Abstract
Inclusive education aims to ensure equal opportunities for all learners, and Universal Design (UD) offers practical and actionable principles to support this goal. As higher education increasingly embraces both physical and digital inclusive learning environments, there is a growing need to understand how UD is implemented and evaluated in these contexts. This systematic literature review, conducted according to PRISMA guidelines, synthesizes findings from 16 empirical studies and reviews published between 2013 and 2023. The review identifies a variety of inclusive actions, such as offering multimodal learning materials, designing flexible assessments and integrating accessible technologies. These approaches illustrate the adaptability of UD principles and their relevance across disciplines and modalities. The study confirms that UD can be an effective, holistic framework for designing inclusive higher education environments. However, clear causal links between specific UD-informed actions and their corresponding outcomes are still lacking, making it difficult to assess which principles drive particular results. Furthermore, not all UD principles are addressed equally, with more emphasis placed on easily implementable aspects while others remain underexplored. These gaps point to a need for greater integration of UD across institutional levels, as well as for interdisciplinary collaboration. This review not only maps current practices but also identifies critical contextual and methodological blind spots and offers a future research agenda. It further proposes nine priority components for advancing inclusive higher education through UD, supporting teachers, researchers and policymakers alike.
Context and implications
Rationale for this study: why the new findings matter: Despite strong policy ambitions, inclusive higher education continues to fall short in practice. While Universal Design (UD) is frequently promoted as a promising framework to address learner diversity, empirical insight into how UD is actually implemented and evaluated in higher education remains limited and fragmented. This review matters because it goes beyond advocacy by systematically examining which UD-informed actions are implemented, how they are interpreted, often through Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and what kinds of outcomes are reported. By revealing uneven application of UD principles and persistent conceptual ambiguity between UD and UDL, the study clarifies why current evidence is difficult to compare and why causal claims about effectiveness remain weak. In doing so, it addresses a critical gap between inclusive aspirations and actionable, evidence-informed design in higher education.
Implications for research: For research, the findings highlight the urgent need for greater conceptual and methodological clarity. The dominance of UDL terminology, combined with inconsistent operationalisation of UD principles, limits the ability to establish causal links between specific design actions and learning outcomes. Future studies should therefore adopt clearer and more transparent frameworks that explicitly connect implemented strategies to underlying UD principles. In addition, the strong North American focus in the existing literature points to the need for more geographically and culturally diverse research to strengthen the external validity of findings. Longitudinal and comparative designs are particularly needed to move beyond descriptive accounts and to build a cumulative evidence base on the effectiveness of UD in higher education.
Implications for practice and policy: For practice, this review identifies flexible assessment practices, multimodal learning resources and user-friendly digital tools as consistently associated with positive learning experiences and engagement. At the same time, it exposes important blind spots, notably the underuse of UD principles related to physical accessibility and spatial design, which are often assumed rather than deliberately addressed. For policy, the findings underscore that sustainable implementation of UD cannot rely on individual teacher initiative alone. Institutional support structures, targeted professional development, interdisciplinary collaboration and clear frameworks defining shared responsibilities between teachers and students are essential. Together, these implications stress the need to embed UD structurally within higher education systems, rather than treating inclusion as a series of ad-hoc adjustments.