A. Choice and Preference

CAST recommends providing learners the opportunity to express preferences through choice, which can build autonomy (CAST, 2018a). Choice can be offered around the learning objective, but it can also be offered around the means of achieving the learning objective as well. In post-secondary settings where learning objectives (expressed as learning outcomes) are ineluctable, designing for choice around the pathways to those objectives can be an important aspect of supporting learning. Choice and preferences can enter the design in a number of ways:

• Perceived level of difficulty
• Opportunities for practice
• The context and frequency of skills practice
• The pace at which new information is presented

Samantha summed up the importance of choice well:

Now that I’m thinking about it, the only way we kind of show what we learn is through like projects and tests and discussion posts and, but I believe it would be more, it would be more fun to be able to do more hands on projects who like creating an art piece, or a portfolio and showing all your skills and, and being able to do it in a way where you’re using many different skills and techniques and being able to kind of think about it from the perspective is if you’re expressing yourself, because I find that it’s just, with the college there’s so much written content, but there’s not enough where we’re actually being creative and where we’re able to express ourselves.

Easton and Josh both indicated some design choices made by their instructors showing proactive planning of options around the action and expression network. In these cases, it is of note that the instructor focused on preferences for presenting the work, but also included an outline indicating structured requirements.

Easton: It depends on the instructor. Most of our instructors have been pretty good about giving a few different options for how we want to present our work. There’s generally like an outline of what has to be included and depending on the instructor, sometimes it has to be written or sometimes it has to be like an infographic. Usually, the most common that I’ve seen is either we have to do a however-many-page reflection, or however-many-minutes video.

Josh: She is offering, for the last couple of essays and then our final one too, she’s giving us the option to do a written essay, a presentation like slideshow presentation, or a video, like somehow do a video and with the next one it’s like create a horror film, it’s like, that’s so great to see instructors letting students explore their creativity like that’s what education should be because not everyone has the same strengths.

Rin and Ash both commented on a style of assessment that would be considered highly open to choice.

Ash: I had an English class with a professor he’s Apache native. Very cool, very into nontraditional styles of learning. He was like, “I’m gonna teach you about literature but literature is kind of whatever you want it to be” and he was like, so music and movies and all sorts of things and so he would just be like his assignments were very open ended and he was like “I don’t care when you turn things in. I prefer you to turn it in by this date but like I know that things don’t work like that,” he said “I don’t care when you turn it in.” … . It was very creative based, like make a video, write a song, write a poem, something like that, very nontraditional styles of learning, and I was able to kind of learn a lot about genres and literary devices and cliches and music and things like that, through that class that I never would have considered otherwise and it has deeply informed the ways I went about the rest of my literature classes.

Rin: He really gave you the space to learn in a way that was most meaningful for you. So we had to do reflections, um, on the readings and on the content and that kind of thing. But we could do that in whatever form we wanted. So if I wanted to hand in a poem, I could hand in a poem. If I wanted to do like a personal kind of reflection on how that um impacted my lived experience and my practiced worldview and that kind of thing, I could do that. If I wanted to, um, do some kind of art piece as long as I put in, you know, here’s a rationale for what this means, he was excited about it and encouraged it.

An interesting aspect of Rin’s comment was the idea that there was pedagogical constraint around rationale; there was choice, but it was framed through the students’ rationale for making that choice.

The theme of choice, so pivotal in the UDL framework, pervaded so much of the interviews with students. Having a choice was supportive of engagement and accessibility, allowed students to gauge their own and others’ strengths and weaknesses, and gave students a sense of curiosity and novelty. Succinctly put, choice could be characterized as a breath of fresh air. As you read through the next sections and consider designing for choice, consider where those choices can lie, what pedagogical purpose they serve, and how they interact with a sense of purpose for students.