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Learning Through Sight – Teaching Visual Learners

Visual learning is another of the main learning styles, and as the name suggests, this is a learner who remembers by sight, preferring pictures, images and printed form over oral instructions and storytelling.

The Characteristics of a Visual Learner

Visual learners have quite several characteristics that you can tap into as a course creator, including:

  •         Vivid imagination
  •         Enjoys visual stimulation
  •         Easily grasps the meaning of body language and facial expressions
  •         Good at reading maps, charts and graphs
  •         Often needs to visualise words to spell them correctly
  •         Uses intuition to solve problems
  •         Strong artistic, mechanical or technological abilities
  •         Often a perfectionist and highly organised
  •         Prefers quiet environments to minimise distractions

Dominant visual learners also work well with other learning styles including solitary learning and logical/mathematical learning. 

Teaching Visual Learners 

It is interesting to note that visual learners can remember 75% of what they see or read, so they do take lots of notes. 

Here are some teaching strategies you can use that suit visual learners: 

  • Use a variety of technology such as slides, videos and photos
  • Organise information with headings and images
  • Introduce exercises into your course where a student reads some information and then closes their eyes and pictures how they would use that information in a practical sense
  • Explain how the information you are teaching will affect them/benefit them.
  • Encourage discussion and group work
  • Use printables 

How to Help:

Visual learners tend to struggle when there is noise in the background. One way to help visual learners is to ensure that there is no/minimal music playing or noise when doing live sessions. It is also important to allow downloading and/or printing of course materials. 

As a course creator, it is important to understand the learning styles and how your students will learn best from you. Ensuring you have plenty of images, charts and graphs to help explain the information in your course will benefit visual learners. 

What is Your Learning Style?

Take the Learning Style Quiz

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