Foundations
Inclusive curriculum design rests on seven bodies of knowledge. Design frameworks supply the structure, pedagogy supplies the values, and systems knowledge determines whether the result survives the first round of edits.
None is sufficient on its own. A course designed from frameworks alone tends to be technically sound and culturally narrow; a course designed from values alone tends to be well intentioned and structurally unchanged.
Learning design theory
Backward design and constructive alignment start from intended outcomes and work back to assessments and activities. They are equity instruments as much as structural ones, because they force the question of whose knowledge counts before any content is written.
Inclusive and anti-oppressive pedagogy
Social position — race, class, gender, disability, language — shapes access to learning in ways that content, assessment format and classroom dynamics can either reinforce or interrupt. This lens supplies the method for finding deficit assumptions already present in a curriculum.
Whose knowledge counts
Which scholarly traditions are treated as authoritative, and which are absent or subordinated, is a structural question about the curriculum rather than a question about reading lists. It bears directly on what is accepted as a valid demonstration of competence.
Universal Design for Learning
UDL supplies a structure for building flexibility in from the outset, across engagement, representation, and action and expression. It shifts the design question from how to accommodate learners who do not fit to what the design assumes about who learners are.
Digital accessibility
Captioned media, alternative text, readable document structure and keyboard-operable interfaces are the technical floor for digital course content. They apply to slides, documents, video, assessments and LMS pages alike, and they are complementary to inclusive pedagogy rather than a separate workstream.
Belonging and psychological safety
A structurally inclusive course is necessary but not sufficient. Learners also have to experience their presence and their ways of knowing as valued, which makes relational design — interaction norms, facilitation, community structure — a design variable rather than a soft consideration.
Accommodation, equity and governance
Human rights law in Canada establishes a duty to accommodate to the point of undue hardship, and federal and provincial accessibility legislation adds duties to plan for and remove barriers. Accommodation is a floor. Design that reduces the need for it is the work this resource describes.
Structural inclusion and retrofitted inclusion. Structural inclusion is built into outcomes, assessment, content, delivery and community design from the start. Retrofitted inclusion is a statement in the syllabus, one alternative format added after the fact, or a single guest speaker asked to represent a whole community. The distinction determines whether a learner encounters access or a gesture toward it, and it is the distinction every decision in this resource turns on.
Process
Six stages, in the order they are carried out. The process is iterative: material is developed, tested with the people closest to the learning, and revised before and after launch.
Scope and timeline determine which stages are most intensive in any given project. Stages two and three carry the most consequence, because outcomes and assessment set the constraints everything downstream has to work within.
Stage 1 Establish intake and context
Understanding the learning environment before designing for it
The work begins by establishing who the learners are: their professional contexts, prior experience, language backgrounds, access needs and the communities they serve. It also establishes what the institution already knows about where learners struggle, and what the real constraints are — platform capability, faculty capacity, assessment governance, timeline.
Subject matter experts hold disciplinary and contextual knowledge that shapes everything downstream. Treating this stage as preliminary rather than substantive is a common reason that redesigns produce material which does not land.
- A shared account of the learner population, context and known barriers
- Documented institutional constraints and design parameters
- An inventory of existing expertise and material
- Agreement on scope, timeline and who holds decision-making authority
Stage 2 Develop learning outcomes
Determining what learners will be able to do, and for whom
Learning outcomes are the first equity decision in a course. They determine what counts as learning, which ways of demonstrating competence are treated as legitimate, and what the assessment will have to measure.
Outcome development asks whether the outcomes are genuinely discipline-relevant, whether they permit more than one way of demonstrating knowledge, whether they are written in language a learner can act on, and whether they reflect the professional contexts learners will actually enter.
- Measurable, discipline-authentic outcomes aligned to programme goals
- Outcomes mapped to assessment methods and learning activities
- A shared statement of what success looks like in this context
Stage 3 Design assessment
Separating the outcome from the conditions of demonstrating it
Assessment is where inclusion most often breaks down, because format can exclude learners who have fully achieved the outcome. A timed written examination taken in a second language measures language proficiency and processing speed alongside disciplinary knowledge. An oral presentation requirement can exclude learners with communication disabilities regardless of the depth of their understanding.
