National Forum Digital Badge in Universal Design for Teaching & Learning - This Autumn UCD Access & Lifelong Learning have entered into a strategic partnership with AHEAD to jointly deliver the Digital Badge for Universal Design in Teaching and Learning in a fully online format to a national audience.
This digital badge course, hosted by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning, provides participants with a strong introduction to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework and gives them the opportunity to implement UDL approaches within the teaching activities they are currently undertaking.
In UCD this digital badge is already integrated into a module of the UCD Teaching & Learning University Teaching Qualification. The integration and promotion of Universal Design for Learning is a core element of the University for All initiative in UCD. UDL has been an especially useful framework for ensuring inclusion of all students during this period of blended and remote learning. Our strategic partnership with AHEAD allows us to broaden the reach of the UDL badge and promote our University for All message to a national audience to encourage others to implement a whole-institutional approach to student inclusion.
We have been facilitating the UDL Badge since we jointly developed it as part of the National Forum’s professional development framework in 2017 but this year there's a big difference to how we're running the course. Where typically we would run the course for about 35 people, this year we are teaming up with previously trained UDL badge facilitators to offer this course to over 600 participants simultaneously in the Higher Education and Further Education and Training sector - the largest national roll out of UDL CPD ever undertaken in Ireland.
The badge roll out is well underway with hundreds of colleagues across Ireland now developing a large Irish UDL community. We hope to do another national roll out again next September but we can facilitate local roll outs of the badge in your discipline in UCD - simply email UniversityforAll@ucd.ie and we’ll start planning!