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Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a teaching framework aimed at accommodating the diverse needs and abilities of all learners by eliminating unnecessary barriers in education. By recognizing that each student learns differently, UDL promotes flexible approaches to instruction, ensuring that all students have equal opportunities to succeed.

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Accessibility: UDL makes learning more accessible by creating flexible classroom experiences, allowing educators to deliver meaningful learning opportunities to all students, including those with disabilities. ​

Engagement: By providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression, UDL increases student motivation and participation.​

Equity: UDL fosters an equitable learning environment by anticipating and addressing environmental barriers, thereby embracing human variability.

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Multiple Means of Representation: Presenting information in various formats (e.g., text, audio, video) to cater to different learning preferences.​

Multiple Means of Engagement: Incorporating diverse activities that tap into students' interests, offering choices to maintain motivation.​

Multiple Means of Expression: Allowing students to demonstrate their understanding through different methods, such as essays, presentations, or projects.

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Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed materials that can be used for teaching, learning, and research. Utilizing OER enhances educational accessibility and affordability, enabling educators to tailor content to their specific teaching contexts.

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Cost Savings: OER reduces the financial burden on students by providing free access to educational materials. ​Flexibility: Educators can adapt and customize OER to fit their curriculum needs, ensuring relevance and engagement.​

Scalability: OER can be distributed widely with little or no cost, making them an efficient solution for expanding educational reach.

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Supplementary Materials: Enhancing existing curricula with additional resources to address information gaps or provide alternative perspectives.​

Customized Content: Modifying OER to align with specific learning objectives or cultural contexts.​

Collaborative Learning: Encouraging students to engage with and contribute to OER, fostering a participatory learning environment.​

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Combining UDL and OER can effectively address educational gaps related to equity, accessibility, and the availability of technology resources:​

Equity: OER provides all students with free access to high-quality educational materials, reducing disparities caused by socioeconomic status. When these resources are designed using UDL principles, they cater to diverse learning needs, ensuring that every student can benefit regardless of their background or abilities.​

Accessibility: UDL emphasizes creating materials that are accessible to all learners. By applying UDL guidelines to OER, educators can develop resources that include multiple representations of content, alternative text for images, captions for videos, and other accessibility features, making learning inclusive for students with disabilities.​

Availability of Technology Resources: OER can be designed to be compatible with various devices and bandwidth conditions, ensuring that students with limited access to advanced technology can still benefit. UDL's flexible approach allows for the creation of materials that can be used both online and offline, accommodating different technological contexts.​

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UDL and OER work hand in hand to create a more inclusive and accessible learning experience for all students. UDL is all about designing lessons that work for different learning styles and abilities, while OER provides free, adaptable resources that can be customized to meet those needs. When combined, they help close educational gaps by ensuring that cost, ability, or learning differences don’t become barriers to success. Both approaches focus on flexibility and making sure every student has an equal opportunity to learn.

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How UDL & OER Apply to My Career as an Educator

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How UDL & OER Apply to My Career as an Educator

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As a future educator, I see myself using both UDL and OER in my classroom to make learning more engaging and accessible. UDL will help me design lessons that reach all students, whether they need different ways to process information or express their understanding. At the same time, OER will give me the flexibility to bring in high-quality materials without worrying about cost, allowing me to adapt resources to fit my students’ needs. Together, they’ll help me create a learning environment where every student feels supported and included.

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Learn about CAST’s Universal Design for Learning framework, fostering inclusive educational experiences and improving learning outcomes for all learners.

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Education is essential to advancing society. It's how we pass down the wealth of human knowledge and equip the next generation of leaders, innovators and productive members of society. Our educational systems are built to provide every person the opportunity to build a better life-by turning children into citizens, learners into teachers, laborers into skilled workers.

Expanding educational opportunities is more possible now than it has ever been before. Through the Internet, learners can find information instantly on virtually any topic, teachers can share their knowledge with students on another continent almost as easily as in their own classroom, and educational materials can be disseminated to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost.