What makes an alternative format rigorous is the quality of the criteria, not the uniformity of the format. Criteria developed with subject matter experts, published before learners begin and applied consistently across formats keep the format a means of demonstrating competence rather than a route around it. Transparent criteria also reduce the hidden advantage held by learners already familiar with academic convention.
- An assessment strategy aligned to the outcomes
- Flexible formats where the outcome permits them, with shared criteria
- A rationale that can be put to a committee or an accreditor
Stage 4 Develop content and modality
Multiple means, and delivery that does not degrade
Content is developed in working cycles with subject matter experts rather than handed off after a single design session. UDL principles shape each decision: whether material is available in more than one format, whether it assumes a particular language background or cultural reference point, and whether the practitioners represented in examples reflect the field.
Delivery mode carries its own requirements. Online delivery requires content that meets WCAG. Hybrid delivery requires deliberate design so that neither mode is a reduced version of the other. In-person delivery requires attention to physical access, sensory access and psychological safety.
- Multimodal material developed iteratively with subject matter experts
- Digital content meeting WCAG: captions, alternative text, navigable documents and pages
- Content sequenced for the actual learner population rather than an assumed one
- Examples and representations that reflect the field as it is
Stage 5 Review with learners and experts
The people closest to a barrier are the most reliable guide to it
Before a course goes live, a structured review cycle involves the people who will use it. Learners with disabilities, learners from underrepresented backgrounds and learners from different professional contexts reliably surface barriers that designers and subject matter experts working together did not anticipate. This is a design input, not a validation step.
Review is structured: specific tasks, specific questions, specific dimensions of the experience to evaluate, and systematic documentation of what is observed. Accessibility testing against WCAG happens here, automated first and then manually with assistive technologies.
- Documented feedback organised by theme and priority
- WCAG findings for all digital content
- Targeted revisions to content, assessment and navigation
- A record of what changed and why, usable by governance and future iterations
Stage 6 Launch, iterate and hand off
Keeping the design intact after the designers leave
Launch is not the end of the design process. Learner experience data, facilitator observation and formal evaluation surface information that was not available beforehand. A documented handoff ensures that whoever maintains the course understands its rationale, so that later edits do not reintroduce barriers that were deliberately removed.
Sustained inclusive design depends on institutional infrastructure: accessible templates, design guidelines, procurement standards, and faculty development that builds capacity rather than delivering a single session.
- A documented design rationale to guide maintenance
- An evaluation framework for tracking learner experience and emerging barriers
- Recommendations for the institutional systems the course depends on
Decisions
Seven choices that determine what a curriculum design project will produce. Each can be answered more than one way, and each answer has a cost.
These are settled early and constrain everything afterwards. Naming them in advance lets the person commissioning the work recognise later whether they received the project they needed.
Scope
How much of the curriculum is in scope?A module is useful for piloting an approach before committing to it. A course is the most common unit and the one where a full design cycle fits. A programme or credential reveals patterns that no single course exposes, such as where the same barrier recurs at every level. Institutional scope addresses policies, templates and design standards, and changes the conditions rather than the artefact. Wider scope buys pattern recognition at the cost of depth in any one place.
Entry point
What is the starting condition?A new build allows outcomes, assessment and content to be designed together, and is the entry point where inclusive design costs least. A redesign rebuilds an existing course on different principles. A retrofit adds accessibility to material whose underlying assumptions are unchanged, which can produce a course that passes an audit and still excludes learners. An audit-first start reviews before deciding what to change. Retrofit is sometimes the only realistic option; what matters is naming it as one, along with the redesign it defers.
Assessment format
How much choice in format, and on what basis is it defended?Format choice is defensible when each option maps to the same outcome and is judged against the same published criteria. Four objections recur. On academic integrity: tasks tied to a specific professional context are generally harder to produce dishonestly than standardised ones, because they require application rather than recall. On comparability: comparability comes from shared criteria, not identical formats, as it already does in professional licensure. On validity: an assessment better aligned to its outcome is the more valid measure. On governance: a documented rationale, showing how each format maps to the outcome, is the response a committee can act on.
