UDL Final Project

Final Project Plans

For the UDL Certification Course, I'll be modifying the Project 2 research that I assign my students in the second half of English 101.  During the Alternative Delivery Certification, I constructed the first half of the semester around key concepts of rhetoric, genre, and multimodality — in those assignments, I had students prepare a series of research articles that would carry them through the stages of finding primary, secondary, and scholarly sources, and then learning the relationships between these types of sources and academic writing.  Although students are writing individual articles, all the articles together share sources and research on the topic that each student chooses, with the final draft writing being assembled together as a research collection that reaches 2,500 words.

Project 2 builds on the skills of Project 1, and then requires students to go further in their ability to sustain research-based writing.  Project 2 is also a 2,500-word research project, the major difference being that is must be single, cohesive paper rather than a series of linked articles that can be presented together.  To help with providing multiple means of engagement, I already allow students to choose their own topics in order to support recruiting interest while giving greater intrinsic desire to sustain effort and persistence.

Presently, I provide students with textual assignments to guide them through each step of the research process.  There are five main steps that I currently walk students through — I support multiple means of action and expression primarily through options for executive functions.  The Project 2 assignments are provided in segments to guide student through five stages of research writing:

1. Researching sources and quotes

2. Organizing ideas and outside information

3. Drafting these ideas into "messy" and "rough" drafts

4. Workshopping to provide and receive peer feedback.

5. Revision for the final paper.

This is obviously a very long and very complicated project — I certainly won't be revamping the entire thing.  Instead, I will take the existing assignments and prepare multimodal materials to give a better overview that meets the UDL guidelines of providing multiple means of representation.  I'll first start with a series of infographic slides that illustrate the size and scope of the project in terms of page counts and numbers of quotes, and then from there use more detailed slides to "zoom in" on parts of the project to better illustrate the requirements of MLA formatting.

Ideally, I'd like to develop this into a screencast, but I'm not sure whether I'll have the time to do that.  Instead, I'll focus my efforts on providing the infographics to make the assignment requirements more visible, and then I'll film short "pep talk" videos for each stage of this project so that students can feel better connected to it.

This is work I'm doing anyway as part of the online English 101 courses I'm teaching semester — for ADC, I developed the framework for my online course and the assignments for the first half of the semester, so for UDL I'll be preparing the additional representation materials for students in the second half of the semester.  I'll be preparing these materials this week, so my final project should be done by Friday, June 26th.

Since these materials will all be shared to Canvas for my students, I will most likely prepare a document that includes the full Project 2 assignment guidelines with the added infographics, and I'll submit that for the UDL course.  My students, however, would be seeing these as multiple documents split up across weeks in order to prevent cognitive overload.  If time allows, I'll also provide a screencast to guide instructors through my Canvas course, and I can share that via Canvas Studio.