However, our systems for sharing information in education have not caught up with the potential of 21st century technology. Instead, the educational materials market is held captive by legacy publishing models that actively restrict the dissemination and innovative use of resources in a world that craves educational opportunities. Textbook prices have continued to rise rapidly, leaving too many students without access to their required materials. Digital offerings from traditional publishers come laced with access restrictions and expiration dates with little savings in return, and print editions are too often out of date by the time they hit the shelves.
For too long, our educational systems have operated with a fundamental disconnect between practices left over from the analog world, and the vast potential of technology and the Internet to support more affordable, effective teaching and learning. The movement for Open Education seeks to close this gap.
Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.

The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource-anytime, anywhere. "Open" permissions are typically defined in terms of the "5R's": users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.

Why Open Education

Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200 per book, and K-12 schools use books many years out of date because they are too expensive to replace. Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever. Resources that would otherwise go to purchasing textbooks can be redirected toward technology, improving instruction, or reducing debt.

Students learn more when they have access to quality materials. The rapidly rising cost of textbooks in higher education has left many students without access to the materials they need to succeed. Studies show that 93% of students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials, since they have easy access to the content starting day one of the course.

Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning. Open Education ensures that teachers, learners and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2018 election, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. Imagine a lecture attended by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, or a peer-to-peer exchange between Canadian students learning Mandarin with Chinese students learning English or French. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open.

Better education means a better future. Education is the key to advancing society's greatest goals, from a building a strong economy to leading healthy lives. By increasing access to education and creating a platform for more effective teaching and learning, Open Education benefits us all.

SPARC's Work

Open Education Leadership Program: SPARC's professional development program to empower library professionals as leaders for open education on campus.

LibOER Discussion Group: Vibrant community of practice of library professionals working open education, including a discussion list and monthly calls.

Connect OER: Join our platform to share and discover information about OER activities across North America, and read our annual report.

OER State Policy Resources: Check out our OER State Policy Tracker for the latest developments, or download the OER State Policy Playbook.

OER Digest: SPARC co-authors this bi-weekly newsletter for open education updates, opportunities, and reminders.

OER Mythbusting: Collaboratively developed resource dispelling the most common OER myths.

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Education is essential to advancing society. It's how we pass down the wealth of human knowledge and equip the next generation of leaders, innovators and productive members of society. Our educational systems are built to provide every person the opportunity to build a better life-by turning children into citizens, learners into teachers, laborers into skilled workers.

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Open Author helps you build and publish Open Educational Resources for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.

Learn more about creating OER

Groups provides a flexible environment to organize, create, share, and discuss resources with others in your network. Collaborate with group members, tag and add resources to shared folders, create your own collections, all within a public or private group.

Groups

Search through collections curated by our digital librarians

Collections

Common Core resources organized for your needs

Common Core

Hubs

A Custom Resource Center

Projects, districts, states, and initiatives make use of Hubs to bring groups of educators together to create, organize, and share OER collections that meet their common goals. Explore Hubs

Microsites

Custom Digital Libraries

Microsites are custom, flexible sites that include all the features available on OER Commons. Microsites allow your users to search resource collections using a custom taxonomy at a unique URL. Contact Us

Our award-winning OER Professional Learning programs support instructors and curriculum specialists to gain the necessary skills required to find, adapt, and evaluate high quality open materials.

In-person and virtual OER workshops help focus instructors to develop a "commons" mindset, to experience the benefits of open processes using the platform's tools, collaborative features, and workflows. This can include using Open Author for creating, remixing, and publishing shared curriculum.

Learn More

How to Search OER Commons

View all How-to videos

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OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement.

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AEM Center - National Center on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST

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The National Center on Accessible Educational Materials for Learning at CAST provides technical assistance, coaching, and resources to increase the availability and use of accessible educational materials and technologies for learners with disabilities across the lifespan.