EPID 5300 Principles of Epidemiology: A UDL-Grounded Redesign

Translating a foundational public health course into an interactive, accessible, scholarship-producing learning experience.

Context

EPID 5300 Principles of Epidemiology is the foundational quantitative course in the School of Public Health curriculum — a course many students approach with anxiety and many faculty struggle to make accessible without compromising rigor.

The pre-redesign version relied heavily on conventional lecture delivery, which compressed students with strong quantitative preparation and those entering from non-quantitative backgrounds into the same instructional channel.

By 2022, the course director, Dr. Malinee Neelamegam, was ready to do something different — and to do it well rather than quickly. The opening was to take the course’s foundational role seriously and treat the redesign as a scholarship opportunity, not just a delivery upgrade.

Challenge

The challenge was to redesign a quantitatively dense public health foundation course around Universal Design for Learning, with explicit attention to Multiple Means of Representation, on a three-month timeline, while preserving the rigor that downstream courses depend on.

Three constraints framed the work:

• Rigor preserved. UDL is sometimes misread as a softening of standards; the redesign had to demonstrate the opposite — that better representation increases what students can engage with rigorously.
• Faculty partnership, not faculty service. The work needed to be a collaboration between instructional designer and content expert, with shared authorship and a shared scholarly question.
• Scholarship as a deliverable. From the start, the redesign was scoped to produce conference scholarship and an award-quality artifact — not only a better course.

Approach

As lead instructional designer and project manager, I partnered with Dr. Neelamegam (course director) and Dr. Adria Battaglia (ID collaborator) to re-architect EPID 5300 around UDL principles and Multiple Means of Representation.

Several design choices shaped the work:

• UDL as the design spine. Every module was structured around multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement — moving epidemiologic concepts across formats (interactive visual, narrated walkthrough, scaffolded practice) rather than relying on one channel.
• 20+ interactive Rise modules. Designed and built within a 3-month cycle, each anchored to a measurable learning objective and aligned with Quality Matters standards.
• Disciplined project management. Intake meeting, scoped milestone plan, weekly check-ins with the course lead, and a clear handoff protocol — the same project management practices I now teach to other instructional designers.
• Scholarship in parallel. Student perception data were collected and analyzed through an exploratory study that became a UDL-IRN International Summit presentation in 2023.
• Dissemination beyond the course. The redesign was positioned for award nomination, leading to the 2024 Delta Omega recognition.

Outcomes

The redesign produced both immediate course-level outcomes and a sustained scholarly trajectory:

The most meaningful outcome is the precedent the course now sets inside the School of Public Health: a foundational quantitative course can be UDL-grounded, scholarship-producing, and nationally recognized — without sacrificing the rigor downstream courses depend on.

My role

I served as lead instructional designer and project manager. I led the UDL framing, designed the module architecture, built the interactive Rise modules, structured the data collection for the perception study, co-authored the UDL-IRN summit presentation, and managed the overall project timeline.

The collaboration with Dr. Neelamegam and Dr. Adria Battaglia continues — this case study is grounded in a working partnership, not a one-time engagement.

What I learned, and what’s next

Two lessons travel forward from this project.

First, UDL is at its strongest when it is built into the course’s logical structure, not added as an accessibility layer at the end — and that requires the instructional designer to be present from the earliest design conversations, not at the production stage.

Second, scoping a redesign to produce scholarship from the outset is a project management decision, not a research decision: it changes how time, evidence, and dissemination are budgeted.

Next: a written account of the redesign methodology suitable for a SoTL journal, replication of the UDL framing in other foundational quantitative courses across the School of Public Health, and integration with the Pedagogical Wellness CoP’s emerging work on sustainable course redesign for clinical educators.

Selected artifacts

• National award: Delta Omega Innovative Curriculum Runner-Up Award, October 2024 — national public health honor society.
• Conference scholarship: Interactive or Conventional Lectures: An Exploratory Study on Student Perceptions of Multiple Means of Representation — UDL-IRN International Summit, 2023.
• Course artifacts: 20+ interactive Articulate Rise modules; UDL-aligned course architecture; Quality Matters–aligned assessment design.
• Testimonial: Available from Dr. Malinee Neelamegam, course lead (see Testimonials).
• Related projects on this site: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Collective · Pedagogical Wellness CoP · Project Management for IDs Collaborative