Are Online Courses for You? Find Out Your Learner Style!

Have you ever thought of taking a course online? What about an equine course online? There are schools who offer these courses, as well as other courses, online. If you have never taken a course online or are unsure if you would benefit from an online course, you should find out your learner style. Barbara A. Soloman and Richard M. Felder from North Carolina State University have put together a short questionnaire which allows you to find out what your style may be.

There are 4 categories of learners; Active or Reflective, Sensing or Intuitive, Visual or Verbal, and Sequential or Global. Within these categories, you can be one or the other, or a mixture of both; everyone is a little of each sometimes.

Let’s take active and reflective learners for example; everyone is active sometimes and reflective sometimes, and a balance of the two styles is desirable. Your personal preference to one category or the othermay be strong, moderate, or mild. A balance of the two, active and reflective, is desirable. Active learners like to do things to learn the outcome and reflective learners like to think before they do things. I took this quiz and found out I am a moderately active learner and it’s true. I had a hard time sitting in a lecture hall taking notes for an hour or more; I preferred lab courses because they were hands on.

The next learning category, Sensing or Intuitive, allows you to discoverif you enjoy learning facts and memorizing them or if you are more of an innovative learner who learns things faster. In order to be an effective learner and problem solver, you need to be able to function both ways. With this quiz, I learned that I am a mildly intuitive learner; I like to be innovative and I dislike repetition, which was most likely why I was prone to making careless mistakes on tests from not checking my answers when I was in school.

Visual and Verbal learning styles categorize learners who need to see charts, diagrams, pictures, etc. to remember what they learned and learners who get more out of things from written or spoken explanation. Like most other people, I am a moderately visual learner; I need to see something in order to learn it, but I also like to have what I am looking at explained to me.

The last category of learners is Sequential and Global. Sequential learners learn in steps which all have connections and lead up to the solution; while global learners have an easier time learning in large jumps and don’t need to see a connection to suddenly “get it.” The quiz showed me I am a mildly sequential learner, which I agree with; I need to learn things step by step in order to get to the solution. Most college courses are taught in this manner which is helpful to most people.

Personally, I have taken online courses while attending college. I learned a lot from some and a whole lot of nothing from others. Not all online courses cater to individual learning styles, and they involve a lot of reading and commitment. If you are a very interactive learner, but are committed to your studies it is not as difficult as you would think to complete an online course. More and more schools are adding online courses and if you are interested you will need to do some research on the program and course, as well as, yourself and what you think will benefit you the most as a student.

If you are interested in finding out your learner style, take the quiz here! :

http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html

Online Equine Courses:

http://www.horsecoursesonline.com/

http://www.myhorseuniversity.com/online_courses

Resources:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.html

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html