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This piece is part of our Research Into Practice series. In this series, members of our team reflect on connections between their academic training and research and their current work in digital learning and program support.

If you’re developing a course with synchronous and asynchronous elements, you have a host of options for engaging students and delivering content. Research suggests that incorporating multiple modalities increases accessibility, engagement, and learning (Mick & Middlebrook, 2015; Margolis et al., 2017). With that said, it is important to be intentional about multimodal course design. Both synchronous and asynchronous methods of delivery are effective, but activities can be better suited to one or the other modality, and synchronous time is often limited. Delivering selected content asynchronously can support students’ understanding of how information is organized and leave more time for interactivity in synchronous sessions.

In comparison to instructional videos, the role of audio-only instructional content in online learning has received scant attention. When audio-only content is discussed, the research often centers on the use of audio feedback or student-created podcasts, rather than instructor-created instructional audio. Additionally, few studies have compared learning outcomes from recorded video lectures versus from audio alone, except within the context of specific disciplines, such as second language acquisition (Berner & Adams, 2004).

This Envision piece focuses on Version 2.2 of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines, released in 2018. The UDL Guidelines have undergone multiple version updates since the release of Version 1.0 in 2008. For more details on the most recent iteration of the Guidelines, review the UDL Guidelines overview from CAST.