How do you learn, and what makes it more fun and lasting for you? What makes it more tedious? How can you access all the needed content of your courses while looking for your own best ways of learning and demonstrating your progress? As a instructor, I try to keep in mind that students come from diverse learning experiences and have multiple needs through which they access and use new information. I use this to design and teach courses that can reach you where you are.
Learning Styles
Learning Styles refers to the concept that people tend to have one or more methods / environments in which they seem to learn and retain information better, and challenges in other methods. This is in no way meant to suggest limitations or set-from-birth intelligence, but rather a way of considering why you might or might not enjoy learning in certain ways. For instance, I personally tend to be more of a visual (show me) and kinesthetic (let me try) learner, than I am an audio (lectures make me sleepy) one. Some people prefer to study in isolation with books and notes; others feel they need specific stimulation to have course material reach them, etc.
As an instructor, I try to offer my course information in more than one way, such as an assigned text/materials, demonstrations, discussions, and resource links to videos and tutorials; this way, students can try to learn and apply course content in ways that best reach them.
Here is a cool website what offers some insights that may interest you: learning-styles-online.com.
Multiple Intelligences
Like Learning Styles, the concepts of Multiple Intelligences is meant to be only something for instructors and students to consider in the overall process for access, learning, and retaining of course content. Learning Styles tends to focus on methods that students may find more or less accessible to most enjoying their learning process. Multiple Intelligences, however, suggests that we each – while learning in ALL these ways – may have one or more that expresses how our unique brains actually parse information more specific to each of us. For instance, Visual-spatial intelligence is suggestive that a learner who uses maps and workflows of content and ideas may take in the information more deeply than if they simply read it.
This is meant to be another way to consider your own experience for deeper and more meaningful learning, not to in any way limit pr categorize you.
Here is more information: Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences