Summary and Takeaway

Back to Michael's Mini-Course

"Learners consume content, manipulate and interpret it to understand it, commit it to memory, recognize patterns and trends in it, apply it, analyze and evaluate it, create with it, use it to solve problems, reflect on it, draw conclusions from it and form opinions about it, summarize it, practice its procedures and skills, and apply it to complete assignments or work tasks" (Larson and Lockee, pg.231).

Our students do all of these things with the content we use, create, and implement; but how do they do it best? Do they process information better by visualizing it? By hearing it? By Interacting with it? Who uses which modality and to what extent? How can we use this information to engage our students in a way that better helps them learn, discover, and create?These are the questions we set out to discover in this mini-course and, hopefully, you now have a better idea of how to create or update your content to correspond to your students skill-sets, or have some more "tools in your belt" as you go about doing it.

Unit Summaries

Unit 1, Definition and Theory: We learned that learning modalities are not a recent discovery, that they have been recognized and studies since the beginning of the 20th century. The most current research focuses on the VAK model, or visual-auditory-kinesthetic, and how each student process information best using a preferred mode, or a combination of the three. Students are capable of learning using any of the three, but to have them really engage and better understand what we teach, it is important that we tailor our content to their needs. Designing our lessons with the multi-modality mindset is always a solid approach to education and a best oractice.