References
CAST. (2024). The UDL guidelines. udlguidelines.cast.org. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
CPE. (2025, October 13). Kentucky graduate profile. Retrieved February 13, 2026, from https://cpe.ky.gov/ourwork/kygradprofile.html
Moriarty, A., & Scarffe, P. (2019). Universal design for learning and strategic leadership. In (pp. 50–68). Transforming Higher Education Through Universal Design for Learning. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351132077-4
Novak, K. (2022). UDL now! (3rd ed.) [Audiobook]. CAST Professional Publishing.
Peña, E. V., Stapleton, L., Brown, K. R., Broido, E. M., Stygles, K. N., & Rankin, S. (2018). A Universal research Design for student affairs scholars and practitioners. College student affairs journal, 36(2), 1–14. Retrieved February 13, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1353/csj.2018.0012
Transcript:
Chase Durrance (00:01)
Universal Design for Learning supports our workforce development and I am going to tell you how. Are you ready for some bite-sized? I think you're ready for some bite-sized. Let's go ahead and dive in.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Byte-sized. I am so glad that you all are here and I'm glad that we can continue our conversation about education and think about how we can make these big topics feel just a little bit more digestible. Before we get started, I want to check in with everybody. How are y'all doing? Is everybody doing okay? The world is heavy. I find it's heavy, mustering even the energy sometimes to
record even sitting in my room, my home office by myself and with my cat, it becomes a challenge sometimes because the weight of the world is heavy. So I hope everyone is prioritizing caring for themselves and finding small moments in the day to just be okay and to check in with yourself and make sure that you're doing all right. But I started the episode with talking about universal design for learning and how it supports workforce development and to that end,
I want to follow through with that promise. let's talk a little bit first about why people pursue college in the first place. So think about it. Why did you go to college? Maybe you went because your parents told you to. Maybe you went because your friends went. Maybe you went because you'd seen movies and it seemed like a fun time.
Maybe you went because you're that uniquely motivated student who wanted to do a particular type of work and you knew you had to get to college to do so. Whatever the reason was, ultimately people pursue college for a lot of different reasons, hopefully to lead toward gainful employment. That sounds all well and good. And teaching college students is challenging in the best of circumstances, but we also know that college students are becoming increasingly
How many of you are practitioners, whether faculty, staff, or otherwise, and you all keep thinking, wow, these students are arriving at our doors with more and more stuff. They got a lot of life going on. And working in a community college, our students certainly have a lot of life going on. But it certainly feels like in the last few years, the weight of life has been heavy for people.
By 2016 alone, one in 10 college students in the United States reported having a disability. That's a lot. One out of every 10 in a classroom of 30 students. You're talking about three who have a disability and that's 10 years ago. How many of us anecdotally can identify that over the last five, 10 years, it seems like more and more students have self-disclosed, hey, I have ADHD. Hey, I have autism.
hey, I need some support with this. The narrative is shifting and that's fantastic because we're reducing stigma around mental health, around disability as a whole. And so there's much more open dialogue about that. But as a result of that, I'd be willing to wager that number is higher than one in 10 in the year 2026. So how do we wrap our arms around all of this? And how do we get a true sense of how many students
are affected by disability? Well, I think it's tough, and it's tough for a lot of different reasons. Number one, some disability is not visible. While some physical disabilities may be, many are not. In the case of learning disabilities, for example, you probably know a lot of people who have a learning disability, and you have no idea that they do. But because of that, it requires an element of self-disclosure.
The student has to tell us that they have a disability, that they need support.
That said, it also becomes difficult to study the population because students with disabilities can be skeptical of research. You have to imagine if you've ever been sick and you've ever sought a diagnosis to figure out what was going on and what kind of help you can get, think about the number of visits and doctors and calls and different things you've had to field just to get to that point. You've probably been poked and prodded and studied and researched and...
By the time that someone comes around and says they want to do some academic research, I could absolutely see cases in which individuals say, you know what, that's not for me. I don't feel good about that. And I think that's reasonable.
