Learning Styles
Introduction
Students will have various individual and group preferences when it comes to learning materials. For example:
- Some will prefer a textual style, others a more visual one.
- Some will respond better to examples given in familiar metaphors.
- Individual may have various needs and preferences when it comes to the display of text.
To be truly responsive to these preferences, a publishing system should be able to provide and combine these at user command,
keeping the content accessible, and letting the user's client (for example, browser) settings override the author or system ones if required.
A technical demonstration prototype
A technical solution would probably work best if the different sets of preferences could be logically and physically separated.
One way of doing this would be by providing a choice of:
- different learning styles
(visual and textual) handled by images and visual representations versus text and numbers.
- themes, which would affect some aspects of visual display and learning content.
- style sheets, controlling display of textual content and possibly some aspects of visual content.
Some basic examples will illustrate a possible technical approach.