Think UDL

Welcome to Ep 138: Neuroinclusive Advising with Rachel Adams and Fred Zinn. Rachel Adams is Associate Director of Education and Training, Disability Services at UMAss Amherst and a Doctoral Candidate, UMass Higher Education and Administration . She offers education and training around disability and also teaches undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Fred Zinn is Ass...

Welcome to Episode 137 of the Think UDL podcast: Deconstructing "College Material" with Cate Weir. Cate Weir is the Program Director for Think College for the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She has written and managed grants to create programs for students with intellectual disabilities to attend college and continues to work with, improve and grow...

Welcome to Episode 136 of the Think UDL podcast: Centering Disability with Katie Grennell. Dr. Katie Grennell completed her PhD in American Studies from the University at Buffalo in 2016. Her dissertation, entitled The Making of the ‘Fame Monster’: Disability Aesthetics, Bodily Deviance and Celebrity Culture delved into the distinctions between deviance and normativity by analyzing representations...

Welcome to Episode 135 of the Think UDL podcast: Nothing Without Us with Amy Lomellini. Dr. Amy Lomellini is the Product Accessibility Lead at Anthology. She leverages her personal and professional experiences to help bring clarity, consistency, and confidence to the accessibility of Anthology’s array of educational technology products and solutions. She has experience as an instructional designer...

Welcome to Episode 134 of the Think UDL podcast: Ask Me and Believe Me with Mickey Rowe. Mickey Rowe is an award winning best selling author and speaker. As an autistic and legally blind person, he believes that when we design for accessibility, we help others to perform at their best, and, as he says, that’s not just for disabled folks. He is a Broadway actor, director, consultant and public spea...

Welcome to Episode 133 of the Think UDL podcast: Online Graduate Education with Tracy Balduzzi. Tracy Balduzzi is the Associate Director of Strategic initiatives for the graduate school at Syracuse University and an adjunct Lecturer at Utica University in upstate New York. Tracy recently wrote an article about how she has implemented UDL strategies in the graduate online course she teaches and I w...

Welcome to Episode 132 of the Think UDL podcast: Design Cycle and Research with Kavita Rao. Dr. Kavita Rao is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the current director of the Research Institute there in the College of Education. In today’s conversation we discuss her published article on the UDL design cycle and then move into the current state of UDL re...

Welcome to Episode 131 of the Think UDL podcast: Easing Academic Stress with Elizabeth Hitches. Elizabeth Hitches teaches across various universities in Australia in inclusive education and research methods, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. Her current research is exploring students' academic stress through the lens of UDL and considering how stressors in the higher educatio...

Welcome to Episode 130 of the Think UDL podcast: Virtual Gathering, Real Inclusion with Cait Kirby and Liz Norell. Cait Kirby is the founding Associate Director of the Williams College Center for Teaching, where she primarily engages with faculty around exploring and celebrating teaching practices and opportunities. Cait spends her time tweeting about disability, pedagogy, and games. She enjoys kn...

Welcome to Episode 129 of the Think UDL podcast: UDL Toolkit with James D’Annibale. James D’Annibale is the Director of Academic Technologies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and has created a UDL Toolkit for his faculty at the small liberal arts college to help faculty integrate UDL into their teaching in no tech, low tech, and high tech ways, and with low lift to high lift options...

Welcome to Episode 128 of the Think UDL podcast: HyFlex Love Affair with Kenyada McLeod. Kenyada McLeod is Associate Professor of Web Design at Brightpoint Community College in the central Virginia region. I first came in contact with her work when she helped me through the QM certification process years ago when I had my First Year Seminar course QM certified. It was then we struck up a friendshi...

Welcome to Episode 127 of the Think UDL podcast: Self-Efficacy Research with Ana Redstone. Dr. Ana Redstone has decades of experience as an instructional designer developing online and hybrid courses. She leads UDL and accessibility strategy at Western Governors University and recently completed her PhD in 2023 in Instructional Design and Technology at Old Dominion University with her dissertation...

Welcome to Episode 126 of the Think UDL podcast: Students as Partners with Anastasia Williams and Lorena Perales. Anastasia Williams is the Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching at the University of Iowa. She focuses on inclusive teaching, course design, syllabus design, well-being, and universal design for learning (UDL). Lorena Perales is a sophomore at the University of Iowa, a first ge...

