Signs of Serendipitous Universal Design for Learning in Online Courses

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a well-established framework in K-12 education in the United States, but it has been slow to advance through higher education (Tobin and Behling, 2018). One potential reason may be lack of explicit knowledge about UDL; however, extending Behling’s (2020) notion of “accidental UDL,” aspects of UDL may be serendipitously implemented by instructors and course designers without full knowledge of the framework. This study used sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005) to explore specific interview responses of 33 online instructors with ten or more years of experience in online education to explore 1) what aspects of UDL online instructors used when designing and teaching online courses and 2) what aspects of sensemaking online instructors used when describing their serendipitous use of UDL. Analysis of these questions using an adapted phronetic iterative approach (Tracy 2020) revealed several themes. First, analysis indicated that instructors used aspects of all three principles of UDL when designing and teaching their courses: Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. Second, analysis found aspects of sensemaking – noticing, bracketing, labeling, and acting – with 11 full exemplars, demonstrating instructors cognitively working through the full sensemaking framework in speaking about their serendipitous use of UDL. We suggest that sensemaking explains how instructors might serendipitously incorporate parts of UDL into their course design. Further, we suggest that sensemaking could ease instructor transitions from serendipitously implementing strategies aligned with UDL to deliberately designing a course using a robust understanding of UDL as a framework.