DUGi

Developing Teachers’ Competences for Designing Inclusive Learning Experiences

http://dugi.udg.edu/item/http:@@@@hdl.handle.net@@2072@@284971

Inclusive education, namely the process of providing all learners with equal educational opportunities, is a majorchallenge for many educational systems worldwide. In order to address this issue, a widely used framework hasbeen developed, namely the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which aims to provide specific educationaldesign guidelines to ensure accessibility of all learner types to the learning environment. On the other hand,nowadays teachers are provided with ample opportunities for freely accessing a wide number of OpenEducational Resources (OERs) that are available through existing OER initiatives. Within this context andfollowing the UDL principles, teachers are expected to be able to select and transform and/or augment, OERs tofit their learners’ diverse needs towards delivering inclusive learning experiences. This calls for developingspecific teachers’ competences that are aligned with existing competence frameworks such as the CompetenceFramework for Inclusive Teachers (CFIT) towards effectively engaging them in the aforementioned process. Tothis end, the scope of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of a teacher professionaldevelopment program (PDP) aligned with CFIT for designing inclusive OERs by applying the UDL principles.The evaluation results of the teacher PDP demonstrated its added value for developing teachers’ competencestowards designing inclusive learning experiences for their students

International Forum of Educational Technology & Society