This quick blog is to give some resources about how we learn. This will hopefully help with your learning intervention design and delivery.

Lack of evidence for learning styles

I know learning styles (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and others) feels really intuitive. I used learning styles at one time too, as I know how much I rely on seeing a picture in my mind of where I’m driving to. Learning styles might still be in a lot of text books, websites and included in training courses, but the evidence shows that teaching to learning styles doesn’t work, and worse, can be harmful to people developing really good learning skills.

Read more in these resources:

• Learning styles is wrong!
• The truth about learning styles and what to do instead
• Ending the year in style(s)

At Lightbulb Moment we focus our work on virtual classroom and webinar training and we find that people also are under the impression that we can multi-task, especially when we think about attending live online learning. Whilst it’s true that we can walk and talk at the same time, what our brain can’t do is use the same area for processing two different things – like listening and reading, which is what a lot of work multi-tasking is.

This is a nice little micro-learn platform that tells us more about the brain not multi-tasking.

Good learning skills

If learning styles are debunked and even harmful to our learning, what actually has the scientific evidence behind it that does help? Some resources here to help you:

• Six strategies for effective learning
• Spacing retrieval practice
• Picture superiority effect
• Words and images together

Virtual classroom delivery

All of the above will help you design great virtual classroom and webinar sessions.

Three things that will also help take you to the next level and follow the principles here about multi-tasking and images helping you out are:

• A robust facilitator guide for your live online session
• Running your PowerPoint in a window to allow you to see chat and webcams
• Having good technical production documents, especially when delivering on your own
• Reading people’s body language through the platform you are using, so you don’t rely only on webcams – in other words, digital body language

If you have comments to add, please comment below, or start a new discussion on our virtual classroom and webinar Community!

• Design
• Digital/Virtual Body Language
• L&D