New technologies that are changing our concept of teaching and learning

The flexibility, malleability, and interactivity that characterize new media provide the basis for educational designs that are impossible with traditional fixed methods and materials, designs that emerge as necessary in light of changing concepts of learning and individual differences.

These new designs reflect a more articulated understanding of learning and avoid "presentational" environments (like books and lectures) in favor of truly instructional environments where students are consistently supported in learning how to learn. Individualizable challenge and support are built into every element of the curriculum, every learning experience. Skill-development materials, for example, can be designed to provide built-in models of performance, opportunities for supported practice, immediate feedback, and extended "communities of practice." In that respect, these new environments more closely resemble traditional models of apprentice learning than "book-learning."

Congruent with apprentice models, these new designs exploit the power of new media to individualize and customize, making it possible and imperative to meet the enormous challenge of individual differences (including those who are defined as having disabilities). To do this, they do not provide one-size-fits-all presentations but highly malleable environments that provide the right level of support and challenge for every individual student.

In accordance with the findings on individual differences from the neurosciences, new learning environments provide the right level of support and challenge in three ways.

First, they provide multiple means of representation. This means that instructional designs assume that there is little value in a single canonical representation of the information in any particular task or problem. Instead, new designers will assume that to provide basic access for some students (e.g. for students who are deficient in one modality or other, like a student who is blind), and multiple routes to meaning for all students (e.g. representing a math concept both in text and graphically) it will be both necessary and preferable to provide multiple representations of meaning.

Second, they will provide for multiple means of expression. This means that instructional designers will decrease their insistence on a single mode of communication from the student as the basis for expression or evaluation. It will be routine to assume that while many students will write (or type) their essays, there will also be alternatives that involve rich mixes of writing, illustrating, speaking, video-making, and drawing. The method of evaluation will suit the task and the means. Students will be required to meet a higher standard of expressive literacy - knowing in what contexts (for which purposes and for which audiences) to use text, images, sound, video, or combinations of media. Evaluation will be sensitive to purpose, audience, and the strengths of the learner. The creative expression of students with motor difficulties will not be evaluated via handwritten assignments.

Third, the new designs will provide multiple means of engagement. Most students are often unengaged or bored in school. There is no single solution to this problem because of the range of individual differences- there are many different reasons for their lack of engagement, not one. Students with disabilities, as usual, highlight the issues. The same design which would likely engage a student with ADHD (a high degree of novelty and surprise, for example) would be absolutely terrifying (and thus disengaging) to a student with Asberger's Syndrome or autism. New designs will be cognizant of the centrality of motivation in learning, and of the individual differences that underlie motivation and engagement. As a result, and given the flexibility of new media, they will provide alternative means of engagement - more novelty and surprise in the learning environment for some students, less for others, for example.

These flexible designs are called Universal Designs for Learning, and while initiated to meet the needs of students with disabilities and those with special talents, they are ultimately more effective with all kinds of learners.