.” This is language that I’m not used to using all the time, and it’s language that most campus leaders are very used to hearing.
Rebecca: It’s important to have campus leadership on board to make this a cultural shift, but it doesn’t have to start there. It can start from anyone at a university who’s committed to this work. Do you have some strategies that individuals might use, collectively or individually, to start to nudge an administration to consider adopting the UDL framework for the entire institution?
Tom: We’re actually heading in that direction in our conversation already, aren’t we?
Rebecca: We are.
Tom: So if you’ve got a grassroots effort where you can show that Universal Design for Learning actually does have an effect on student retention, or more tuition coming in, or fewer people dropping out. Collect those data and share that information with your senior leaders and share it with language that they understand. That is task number one. Talk about its impact on the budget for your unit. Or if it’s not a budget impact, talk about how, instead of putting out little tiny fires over and over and over again, that adopting UDL has meant that you’ve addressed some regular concerns and gaps that happen every day, and that’s actually freed up your staff to go after bigger or more complex challenges and goals. So it actually does help us to shift how we spend our time. Listeners, I don’t know what area you work in, in a college or a university, I guarantee that you have the story of the thing that you spend all your time doing once a year. So for example, I worked with some colleagues at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York, and the head of their Disability Services Office. She was one of the champions who went through a process of learning more about Universal Design for Learning. She shared that on average, she was chasing 70 plus students every semester because they had to actually actively request their accommodations every semester, it’s not just like you get your accommodations and then you’re good for four more years or six more years. So every semester, she would be sending out email messages to people’s .edu address saying, “Hey, quick reminder, you have to request this every semester.” And she spent literally 80 to 120 hours of her own time, and then 80 to 120 hours of the four people in her office chasing down these requests. And then they made one UDL change. When people initially sought a disability accommodation, they asked the students, “We’re going to send stuff to your campus address. Would you be willing to share your cell phone number with us so we could text you? We promise we won’t spam you.” 90 plus percent of the students on intake shared their cell numbers, and when she sent out the reminder, “Hey, you got to do this every semester,” it went to their email address and it went to their cell phone number, if they had shared it. They literally went from chasing 70 or more students over the course of weeks every semester to two. Two people needed reminders more than once. So making that UDL choice about giving people more than one way that they can get the information helped them to actually reduce a huge time barrier for their staff, and that meant that their disability service staff weren’t playing phone tag and email tag with people, but they were able to actually do the work that they were hired to do, which is helping students to overcome barriers in the classroom environment. So when we think about convincing the administration, show them examples like that. “Hey, we saved you a whole bunch of money, and now we can work on more complex challenges with the same number of staff members.” That’s an argument that a provost is going to listen to. So show that it works and use language that they understand: budget, retention, persistence.
John: We always end by asking, what’s next? So what’s next for you, Tom?
Tom: My focus is always on quality in higher education. So I’ve got two new books coming out after UDL at Scale, which is coming out in August of 2026. Sometime in 2027 I have Evaluating Teaching in the Digital Era with Annie Taylor and Jean Mandernach. Then in 2028, it’ll be Peer Observation Made Practical with Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel. And sometime in 2026 or ‘27, I worked with Chris Hromalik at the SUNY System, and we have an article coming out on Universal Design for Learning in Project Management. Plus, I am now a full time professional advisor, so I’m enjoying working with colleges and universities on really complex problems. Listeners, if you go to my website, it’s just ThomasJTobin.com, there’s a free UDL book there on further education and training, John mentioned it in our opener, and you can download that. And if you’ve got a wicked problem that you’re trying to figure out that has to do with the quality of our teaching or access to education, I’d love to hear from you. So thank you again for having me on the program. I love Tea for Teaching. I’m a regular listener. I’ve got my Tea for Teaching mug, and I’ll look forward to where this all goes down the line.
Rebecca: Well, thanks so much, Tom, we always enjoy talking to you and brainstorming how to make some good institutional change.
John: Yes, It’s great talking to you again, and I’m looking forward to seeing you at one of the next conferences coming up.
Tom: Yep, and listeners, if we cross paths in three dimensions, just look for the tall man with white hair, glasses and a giant black mustache and say hello, I’ll be glad to talk with you. Thanks everybody.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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