Participation
Whose knowledge shapes the design?Subject matter experts are needed in every project. Learners are the most reliable source of information about friction in a design. Community members matter where the curriculum trains practitioners serving specific communities. Equity specialists matter where the work involves domain-specific equity questions. The distinction that decides the outcome is consultation against co-design: consultation invites reaction to decisions already made, co-design involves people in making them.
Delivery mode
What access requirements does the mode itself create?Online delivery requires content that meets WCAG and an LMS structure that can be navigated by keyboard and screen reader. Hybrid delivery requires deliberate design so that neither mode is the lesser one, which is more work than either mode alone. In-person delivery requires physical access, sensory access and attention to psychological safety. A blended programme requires coherence across all of these. The mode is chosen for reasons that are usually not about access, so its access consequences have to be surfaced deliberately.
Constraints
Which constraints are fixed, and which are habitual?LMS capability, assessment governance, faculty capacity and institutional policy are design parameters. Some are genuinely fixed within the timeline, and some are conventions that have not been tested. Naming them explicitly is what allows the two to be told apart, and it is more useful than treating all of them as obstacles or all of them as negotiable.
Audience
Who has to approve the design, and who has to maintain it?Academic committees need the rationale behind outcome and assessment choices. Accreditation bodies need evidence that the approach meets or exceeds professional standards. Faculty teams need practical guidance for running and iterating the course. These are different documents. Deciding the audience before the work begins changes what evidence is gathered, not only how it is presented.
Competencies
What a person doing this work must be able to do. Each capability maps onto a stage of the process above.
These are capabilities rather than topics, so each can be observed in the work produced. They are drawn from the design and pedagogy literature named in Sources and from the process set out in Process.
Align outcomes, assessment and activities
Produces a course in which each activity and each assessment traces to a stated outcome, and writes those outcomes so that they do not presume one disciplinary tradition or one way of demonstrating competence.
Design assessment that measures the outcome
Separates what a task is intended to measure from what its format additionally requires, and builds formats and criteria that preserve the first without imposing the second.
Build multiple means into content and activity
Identifies where a course offers only one path through engagement, representation or expression, and produces alternatives that are equivalent rather than nominal.
Produce course material that meets WCAG
Captions media, writes useful alternative text, structures documents and LMS pages so they can be navigated by keyboard and screen reader, and can tell a genuine defect from an automated false positive.
Critique a curriculum for bias and gatekeeping
Examines existing content, examples, reading and assessment for deficit assumptions and unexamined authority, and proposes specific alternatives rather than a general observation.
Facilitate co-design rather than consultation
Runs design sessions in which faculty, learners and community partners hold real decisions, under conditions of informed consent and fair compensation, and can hold competing priorities without deferring automatically to the most senior voice.
Read disaggregated participation and success data
Interprets completion, participation and attainment broken down by learner group, and distinguishes a pattern that indicates a design problem from one that does not.
Locate a course inside institutional systems
Traces which template, policy, procurement decision or governance process a barrier came from, and writes recommendations addressed to that point rather than to the course alone.
Outcomes
What inclusive curriculum design produces within a project, and what tends to follow over a longer period. The two carry different evidential weight.
Outcomes within the project are observable during the engagement and can be verified by someone else. Longer-term change is what the available evidence suggests, and is stated here with the hedging that evidence supports rather than the hedging that would be more persuasive.
Within the project
- Barriers are addressed at sourceWhere a barrier is in the design rather than the learner, it is resolved in the design. Access arrives through a course built for the actual population rather than through a workaround negotiated case by case.
- Format stops standing in for the outcomeAssessments are traceable to what they are meant to measure, with criteria published in advance and applied consistently across whatever formats are offered.
- Some accommodation requests become unnecessaryWhere flexibility in format, pacing, navigation or delivery is already in the design, the requests that would have secured it individually no longer need to be made. Requests arising from needs the design cannot anticipate continue, and should.
