Design Changes for Flexibility

If you are considering some design changes around flexibility in your classes, you can consider these three questions:

Do I enter the semester with a sense of dread, anticipating requests for deadline extensions?

This is a strong indicator that you are reacting to requests for flexibility instead of planning for it. Instead, consider in the course planning stage where you can afford to move deadlines, what the cutoff dates are, and communicate that information to students.

Can too much flexibility be confusing?

A key consideration in moving towards flexibility is the very real hazard of blurring expectations and outcomes. When flexibility gives over to ambiguity, it can create uneasy feelings in students that range from uncertainty to outright alarm. If you continually revamp deadlines, parameters, guidelines, and practices, you run the risk of making everything meaningful into nothing meaningful (Hollingshead et al., 2020).

Can you address common problems in content so that students can recognize and meet the challenge?

Part of good course design is the transparency in identifying common areas of misunderstanding, bias, and challenge. Consider the difference between these two statements:

“Accounting 3440, Taxation is a tough course – nobody ever gets an A and only some people a B.”

This phrase is frightening, gives no sense of what is challenging, common topics for additional support, helpful reframes, or methods to retain information.

“Accounting 3440, Taxation is tough for a number of reasons: the information is dense, the concepts use advanced algebra (so you may need to brush up on some old concepts), and weeks 5-8 involve case studies so you will have to not only recall the information but use those algebraic concepts in a practical sense to solve problems.”

The course may still be frightening but now the learners know the parameters of the course, the rationale behind the challenge, and can prepare for what is to come, particularly for either brushing up on algebra or for the case studies where theory and practice converge.

Sometimes making challenge points visible can support perseverance because it cues the learner to allocate more time, resources, and support-seeking for the task which can move them to deadlines more readily. Planned challenges tend to be met with more intentionality. By contrast, surprise challenges can force learners into a reactive state, which can be haphazard and unproductive. With visible challenge points, we can move to a place of assessing where flexibility is helpful in terms of the learning parameters, knowledge structure, and content acquisition rather than just mindlessly pushing out deadlines and arbitrarily changing assessment and activity features.

Pacing

How do you know if pacing could be a way of implementing UDL?

You keep having discussions about time.

At its core, pacing is about timing. Are students consistently asking for more time, different time, time for review, time to have extra help, time to develop a different idea? Are you always negotiating deadlines? Do you feel like you are either going too fast or too slow? These kinds of requests and complaints can mean that the Plus-One Approach could see you designing one more option for speeding up, slowing down, implementing question periods, or planning review sessions.

You have assumed that everyone will keep the same pace throughout the course.

A well-designed course will have at least some capacity to proactively expand and contract the pacing requirements. Options for speeding up and slowing down can be planned in advance so that you do not have to do reactive work. Pacing changes can mean that the speed of content presentation can be changed but it can also mean modifying the depth of response, having rapid-fire vocabulary activities, quick writes (Shen, n.d.), or semester-long project development with embedded milestones. Pacing concerns can also mean you check in on the number of questions you think you are asking. What is the purpose? Are they inviting people to think? Integrate concepts? Checking for remembering? Or are they fast-paced “doyagetit” questions without substantive answers?

You worry that you will not get through the content.

Every good instructor worries about staying on track, but if this is always front of mind, consider points in the semester when deeper review and special interest points could support the integration of content. Consider an in-class review period where earlier concepts are revisited. Changing the modality can support learners who need more review as well as learners ready for an engaging challenge.