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In education, "universal design" means the preparation of curricula, materials, and environments so that they may be used, appropriately and with ease, by a wide variety of people. Universal design places responsibility for making adjustments upon the instructors and the school. Only students posing unusual special needs are expected to provide their own accommodations. The Council for Exceptional Children ( CEC) has offered a definition of universal design in education:
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An unknown number--but a growing one--of Americans find traditional times, locations, and even formats of education to be inconvenient. As a professor teaching graduate students at Hofstra, I am accustomed to meeting in person with my students once each week, for slightly under two hours each time. My colleagues who have classes with undergraduates see them twice weekly, for even shorter periods of time. This calendar is more than a century old. (That's why it is so impervious to change!) Yet for many people, it's a very inconvenient plan. Far better, for some, would be three-hour classes, every other week, so that fewer commutes to and from campus would be required. Some of those same people would find distance learning (see Chapter 6) even more convenient, because it would require very little, or actually no, commuting. Distance learning uses telecommunications technologies to deliver instruction at a distance. This holds obvious appeal for parents with very young children, older adults who risk injury when they travel during inclement weather, and people with severe disabilities or health conditions who cannot commute at all or only with great difficulty and at great expense.
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I am the only deaf professor at Hofstra, a university having 500 full-time professors and another 600 adjunct (part-time) instructors. Unlike most of my colleagues on campus, I learn best by reading, alone. They tend to learn best by listening and by interacting with other people. They enjoy going to conferences and conventions. I don't; I attend such gatherings only if I am a scheduled speaker. This is a learning-style difference, despite the fact that in this case it is traceable to the facts that I can't hear and that I grew up learning this way, because there were no interpreters in my elementary, secondary, or college classes. There are, nonetheless, people whose hearing is not impaired who learn well with this same learning style. Traditional education, featuring as it does a teacher lecturing aurally to a room filled with listeners, is not readily amenable to that kind of learning.
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