Welcome!
My name is Jeni Dulek, and I teach OTD715: Practitioner as Educator in the entry-level occupational therapy doctorate (OTD) program at Pacific University. The course introduces students to instructional design and teaching-learning principles for use in client education, academic settings, and other situations and settings where occupational therapists provide education to others. Course delivery is fully online, and students typically experience many of the barriers to learning in online courses that are cited in the literature. So I set out to change that using Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This project is the result of those efforts.
Even more than that, though, it is the result of a deeply rewarding and meaningful partnership with my students. At the point that the course had been updated enough that I felt comfortable saying that it had been designed using UDL principles - in the Summer of 2021 - 30 students were enrolled, and another group of 10 completed it in Fall 2021. Their responses told me that the changes I had made were effective, and their suggestions (and even their criticisms) helped me to make things even more effective. I have continued to make changes to the course design, with their enthusiasm, appreciation, and feedback inspiring and guiding me. The course is what it is today thanks to them. And I am the instructor I am today because of them, too.
I developed this website with assistance from several students in order to document my application of the UDL guidelines to the course. It includes many practical examples as well as students' perspectives. I have presented on the course redesign on several occasions, and this website also serves as a companion site to those presentations, so you can find downloadable files and related bibliographies. Please feel free to browse, access resources, and reach out if you'd like to connect!
Even more than that, though, it is the result of a deeply rewarding and meaningful partnership with my students. At the point that the course had been updated enough that I felt comfortable saying that it had been designed using UDL principles - in the Summer of 2021 - 30 students were enrolled, and another group of 10 completed it in Fall 2021. Their responses told me that the changes I had made were effective, and their suggestions (and even their criticisms) helped me to make things even more effective. I have continued to make changes to the course design, with their enthusiasm, appreciation, and feedback inspiring and guiding me. The course is what it is today thanks to them. And I am the instructor I am today because of them, too.
I developed this website with assistance from several students in order to document my application of the UDL guidelines to the course. It includes many practical examples as well as students' perspectives. I have presented on the course redesign on several occasions, and this website also serves as a companion site to those presentations, so you can find downloadable files and related bibliographies. Please feel free to browse, access resources, and reach out if you'd like to connect!
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