Respect Different Ways of Learning

We ran our How to Bring eLearning to Life: Graphical Choices & Tools webinar today, with 40 participants from across North America. My colleague Anie Kojarian did a great job laying out the importance of good graphic design in helping to realize the goals of your eLearning. She said that looking at a poorly designed eLearning course was like looking at a bowl of soup....it is a mish-mash that doesn't make any logical sense.

Good graphic design works hand-in-hand with sound instructional design to help engage learners, let them understand the importance and hierarchy of content and learning tasks, and, very importantly, respects different learning styles.

On this last point, I think too much eLearning is text-based and only engages a limited number of senses in learners. Interestingly, when we polled webinar participants today, asking them how they preferred to learn in a number of specific circumstances, most responded that they were visual learners. The second highest number categorized themselves as kinesthetic learners (i.e. they like tactile learning, actually doing things, experimenting, etc.). Yet, we do not design to this reality often enough.

We in the eLearning field should be doing more to respect the different ways that people learn. Let's do away with the mind-numbing text dumps and introduce graphics and photos and videos when appropriate (a picture worth a thousand words, and all that). And let's give learners more opportunity to learn-by-doing (e.g. making choices, carrying out tasks, experiencing simulations, role playing, etc.).

Are your trainees visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners? Do you know? Chances are that they are a bit of all three. If you respect this reality and design to it, you will likely have more success with your eLearning.