- A design rationale exists in writingA record of what was decided and why, held by the people who will maintain the course, so that later edits do not remove features that were put there deliberately.
- Team capability growsFaculty and staff who take part acquire working knowledge of UDL, assessment design and accessibility that carries into the next course they build.
Over time
- Inclusion enters at the start of the design cycleWhere the process is repeated, equity and access tend to be raised while outcomes are being written rather than after content is built, which is the point at which changes cost least.
- Design features are used more widely than intendedMultimodal content, clear navigation, transparent criteria and flexible pacing are used by learners who have disclosed no disability and were not the intended beneficiaries.
- The evidence supports the process more strongly than the outcomeMeta-analytic work reports that UDL improves the learning process for all students while noting that its impact on educational outcomes has not been demonstrated. Later meta-analysis reports positive effects alongside considerable heterogeneity between studies. Both are grounds for adopting the approach and for describing its effects carefully.
- Institutional infrastructure changesTemplates, procurement requirements, quality assurance processes and faculty development begin to carry the design standard, which is what determines whether it survives past the people who introduced it.
What this work does not do. A well-designed course does not remove barriers that originate in fees, scheduling, caring responsibilities, immigration status or income, and it should not be offered as though it does. Accreditation frameworks, credit structures and platform limits constrain what any single project can change. Individual accommodation remains necessary and remains a legal duty. And a course designed inclusively can be edited back toward exclusion within a term if nobody holds the rationale, which is why the handoff in Stage six is part of the design rather than an administrative step.
Reflection
Four questions about current practice, and four descriptions of what different patterns of answer usually indicate.
Choose the option closest to the current situation rather than the intended one. The descriptions that follow address the situation, not the people working within it.
Questions
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How does your organisation currently approach inclusive curriculum design?
Consider what happens routinely rather than what happened once.
- Inclusion is not yet a structured design consideration
- Inclusion is addressed when accommodation requests are raised
- UDL and accessible design practices are used in course development
- Inclusive design is built into every course and programme from the start
-
How would you describe the current approach to assessment design?
This asks about the design of the assessment, not about adjustments to it.
- Conventional formats are in place and not under active review
- Adjustments are offered to individual learners who request them
- Flexible or alternative formats are being piloted
- Assessments are designed to measure the outcome rather than performance under one set of conditions
-
To what extent do learners inform curriculum design?
This asks about structured participation, not end-of-term surveys.
- Design is led by faculty and administrators
- Learner feedback is gathered informally, usually after a course has run
- Structured review is conducted with learners before and after launch
- Learners and community partners take part in designing courses and assessments
-
Where does responsibility for inclusive curriculum sit?
Consider where decisions are made rather than where the interest lies.
- Responsibility is not formally assigned
- Responsibility rests with one or two individuals
- Responsibility is shared across a team with defined roles and some development support
- Responsibility is held in governance, assessment policy and design processes
Reading your answers
Take the option you chose most often. If your answers are evenly split, read the lower of the two bands.
Inclusion is not yet part of the design process
In this pattern, barriers are being identified by learners rather than by the people designing the course, and usually arrive as a request or a complaint. That reflects the absence of a process rather than the priorities of the people doing the work. The most useful next step is a single course, chosen because it enrols a wide range of learners, taken through outcome and assessment review before anything else is touched.
Inclusion is handled through accommodation
Access is being provided, but individually and after the fact, which places the administrative load on learners and on whoever processes the requests. This is the most common position and it does deliver access to the learners who ask. The next step is to look at the accommodation requests already on file for one course and ask which of them describe the same barrier, then remove that barrier from the design.
Inclusive design is practised in places
Method is established and produces good courses where it is applied, so the constraint is usually reach and durability rather than skill. The next step is to move one practice out of the project and into the infrastructure — an accessible course template, or a required assessment rationale — so that it applies without anyone having to remember it.
Inclusive design is institutional
Design decisions are made where curriculum and assessment policy are made, and the practice does not depend on particular individuals remaining in post. The remaining work is usually in maintenance and procurement, where new barriers enter. The next step is to require evidence of accessibility conformance as a condition of the next platform or content purchase.
