Depending on the school of thought you adhere to you might have heard that there are four, seven, eight, even seventy-one types of learning styles. While experts vary, the general consensus is that there are at least three: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. It’s commonly believed that to provide a unique learning experience, learners must be able to learn within their preferred style. But we’re not so sure.
In fact, there’s evidence that there’s no such thing as learning styles. A report published by Psychological Science in the Public Interest debunked the studies that claim to provide evidence for the existence of learning styles. The report showed that the research to justify their existence was often inconclusive, conducted improperly, or contradictory to the hypothesis: in other words, some learning style studies found that learning styles don’t exist at all.
That’s probably because in a moment of learning, people respond to stimuli differently and learning styles shift. Learners react more than “choose”.
How to Get a Unique Learning Experience Without a Learning Style
While many L&D functions invest time and money in an arguably pointless effort to address learning styles, we think that a truly personalized approach is needed to deliver effective corporate training at scale.
When you are trying to provide compliance training to 500 employees - let alone 50,000 - a scalable solution is paramount. That’s why businesses turned to online learning - it’s at least scaled and everyone has access to a computer - as the preferred training delivery method.
However, while online learning scales, when a learner gets to a learning dead-end in the content, the online program will keep offering up the same information until the learner gets frustrated, gives up, or fails.
Adaptive Learning provides a unique learning experience, at scale, and without a specific learning style in sight. Adaptive Learning is a personalized learning system that uses formative assessment to adapt to the needs of individual learners. Because Adaptive Learning understands what each learner needs in order to master the content, the learner will never be shown content they already know, reducing training time. Because the learning is online, your business gets every member of your staff up to speed. No more learning styles necessary, just mastery of the content demonstrated to you in the form of business impact.
When you take an adaptive approach to your online compliance training your business gets to train in compliance at scale. Learners get to learn at a pace that matches their abilities, skill levels, or even “learning style” - and they do it in 50% less time.
To find out how Adaptive Learning trains at scale - and other common questions about the process - download this ebook The Truth About Adaptive Learning.
References:
http://complianceandethics.org/compliance-training-different-learning-styles/
