VARK Me

 I recenly took a VARK asssessment. The VARK assessment looks at learners Visual, Audio/Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic learning preferences. My assessment showed me that I was "Mild Kinesthetic" - meaning that I learned best through "practical exercises, experiences, examples, case studies, trial and error, things that are real."

Having thought about the tool sets described in Chapter 4 of Boettcher & Conrad and considered it against my VARK assessment results, . . . I also think back to some of the more effective learning tool types I used when I was teaching online courses . . . the first thing that pops to mind is a series of videos that we used successfully in our 40 Hour Hazwoper training. 

When providing this training, we taught 8 hours of content everyday for 5 days. It became quite grueling and eventually we started to notice that the training was becoming quite rote and compartmentalized. For fire protection do this. For electrical protection do this. For fall protection do this. The trainers and I realized that if we were having this problem, so might our trainees. Most accidents in our industry were not caused by one event, but rather by a cascading series of events. An electrical spark might cause a fire which would cause a worker to back away and fall off a tower. No one module in our course would necessarily have stopped that worker from falling, but all three together might have. 

The trainers and I instituted a program within the course that would allow us to stream videos that described accidents in our industry and we would ask the learners to analyze the accidents with an eye toward the modules they had reviewed. A video about a man getting trapped in a small, enclosed, space might yield an analysis about Hazard Communications, Breathing Air Protection, and Confined Spaces. All of this we captured initially on worksheets, but eventually we found that iPhones could be used as well. We used "Physical Devices" . . . iPhones, videos from industry, and workbooks to keep the learner engaged and to help provide greater understanding of the content and how the content pieces work together to provide safe work activities. For me, it just made sense to use real world scenarios and to use technology to capture the learners understanding. Now, I see why that made natural sense for me.

Eventually this capability became a "best in class" safety training device and I think added to the course understanding for all of the learners who took part.

References

Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R.-M. (2016). The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

The VARK Questionnaire. (n.d.). Retrieved May 18, 2021, from Vark-learn.com website: https://vark-learn.com/the-vark-questionnaire/?p=questionnaire