Sponsor/year: Faculty of Arts and Education, 2014.

Project leads: Dr Petra Brown, Dr Mary Dracup, Robyn Everist, Christine Oughtred, Corinna Ridley.

Aims: Redesign and redevelop a unit to introduce students to university study using Universal Design for Learning principles.

Underpinning theories/literature:

• Universal Design for Learning in higher education: website with explanations, examples of how UDL is applied in higher education.
• Transition pedagogy: article defining a pedagogy for teaching diverse commencing students.
• Authentic learning: website with explanation of authentic learning, examples.
• Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does: authoritative text on constructive alignment).
• Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding: video introduction to principles of constructive alignment.
• The ‘academic literacies’ model: theory and applications: article explaining the concept of academic literacies.

• Accessible: The unit CloudDeakin site has accessible design and content, including captioned, transcribed videos, high-contrast colours, readable fonts, a style sheet, etc.
• Expert support on-tap: Librarians and language and learning advisers lend their considerable expertise in meeting beginning students’ needs by teaching several topics and answering students’ queries via online discussion threads. Evaluation comments show that students enjoy these sessions and appreciate the personal support these staff provide on-campus and online.
• Authentic learning design: The assessments are authentic tasks for university students, and build on each other so that students have a chance to respond to personalised feedback from their peers and tutors, and finally present a carefully researched, polished piece of work. Rubrics, templates and examples of high quality assessments demystify requirements and guide students to perform at their best.
• Constructive alignment: Intended learning outcomes, weekly learning activities and assessments are strongly aligned so that students immediately recognise the relevance of their tasks. A visual curriculum map makes these connections explicit.
• Active, collaborative activities: On-campus seminars are built around active, hands-on, collaborative activities to demystify academic tasks and build students’ skills step-by-step. Cloud students have equivalent active learning experiences in regular BB-Collaborate sessions.
• Self-assessments: Weekly self-tests on CloudDeakin and on-campus in engaging ‘quiz-show’ activities help students review key concepts and identify areas of weakness. They are encouraged to set personal learning goals and prompted to reflect regularly on their progress, which culminates in an assessed reflective essay.

• Student success rates: The overall student success rate rose 7.5% in the new unit’s first trimester (Trimester 1 2015), in comparison to the previous unit. In the same trimester, success rates for low socioeconomic (LSES) students rose 13.2%, Cloud students rose 12.8%, first-in-family-to-university students rose 11.4%, and low-ATAR students rose by 17.4%. The overall student success rate over the unit’s first 5 trimesters has been consistently at or above Faculty and University averages (SIPU).An alternative format may be downloaded here: AIX160 success rates 2015 – 2016 (DOCX 17KB)
• Retention: Retention of all students who passed the unit in Trimester 1 2015 until Trimester 2 2016 was 7.1% higher than retention of students who did not study the subject in this period. Retention of LSES students in the cohort was 9.3% higher in the same period (SIPU).
• Student satisfaction: eVALUate satisfaction rate overall has been 5% higher than Faculty average over 5 trimesters (eVALUate).
• Key learning areas: Students identified four key learning areas: practical skills (e.g. assessment writing); learning about learning; transition to university; and skills and attitudes that were relevant to university as well as for working life (e.g. teamwork, time management) (internal evaluation report).
• Staff capacity building: Project partners developed increased capacity to design and deliver inclusive curriculum (Dracup et al. 2016 publications).
• University awards: The project design, implementation and evaluation team won a 2016 VC Award for Outstanding Contribution to Partnerships and a 2016 Arts and Education Faculty Commendation for Teaching Excellence – Team Teaching award.

• AIX160 Curriculum map was developed as an html file designed to be uploaded to and edited in your CloudDeakin unit site. Download the Curriculum map (ZIP 104KB) and follow the Curriculum map upload instructions (DOC 25KB).
• Dracup, M 2015, Applying UDL in an ‘introduction to university’ unit evaluation report (DOCX 500KB), unpublished paper, Faculty of Arts & Education and Equity & Diversity Division, Geelong, Victoria.
• Dracup, M, Brown, P, Ryan, J, Ridley, C & Oughtred, C 2016, ‘Collaborating around universal design for learning: from policy to practice’, HERDSA Conference, 4 – 7 July.
• Dracup, M, Brown, P, Ryan, J, Ridley, C & Oughtred, C 2016, ‘Partners by Design: A Case Study in Inclusive Pedagogy’, STARS Conference, 29 June – 2 July.