Sources
Every claim in this resource is traceable to one of the sources below. They are grouped by the foundation each supports, in the order of Section one.
Each entry carries a label naming what kind of source it is, so a reader can tell a standard from a meta-analysis from a practitioner text. Where a stable public address exists it is given; the books listed are held in most academic libraries.
Learning design theory
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. Understanding by Design, 2nd edition. ASCD, 2005. The source of the backward design sequence used in Stages two and three: desired results, acceptable evidence, learning experiences.
Biggs, J., & Tang, C. Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 4th edition. McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, 2011. The standard reference on constructive alignment.
Inclusive and anti-oppressive pedagogy
Morgan, H., & Houghton, A.-M. Inclusive Curriculum Design in Higher Education: considerations for effective practice across and within subject areas. The Higher Education Academy, 2011; now published by Advance HE. A widely cited sector reference covering anticipatory, flexible curriculum design generically and by discipline.
Whose knowledge counts
Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D., & Nişancıoğlu, K. (eds.) Decolonising the University. Pluto Press, 2018. Used here for the argument that which knowledge is treated as authoritative is a structural feature of a curriculum rather than a matter of content selection.
Universal Design for Learning
CAST. Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, version 3.0, released July 2024. The source of the three principles applied in Stages three and four.
Universal Design for Learning Guidelines — udlguidelines.cast.org
Capp, M. J. "The effectiveness of universal design for learning: a meta-analysis of literature between 2013 and 2016." International Journal of Inclusive Education, 21(8), 791–807, 2017. Reports that UDL improves the learning process for all students while stating that its impact on educational outcomes has not been demonstrated. This is the basis of the hedging in Outcomes.
International Journal of Inclusive Education — doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1325074
Almeqdad, Q. I., Alodat, A. M., Alquraan, M. F., Mohaidat, M. A., & Al-Makhzoomy, A. K. "The effectiveness of universal design for learning: a systematic review of the literature and meta-analysis." Cogent Education, 10(1), article 2218191, 2023. Reports positive effects across thirteen studies alongside considerable heterogeneity.
Al-Azawei, A., Serenelli, F., & Lundqvist, K. "Universal Design for Learning (UDL): a content analysis of peer-reviewed journals from 2012 to 2015." Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(3), 39–56, 2016. Identifies where the evidence is strongest and where implementation gaps remain.
Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning — doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v16i3.19295
Rao, K., & Meo, G. "Using Universal Design for Learning to design standards-based lessons." SAGE Open, 6(4), 2016. Sets out a design cycle linking UDL to outcome-aligned assessment, which is the bridge used in Stage three.
Rose, D. H., & Meyer, A. Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning. ASCD, 2002. The text that established UDL as a curriculum design framework.
Digital accessibility
World Wide Web Consortium. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. W3C Recommendation, 5 October 2023. The technical baseline for all digital course content, including LMS pages, documents, media and assessment platforms.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — w3.org/TR/WCAG22
Belonging and psychological safety
Wise, S. Design for Belonging: how to build inclusion and collaboration in your work. Ten Speed Press, 2022. A design framework for the relational and community dimensions addressed in Stages four and five.
Tomlinson, C. A. How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, 2nd edition. ASCD, 2001. The basis for treating rigour and flexibility in assessment as compatible rather than opposed.
Accommodation, equity and governance
Parliament of Canada. Accessible Canada Act, S.C. 2019, c. 10. Establishes the framework for a barrier-free Canada by 2040 across federally regulated sectors, with information and communication technologies among its priority areas.
Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. Accessible British Columbia Act, S.B.C. 2021, c. 19. Requires prescribed public sector organisations, including school districts, to maintain an accessibility committee, an accessibility plan and a mechanism for public feedback.
Every linked source above is publicly available at the address given, and the books are held in most academic libraries. Legislation and standards are revised: the date this resource was last reviewed appears in the footer, and anyone acting on a regulatory or accreditation question should confirm the current position with the issuing body.