Learning With a Little Help From my Friends: Inclusive and Structured Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Programmes Through the Lens of UDL

Access Foundation Programmes are a widening-participation initiative designed to encourage engagement in higher education among under-represented groups, including socioeconomic and educational disadvantage. The transition to tertiary education can be particularly challenging for these groups, and more so if they have a disability. In the TU Dublin, we have developed and implemented a Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) programme to support Access Foundation Students with traditionally difficult subjects like computer coding.

PALs are student-led tutorial sessions run by cross-year PAL Leaders that provide subject matter help, college guidance and a supportive social learning environment. These sessions have been shown to offer students a positive support structure that can help with their transition and acculturation to tertiary education. Feedback from students on our PAL programme suggests that these PAL sessions have an overall positive effect on subject comprehension as well as enhanced learner confidence.

But more crucially, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has introduced the need for conferencing technology to move these PAL sessions to an online environment. Accessible virtual conferencing technology has created a more inclusive and supportive environment for disability students. In particular, we demonstrate how this kind of accessible conferencing technology enabled a visually impaired former Access Foundation student to undertake and excel at the role of a PAL Leader, running his own virtual PAL Sessions with Access Foundation Students in computer coding. We feel that sharing the experience and learnings from this PAL Leader reinforces the concept of inclusion that is central to all Peer Assistive Learning programmes.