One of the most important career skills you can master as you go through your online education program is simply learning how you learn. Armed with that valuable knowledge, you’ll be able to continually adapt to new opportunities that require new learning.
Learning Styles
First, it helps to understand your personal learning style. Although there are many approaches to learning styles, generally, you’ll want to figure out which type you are within three main categories: senses, reasoning types, and learning environments.
Senses
• Auditory, or listening (you find verbal instructions easier to follow than written ones)
• Kinesthetic/tactile, or moving, writing, doing (writing down concepts helps you understand them, you like to graphically “draw” relationships such as ideas and processes)
• Visual, or seeing and reading, (you easily absorb information by reading about it, whereas you have difficulty understanding verbal instructions)
Reasoning Types
• Deductive, or approaching a topic from a high-level subject overview before focusing on a specific topic (you need to understand how an idea fits into the broad subject area before mastering the idea itself, when you write a paper you prefer to first state your main premise then draw your conclusions)
• Inductive, or approaching a new subject without any broader overview (you can start learning about a new subject just by seeing some examples, you’re comfortable learning the rules of a game as you play it).
Learning Environments
• Intrapersonal, working on your own (you enjoy the challenge of figuring things out on you own, you find working as part of a student team on class projects wastes too much time)
• Interpersonal, working with a group (you like to talk through personal and professional decisions with friends and family, you enjoy group projects and team-based activities).
Think about how you’re most comfortable learning about new ideas or skills or processes, so you can apply this approach to your coursework. Since much of online learning involves reading (great for visual learners, more of a challenge for auditory or kinetic), figure out ways to adapt the learning process to your personal style.
For example, kinesthetic learners might draw graphic maps of ideas and related concepts, while auditory learners might want to read aloud and record notes that they could then play back for studying. Another study method that often works for visual learners is to use highlighter pens to mark key concepts in study materials, while kinesthetic learners benefit from hand-copying notes.
Knowing that you’re an intrapersonal or interpersonal learner can help you choose between team or individual projects, whereas your tendency to be an inductive or deductive thinker will help determine whether you can jump right in with a new idea or need to first back up and understand where it fits into a topic’s broader knowledge base. The important thing to keep in mind is that whatever your learning style is, it’s right for you.
The goal is to learn how to use it to make learning as easy – and effective – as possible for you.
To that end, consider what ways your disability changes how you approach learning, and what assistive tools/techniques may help you most effectively adapt your learning setup (e.g., computer, print or electronic books, etc.) to your individual learning style.
Here are some great resources for learning more about your learning style:
What’s Your Learning Style? - An online test to help you determine your preferred learning style.
How to Identify your Best Learning Styles - Brief guide to the different learning styles, from How to Be a Successful Student (1991) by Donald Martin.
Learning Styles: Tell Me About Learning Styles - Although written for tutors, this has great tips you can use for adapting your learning style to your coursework.