So now what we need to do is we need to reconcile knowing we have an increasing population of students who have disabilities or students who just have more complex needs generally, while knowing that we're not going to be able to pinpoint and necessarily show the data of exactly how many students that is. So what do we do? How do we ensure that they can still learn? Well, in the college and university setting, think universal design for learning is a great way for us to think about
how we can jump over the hurdle of all of this disclosure and research and finding out who's who and how many people we have in a particular population. Universal Design for Learning, as we've talked about, it says that learners have complex needs, needs that change daily even, maybe even throughout the course of the day. And you don't have to have a disability in order to have complex needs that change.
Within the college setting, what we're doing as we develop workers, people to go into the workforce to be professionals, we need to be thinking about what their lives will be like as professionals. What are the kinds of things they're going to have to do? They're going to have to solve problems. They're going to have to deal with people. They're going to have to work with challenging situations.
All of these are the types of things that we need to be building in the college setting that may even exist outside of the curriculum, right? Outside of math and English. So how do we build those skills? Well, much in the way that we're gonna support our students with disabilities, we can also use Universal Design for Learning, a framework that is designed to help students reconcile things like making choices.
we're going to use that to our advantage. And if we do that, we can help build some of the soft skills that employers are consistently identifying as gaps within their employment force.
So according to Moriarty and Scharf, an article that's linked below here, this speaks to moving from a medical model of disability to a social model of disability. We're not saying that students with disabilities need to be fixed through universal design for learning. Rather, we're saying that disability is a natural form of diversity. That through the course of working with people, we will encounter people who have disabilities. And that's great. We have an opportunity to support them.
to learn from them and to help build skills in their lives that then allow them to contribute to the world in the way that's meaningful for them.
So how do we embrace this? And when we think about embracing diversity, a challenging concept in 2026, if you look at the political landscape and legislation that exists across the United States, it's hard to think about that, but we all are different people and diversity is a positive. It is, it's good that we're different. We can learn from that. We can...
have richer experiences as a result of that. But in today's climate, and the reason I mention that is that that alone may not be a strong enough argument. People may need more because state legislatures may have explicitly banned people from creating initiatives on the basis that they support diversity. But what if the initiative supports the development of our workforce?
Skills gaps cost employers an estimated $200 billion annually. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of time and money and effort that employers are pumping into making sure that the people they've hired, people they've hired ostensibly because they already had the skills that they needed for the job, that they're doing to make up that deficit, to train them in all these sorts of soft skills that we talk about often.
In Kentucky, we describe these as 10 essential skills. And these are what Katie Novak describes as next-gen skills. She describes four categories of next-gen skills that students need to earn. Knowledge of core subject, learning and innovation, career and life skills, and importance of productivity and accountability. Now, if we think about applying that to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we have 10 essential skills and those skills
include communication, professionalism, critical and creative thinking, civic engagement, quantitative reasoning, collaboration and teamwork, interpersonal relations, knowledge application, adaptability and leadership, and information literacy.
As we think about those skills, both in terms of how they're framed by Katie Novak in NextGen or Kentucky in the Ten Essential Skills, think of how many of those overlap with some of these core concepts of universal design for learning. As we talk about students becoming better communicators, creative thinkers who advocate for themselves. Things like critical creative thinking, engagement.
collaboration, application. These are the types of skills that we're trying to build through Universal Design for Learning. And they're skills that exist and are named because employers want these skills. The workforce craves individuals who have these abilities. And we can build many of these through Universal Design for Learning. So what are a couple strategies we can think of in order for us to move in that direction? Well, let's think about a couple of different things.
