UDL in American colleges and universities: a common pathway to success

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has been present in higher education across the United States since the 1990s. As with most aspects of higher education, institutions in the United States have taken different paths to UDL implementation. This chapter will explore three of those paths; 1) individual faculty application of UDL for the courses that they teach, 2) academic departmental efforts to infuse UDL into the whole curriculum, and 3) university-wide promotion of UDL as a tool to promote diversity and inclusion across an institution. This chapter will tell the stories of faculty, academic departments and institutions that have successfully infused UDL into their day-to-day work across different institutional types (private, public, four-year and two-year). It will conclude with a list of recommendations from those in the field on how to get others to buy into the concept of UDL as an important teaching tool.