Universal Design for Learning

Providing effective learning experiences for all students is a primary goal of EDC’s work in developing science curriculum. The challenge in doing so is to provide ways to present the materials that are accessible to a broad range of students. To achieve this goal, EDC, working in collaboration with CAST and the University of Michigan, developed UDL Curriculum Toolkit, an open-source web application designed to support the creation of interactive, multimedia curricula according to the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The Toolkit software was built to enable any curriculum developer or researcher to design Web-based curricula or interventions from scratch, as well as to retrofit existing curricula into a UDL-supported, scaffolded learning environment for middle and high school students.

To facilitate the use of the Toolkit, guidelines for curriculum development, and middle- and high-school science exemplars were also developed. In order to provide an exemplar of a UDL high school science curriculum, EDC developed a UDL version of learning experiences from the Ecology unit of Foundation Science: Biology.

One such exemplar can be viewed at the CAST UDL website.

You can view the teacher management prototype by using the username “teacher” and password “guest”.  To log in as a student, use “student1″ and “guest.”

Sample screens from UDL Curriculum Tool Kit.