The UDL Symposium 2025 was held 25-26 June at the University of Sydney.
It was a privilege to attend the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Symposium this week at the University of Sydney!
As someone with little previous knowledge about UDL, it was great to hear from so many different people about how they are implementing UDL in their teaching. From the symposium, two things really stood out to me.
The first was integrating UDL principles into assessments. One way to do this is to have multiple modes of submission for students. I experienced this occasionally in high school, where students would be given a broad assignment task with flexibility in the artifact produced. In particular, in a Year 10 geography assignment, we could create a website or do a slideshow presentation. I believe that providing students with choices is invaluable. By providing students with multiple ways to submit their work, I believe the flexibility fosters creativity, which in turn leads to enjoyment and ultimately enhances learning. Not only that, but it is also inclusive – some students may be terrified of public speaking, so giving a slideshow presentation may be incredibly scary (especially when compounded by the stress of being assessed in an academic context).
I understand that implementing this may be more challenging in tertiary classes with large enrollment numbers (potentially over a thousand) and a huge teaching team. However, after a conversation with a tertiary educator at the symposium, I do believe this is very possible and realistic with careful design.
My second key takeaway is implementing UDL into delivering course content. Firstly, content must be accessible to people with different disabilities – for example, is the content on a platform where text size can be easily adjusted? Secondly, because students learn differently, it is beneficial to have multiple ways of presenting content. To illustrate this, an excellent workshop by Raymond Rutgers and Bec Inwood from Murdoch University had participants attempting to make origami. UDL was implemented in various ways, with the key being that participants could choose the level of origami they created (easy, medium, or hard), and multiple learning methods were provided (such as static instructions, video demonstrations, live demonstrations, and viewing pre-built origami). I believe a design like this is empowering, allowing the student to choose the learning method best suited for them (with the flexibility to easily move between learning methods). This idea of multiple learning representations is something I plan to implement when developing online resources for teaching topics in data science.
Overall, it was a great symposium! I’m very grateful to the University of Sydney Education Innovation team for sponsoring my ticket under the student partner’s program.)
