Instructional technologies provide many opportunities to support assessment and track student performance in Blackboard.
The following articles provide details describing the best practices we regularly publish to support our pedagogical community of practice.
Showing items tagged udl. Show All
When Good Design Is Invisible: Four UMBC Faculty Share How UDL Supports Student Learning
Small design choices make learning more accessible for all.
Students in Sarah Bass’s chemistry courses who use the course-grounded AI assistant say it feels like talking to their professor. Many of their classmates, though, don’t know the assistant exists...
Posted: November 3, 2026, 2:30 PM
6 Ways to Make Humanities Content More Accessible
The text matters. So does whether students can reach it.
A student pulls up the assigned primary source the night before class: a scanned nineteenth-century pamphlet, photographed at an angle, half the page lost in shadow. She can make out maybe...
Posted: October 27, 2026, 12:00 PM
6 Ways to Make Visual and Creative Media More Accessible
Art can challenge students without creating barriers.
A student opens the image for tomorrow's critique. The assignment asks her to analyze composition, contrast, and scale, but the image description says only, "abstract painting." She knows what...
Posted: October 20, 2026, 4:59 PM
6 Ways to Make Social Science Content More Accessible
Where evidence lives shouldn't decide who can reach it.
A student opens the assigned dataset the night before discussion, ready to test a hypothesis about voting patterns in urban counties. But the chart won't resize, the color-coded legend is...
Posted: October 13, 2026, 10:00 AM
National Distance Learning Week Lunchtime Series
Join us for lunchtime conversations on Nov 2 and Nov 4
Online learning has become an established part of higher education, but its continued growth raises questions that extend well beyond enrollment. Students need flexible, high-quality learning...
Posted: October 7, 2026, 9:56 AM
6 Ways to Make Complex STEM Content More Accessible
Keep STEM rigorous while opening up student access
A student opens the problem set and finds an equation embedded as an image. She understands the math, but her screen reader can't interpret the notation. Later, the assignment asks her to analyze...
Posted: October 6, 2026, 10:00 AM
UDL at the Heart: Designing Learning with Every Student in Mind
Small design changes. Massive student impact.
Students don't all learn in the same way. They bring different experiences, strengths, needs, expectations, technologies, and approaches to learning into our courses. Yet many course designs still...
Posted: September 8, 2026, 10:00 AM
[Online-Insights] 5 Ways to Co-Create Communication Norms
Establish expectations early to build community and trust
Every student arrives in an online course with their own sense of what "respectful" or "professional" communication looks like, shaped by culture, prior schooling, workplace norms, and plenty of...
Posted: September 3, 2026, 3:45 PM
[Online Insights] 4 Strategies to Reduce Student Anxiety at the Start
The first five minutes matter in your online course
Picture a student logging into your course for the first time. They see a homepage with six modules, a syllabus buried two folders deep, and no indication of where to start. So they click around....
Posted: August 20, 2026, 2:30 PM
Accessibility, UDL & Quality Matters: Your Blueprint for Inclusive Teaching and Quality Course Design
Practical steps to make content accessible and inclusive
As part of the 19th annual National Distance Learning Week (NDLW), Instructional Technology will offer a series of sessions that underscore the importance and context of digital accessibility, how...
Posted: October 23, 2025, 5:36 PM
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