Best Practices for Designing Canvas Courses According to
Universal Design for Learning

Guiding Concepts

This guide is designed to support course developers in creating instructional environments, assessments, and lessons for diverse students (e.g. those with various and dynamic abilities and disabilities, learning styles, interest levels, etcetera). The main idea is to design courses in such a way that such that the clear majority of students may access content and excel in learning without future retrofitting.

Two big ideas that drive the UDL framework are:

What is necessary for some is almost always good for everyone.
Environments can be disabling; well-designed environments are not.

Below, a five-minute video provides an overview of UDL. For more information about UDL, please take a look at the resources at the end of this document and/or contact Eric Moore, UTK's Universal Design for Learning Specialist.

How to use this Guide

Please consider these points as considerations to make and guidelines to apply. Therefore, if you use the checklist as a checklist, checking a box may only mean that you have considered that point, whether or not you felt the context warranted applying it.

For each section, each of the principles are represented with suggestions for how to address the principles. Links to additional information about the principle or its subordinate guidelines or checkpoints are provided. The suggestions provided and their corresponding examples are not intended to be exhaustive; they will provide a good place to begin, but instructional designers and faculty should be thinking of other ways in which to apply the principles, as well, as warranted. Each section focuses in turn on the three UDL Principles:

Provide Multiple Means of Engagement: the provision of options to recruit and sustain interest, effort and motivation. Supports for self-management.
Provide Multiple Means of Representation: the provision of options to support perception, conceptualization, and comprehension.
Provide Multiple Means of Action & Expression: the provision of options for physical action, expression, communication, and support of executive functions.

Please notice that there are two versions of this document, the “full” and “condensed.” The full version includes additional information, links to details from the UDL Center and links to examples. It is intended to be used at least the first time. However, for the sake of speed, a “condensed” version is available to focuses just on the actionable phrases for each point. This will be more useful once users have the hang of the ideas and just want prompting for the different points. Because the two documents correspond 1:1, a person may use the condensed version and then refer to the corresponding item in the full version if further clarity is needed.

For additional commentary, feel free to check out this four minute podcast (or view the transcript).

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