A Website for Reflective and Visual Learners

I recently built a website on GoogleSite. It is designed for an audience with a particular learning style - Mine. The site, Torque Wrench Basics, trains viewers to use a torque wrench. To identify my learning style, I completed the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire, sponsored by North Carolina State University. There are four continuums on which learning styles are evaluated. Learners are:

1. Active to Reflective
2. Sensing to Intuitive
3. Visual to Verbal
4. Sequential to Global

A discussion of the various learning styles can be read here. My profile was identified as follows:

My profile indicates that I am a moderately-to-strongly reflective and visual learner, with a tendency towards sensory rather than intuitive learning. To accommodate an audience with my learning tendencies, I used design elements that would help learners like me understand and retain the training content. The elements that made it into my final design are listed below by each learning style component.

Active vs. Reflective: Moderately-To-Strongly Reflective 
Active Learners like to learn by doing. Reflective Learners tend to learn by thinking about the matter for a while. I am a little of both, but more of the latter. To satisfy this description, I included two elements in my site:

• Review questions, where appropriate, to allow for reflection during the training.
• Links to sources outside of the training tool for additional information, study and reflection.

The review questions were included to force the viewer to do what they do best, reflect on the material in a particular section of the site. I used a two-page format for my reviews - the first was a questions page:

Following the "Answers"  link brought a copy of the page with the corresponding responses:

Sequential viewing of these pages immediately following the related training content allows, even forces, time for reflection by target audience to improve understanding and retention.

Links to outside sources of information, such as dictionary definitions and Wikipedia articles, were included to promote further reflection.

Sequential vs. Global: Neutral

Sequential Learners thrive when there is structure and order, while Global Learners take a more eclectic approach, jumping around until the piece s fall into place and they suddenly "get it". With neutral results on this scale, I thought it best cater to both traits. To address both ends of the spectrum, I incorporated the following features:

• Sequentially-numbered major pages for sensing learners. These presented the content in 5 modules.
• Color-coded icons at the top of content pages that show global learners the relationship of the page materials to the remaining site content.
• Titles in the content area colored to match the training module in which the page is located, again for global learners.

All of these features are shown below. The red title nearest the content indicates that this page is located within Module 1: Principles.

I also used sequential links at the bottom of each page for sensing learners, and site map that could be expanded to show the all of tha pages across the site, visible on every page for global learners. These features are show in the two screenshots below.

Sensing vs. Intuitive: Slightly-to-Moderately Sensing

Intuitive Learners thrive on learning the relationships within the subject of study. Sensing Learners are better with facts, but need to know the practical applications for the information. I used the following featuers to accommodate these traits.:

• Inter-page navigation links labeled as to the content, for example “Calibration” rather than “Next”.
• Content that favors actual use over theoretical constructs, related to field or job applications.
• Graphics composed of actual photographs or photo-realistic illustrations rather than abstract line diagrams.
• Supplemental fact-based content that reflects “real world” applications, such as lists of, and links to, calibration labs.
• A question-based navigation feature, picture in the next two screenshots, that:
• Allows answers to be found quickly.
• Responds to Sensing Learners’ affinity to application-infomation. 

The links in the screenshot above bring the user to the page that responds to the listed questions, an application-oriented result that caters to our Sensing Learner's need for practical information.

Visual vs. Verbal: Moderately-To-Strongly Visual

The learning style for this audience is strongly visual. To met the needs of Visual Learner, textural information was minimized. Again, photographs and photo-realistic sketches were used to illustrate key topics, and in two instances vidoes were used. In the first instance, a short video was used to allow Visual Learner's to see and hear how a torque wrench works. This video was very, very short:

The next video also meets the needs of Visual Learners, but was also used to underscore the real world consequences of the training content, something that could prove important to our Sensing Learners.
   


Closing Thoughts
Developing the actual content for the site proved to be fun. Developing the site itself proved to be a bit more challenging. Google Sites didn't have the feature sets I had originally planned on, such as buttons that functioned as links, and this caused me to implement solutions that were more crude than my intentions.  All the same, I think the site hits the design objectives, and the process I used to adjust this site is one that can be used in other web-based training applications. After all, adjusting the message based on audience analysis is an important key in creating A Better Message.