Digital Text: Exploring Stages Towards Universal Design for Learning

We live in an environment of rapidly evolving technology. Computer-related (digital) technology is perhaps the most wide-reaching area of these changes. Digital technologies pervade our everyday lives, and are making their way into educational contexts. They can make educational content more accessible to students with diverse needs. Digital text specifically holds great potential for creating accessible content.;The principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) promote the creation of curricular content that is flexible enough to meet the needs of all learners, including those with disabilities and those with different learning strengths and weaknesses. By building in options of which all learners can take advantage, UDL enables the customization of content to each individual's unique optimal learning environment. Digital text has much to offer towards the development of such UDL content. Development of UDL content is time and resource intensive however, and it is therefore worth investigating whether students use and benefit from any of the affordances of digital text.;The purpose of this study was to investigate how graduate students choose to interact with and learn from different types of digital text in an academic context. Students from three sections of two high-enrollment graduate-level courses were surveyed and interviewed about their interactions with first-degree digital text (scanned images of a printed page) and third-degree digital text (UDL enhanced digital text with supports and scaffolds built in).;Findings suggest that students are generally comfortable with and prefer digital content. Most students chose to read content digitally rather than printing it out. They demonstrated willingness to explore new tools and expressed appreciation for the availability of UDL enhancements. Participants employed a variety of strategies for processing each type of digital content, and used supports strategically as part of their learning experience. Students in this study accessed support tools in the enhanced digital content much more frequently than they pursued outside support with non-enhanced content. This study helps inform institutions of higher education in their decisions on the strategic investment of resources for updating course materials to better serve current students in a technology-saturated world.