Welcome to Episode 125 of the Think UDL podcast: Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility with Rebecca Mushtare. Rebecca Mushtare is the associate dean of Graduate Studies and a professor of art and design at SUNY Oswego. With John Kane, she co-founded and co-hosts the Tea for Teaching podcast . Rebecca’s primary research areas are inclusive design, design for older adults, and digital accessibility...

Inclusive Impactful Instruction with Kevin Merry. Dr. Kevin Merry is the Head of Academic Development and Associate Professor of Learning, Teaching and Assessment at the Center for Academic Innovation and Teaching Excellence at DeMontfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom. His most recent book is Delivering Inclusive and Impactful Instruction: Universal Design in Higher Education. In today’s...

Welcome to Episode 123 of the Think UDL podcast: AI and Ethics with James Basham. Dr. James Basham is a Professor in the Department of Special Education in the School of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. He is the founder of the Universal Design for Learning Implementation and Research Network (UDL-IRN). His research is focused on the implementation of U...

Welcome to Episode 122 of the Think UDL podcast: Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility with Joe Houghton. Joe Houghton is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business in Dublin, Ireland. He is also a prolific writer and producer of books, podcasts, and instructive videos and webinars on teaching and learning. He has recently thrown his intellect into...

Dr. Liz Norell is the Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss. In this conversation, Liz and I discuss several important UDL ideas including reflection and how to incorporate that into our classes and how beneficial it is for our own learning. We also discuss how to create psychologic...

Welcome to Episode 120 of the Think UDL podcast: The Double Empathy Problem with Aaron Lanou and Colin Ozeki. Aaron Lanou is an educational consultant supporting schools and organizations to reach all kids with inclusive, strengths-based practices. Through the lens of Universal Design for Learning, he coaches teachers to support autistic students and all kids with a variety of academic, executive...

Welcome to Episode 119 of the Think UDL podcast: Contextual Pathways with Lee Dale. Lee Dale is the founder and CEO of Say Yeah!, an educational tech company based in Toronto, Canada. Lee saw the accessibility gaps in online education and decided to do something about it, he created his company Say Yeah! to help unlock the potential in everyone. In this conversation, we discuss instructional desig...

Welcome to Episode 118 of the Think UDL podcast: Badges, Modules and Praxis with Thomas O’Shaughnessy. Thomas O’Shaughnessy is an Assistive Technology Officer and UDL Project lead at the University of Limerick in Ireland. I thought I might introduce him and this episode with a poem: In Limerick, Tom's praxis did shine, Inclusive practice, his paradigm fine. With UDL's broad scope, And tech breakin...

Rachel Combs is a Disabilities Accommodations Consultant and Professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. In this conversation, Rachel and I discuss her work with Project ENABLE which stands for Expanding Non-discriminatory Access By Librarians Everywhere and which seeks to raise librarians’ understanding of the library and information needs...

Welcome to Episode 116 of the Think UDL podcast: The UDL Gears with Loui Lord Nelson. Loui Lord Nelson is an author, leader, consultant, and educator in  Universal Design for Learning in a global context. She is also my esteemed friend and colleague as well as the host of two podcasts on UDL, UDL in 15 minutes and UDL Research in 15 minutes, both of which cover a multitude of subjects focussing on...

Welcome to Episode 115 of the Think UDL podcast: UDL at Scale with Tom Tobin. Thomas J. Tobin is a founding member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Teaching, Learning and Mentoring as well as an author, speaker, and consultant on UDL, evaluating online teaching, copyright, academic integrity, and alt-ac careers (non-traditional and non-faculty career paths). Not only that, Tom is...

 Welcome to Episode 114 of the Think UDL podcast: HEQCO’s Key Recommendations with Rachel Courts and Ken Chatoor. Rachel Courts is a Researcher at HEQCO, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and Ken Chatoor is a Senior Researcher at HEQCO as well. Together with their co-authors Jackie Pichette, Ofure Okujie and Ryan Tischoff, they have extensively researched UDL in Higher Education in O...