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Instructor Spotlight: Max Krasnow on Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

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"It really means caring enough that your teaching is accessible to your students and recognizing the fact that your students are a diverse audience."
Max Krasnow is an instructor at Harvard Extension School. In this Instructor Spotlight, Dr. Krasnow shares his thoughts on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and provides tips on how to include UDL principles in his class.

As part of the Inclusive Teaching Institute’s initiatives, we are engaging in conversations with instructors to highlight their inclusive teaching practices to share with you. Our first Instructor Spotlight features Max Krasnow who discusses how he uses Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to make learning accessible for all of his students.

Currently, Max is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School (HES) teaching in the Masters of Liberal Arts Program in Psychology. Previously, he taught at Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in the Psychology Department. Through his teaching at Harvard, Max continuously thinks about new ways to infuse UDL and shared:

Universal Design for Learning was actually a term that I heard fairly recently, but I think it’s a philosophy that many of us can understand on an intuitive level pretty easily. It really means caring enough that your teaching is accessible to your students and recognizing the fact that your students are a diverse audience.

Below is a video of my conversation with Max along with a written resource of his UDL tips and tricks:

 

UDL Strategies Shared by HES Instructor Max Krasnow UDL in Practice

Making Teaching Accessible & Democratizing Education

  • Make learning accessible to all your students
  • Recognize the diversity of your students
  • Reach your students from around the world through online teaching
  • Democratize education by delivering the same content to all students
  • Ensure to make learning accessible through your course content and design, not just by providing access to the Zoom recording

 

UDL Strategies: Designing Accessible Content & Leveraging Resources

  • Design slides to be read by screen reading programs for students to understand what you are talking about if they are not able to see the slides, which applies not only to students who are visually imparied, but for all students. 
    • Resource: Screen reader (from Digital Accessibility Services at Harvard)
       
  • View Canvas online course page layouts through the accessibility checker, which is a built-in feature on Canvas that helps you see the page layout from the perspective of a student using accessibility software and offers suggestions to improve the display elements.
  • Plan how videos will be delivered to students and ensure to have closed captioning of videos, which applies not only to students who are hearing impaired, but for all students. YouTube has an automatic caption generation, which can be used as a repository for course videos.
  • Think about the diversity of your students and design course content and materials in advance. Anticipate that you might have access issues in your course and plan ahead for this to enhance your learning experiences for all students and not only for students experiencing access issues.
     

UDL Key Take-Away: Representing Content through Diverse Formats
 

  • Understand that representation, your positionality, and the challenges students face, matters, which helps you support students to creatively problem-solve.

To highlight the UDL and social justice principle that representation matters and the challenges you may experience as an instructor, Max states:

There are a lot of ways that I cannot represent the backgrounds of my students, but I can let my brain represent as many of them as I can. If I learn about their diverse backgrounds, that helps me appreciate where they are coming from and it helps me design the course with them in mind.

Try out some of the UDL strategies that Max shared in your own course for you to teach and reach all of your students.

For support with digital accessibility for your course, reach out to Accessibility Services at HES.

If you would like to share an inclusive teaching practice that you tried out, feel free to reach out to me at zahraahmed@g.harvard.edu.

With gratitude,

Zahra