Number one, not all of us are in the classroom and not all of us can affect what's going on in the classroom. I am a staff member, I am a dean of students and I am a supportive function, I don't teach. So what I can do is I can become a UDL champion. I can advocate for thinking about different ways to present information, to represent information for students, different ways to engage them.
different ways for them to show their learning in the context that I have agency in. So for example, orientation, that's a function that I represent, it's a function that I supervise, and there is real teaching that happens in that space. That's where I can really not just apply UDL, but I can model for other people, because that's a big group of people. I can model for them how we can think about things a little bit differently. And whether or not I explicitly say,
These are concepts of universal design for learning. If I do say, hey, can we think about maybe a video option for students who might not read at a great level or feel super comfortable with reading or decoding text? Or hey, what about an audio option? Because I know we've got a lot of adults who have kids and it's been a long day and they work and they fed their kids and they're trying to do dishes and they can still hear a little bit of good information if we just had an audio option.
Those are ways that I am in control of that I can model universal design for learning concepts. When I present, I can create examples that feel relevant to students' lives. These are small things that we can do to integrate these changes of universal design for learning.
Other things that we can do, we can think about curricula that's flexible, that's adaptable, that allows for multiple forms of engagement. So if you are a faculty member or perhaps you're someone who supports faculty members, ask those types of questions. Could there be a different way that we could show this information or display this information? Could we make it a little bit more dynamic for students? Could we think about students who have disabilities?
I'm reminded of a colleague of mine who shared an idea that if we build supports for the most vulnerable, those who need them the most, then theoretically everyone who is less vulnerable, more supported than them, should be okay. And that's what Universal Design for Learning is saying here is that if we create these supports, if we already think about designing materials for those who are the most in need, and remember,
Let's go back to earlier, we were talking about the idea of moving away from this understanding of disability through a medical model to a social model. Disability is just part of life, and it's not something we have to shy away from or whisper about. We can talk about it, we can engage with it, we can work with students and celebrate them, but we have to support them too. And a great way to do that is to go ahead and design the programs that we implement, the curriculum that we're sharing, the lessons that we're teaching.
Why don't we go ahead and just think about designing them with those individuals in mind? And if we do that, then think about how many hoops we don't have to jump through. How many times we don't have to have back and forth email exchanges about whether or not someone's registered for a service or whether or not someone has their paperwork submitted or what does this particular type of accommodation means. We here, we meet students where they are and we support them in a variety of different ways because we understand
that students, whether or not they have a documented learning disability or physical disability, we understand their capacity is going to change. And by giving them some choices, not an unlimited number of choices, but a few choices, we can then build some of that self-efficacy.
So let's roll the tape for a second. How does this all play out?
If we spend some time with students and they understand that there's going to be choice, and they understand that they're going to be agents in their experience, and they understand they can advocate for themselves and their needs, but that they still have to meet the expectations that are set, that having choice is not a way to bypass expectations, but having choice is just about allowing people to meet those expectations a little bit differently. And if we can do that,
Think about what that looks like when they arrive to their jobs. Think about that employee who shows up and understands how to think critically and think outside of the box and how much differently they approach a project than the person who's been told, okay, I'm going to hand you this, I want you to read it, and then I want you to take a test on this information. Do what I say and tell me what I've told you. And then why would we be surprised when they arrive to work and they need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it?
Choice is powerful for our students and to get their buy-in we need to give them choice. And we need to explain to them why we're giving them choice because it's important. Because we want them to co-create this plan for their learning with us, to be active in this plan with us, and that we want to build the skills that will translate for them in the workforce. So do I think that universal design for learning addresses all of the workforce challenges in the world? No, I don't.
But do I think that it could move the needle with some of those soft skills, the essential skills that we're talking about in building in this next generation? I do. So as you think about your context, whether you're in the classroom or out of it, in the college or university setting, think about how universal design for learning, representing information differently, connecting it to relevant context, to giving people different ways to show that they know what they know.
How could that create for students not just a better experience in that moment, but a better ultimate experience in the workforce?
I want to say thank you for spending some time with me as we continue to unpack and take a small bite out of the big issues in higher education. Until next time, thank you so much and have the best day that you can.
