Paola is teaching a first-year Communications course. She has taught face-to-face classes for four years and enjoys teaching enormously. She has enjoyed being flexible with students and has established strong relationships with her students who describe feeling like she really cares about them and their success. This semester, Paola was asked to start teaching a blended course with a lot of emphasis on the flipped classroom model. Most of the class is online and students meet in person for a three-hour evening class every two weeks. Paola is excited for and comfortable with a flipped classroom model but she is reluctant to have so little in-person contact with students. She knows that her students likely have good access to technology but she is concerned that teaching Communications with so much online content will be frustrating for both her and students.

Paola decides to use UDL principles and takes five steps to support both her teaching and her students’ learning and sense of feeling imbedded in a community:

1. Paola introduces herself in a 5-minute video, giving a brief overview of the class, showing pictures of her cats, talking about a recent kayak trip to Haida Gwaii and describing her favourite part of the course. She invites students to introduce themselves by way of a quick note or video in the LMS.
2. Paola creates a module to describe the flipped classroom model and gives examples of what previous students have liked and disliked about the flipped classroom. She follows it up with a survey to solicit information specifically on accessibility concerns for the course.
3. Paola describes her rationale around activities designed online and the activities and feedback designed for the in-person time which include structured questions, and a problem-solving activity.
4. Paola includes one community-building activity each week of the course and creates a dedicated space on the LMS where the community-building activity can take place. Students can work together and with her to develop other community building activities that intersect with the content of the course or that are frivolous (e.g., do you eat or drink smoothies?)
5. Paola draws out a colour-coded map of the course content week by week, including readings, videos, hands-on experiments for home and class, suggested questions to guide in-class work, and gives students options for both learning content and expressing their knowledge. She includes a section below the map where she reminds students that her goal is to help them become content experts and experts on their own learning.

Xinli is an Emergency Management instructor. She has recently moved her class online and her first concern was the fact that students required hands-on practice. Normally she would supervise that hands-on practice and work with students very closely as they navigated scenarios. Xinli took several steps to remove barriers:

1. She sent an email to all students prior to class starting with a survey to get an idea of previous emergency management knowledge as well as the aspect of emergency management they found most compelling.
2. She thought carefully about the best way of learning procedures and how to represent that information in picture and video format, offering multiple opportunities to practice and improve without being assessed.
3. She decided to provide choices for students to practice and consult with one another by pairing them together. They would rank each other and themselves on how confident they would feel in executing the emergency management procedures under a variety of conditions.
4. Finally, Xinli created a final project where students could identify areas that they would like to practice, improve upon, or expand their expertise such as scenarios around riot management or explosives.

UDL principles helped Xinli to key into the knowledge students were bringing into the course, how they could mobilize that knowledge and develop meaningful content understanding in turn. By pairing students she created a method of immediate feedback and rehearsal. Providing multiple means of representation is key in conveying procedural knowledge by offering pictures, videos, and opportunities to reflect, observe, and rehearse what they have learned.