Addressing Diversity in Online Learning through the Implementation of Universal Design Strategies

Students enrolled in a face-to-face and online classroom vary in terms of personality, learning styles, socio-cultural context and physical abilities among other differences. This diversity poses a challenge for instructors to plan and implement a class that addresses all these differences. This challenge is the result of many factors and variables to consider when planning to address diversity and at the same time to try to deliver instruction that would match everyone. However, there are strategies and paradigms such as Universal Design, an engineering and architectural design strategy, which is intended to implement products that serve users’ diversity. Consequently, Universal Design (UD) emerges as a strategy that has been integrated into face-to-face and online education to target the need of planning for learner’s diversity. Instructional strategies used by Universal Design include delivering content using different formats, helping students to determine their own learning style, and implementing assignments and assessments, which are error tolerant. These strategies are of easy implementation in an online course thanks to the flexibility of Course Management Systems such as Moodle and Blackboard. This paper is intended to provide examples of Universal Design strategies implemented in Moodle to address learners’ diversity in an online classroom.