Developing teachers' competences for designing inclusive learning experiences

Abstract

Inclusive education, namely the process of providing all learners with equal educational opportunities, is a major challenge for many educational systems worldwide. In order to address this issue, a widely used framework has been developed, namely the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which aims to provide specific educational design 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 Open Educational Resources (OERs) that are available through existing OER initiatives. Within this context and following the UDL principles, teachers are expected to be able to select and transform and/or augment, OERs to fit their learners' diverse needs towards delivering inclusive learning experiences. This calls for developing specific teachers' competences that are aligned with existing competence frameworks such as the Competence Framework for Inclusive Teachers (CFIT) towards effectively engaging them in the aforementioned process. To this end, the scope of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of a teacher professional development 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' competences towards designing inclusive learning experiences for their students.