 |
| IMAGE CREDIT |
Is the class you’re taking making your head hurt?
Don’t stress… Sometimes reading or studying the class material isn’t enough. If you’ve attended school or college within the last 5+ years, you’re probably motivated to learn a topic through visual interpretation.
What does this mean?
Simply put, you learn best through visual communication rather than reading a book or listening to someone lecture to you about a specific topic.
Though those tactics work great for some people, a lot of people nowadays have been pre-programmed to “watch” and learn. Like anything else, there are advantages as well as disadvantages to learning this way.
Advantages:
Visual communication is fast paced, engaging and more often times than not, it has some sort of instrumental aspect to it (you know? MUSIC!). The whole concept of visual communication is to engage the viewer by motivating them to watch what it is you’re trying to sell, promote, educate or entertain them with.
Take the news for example…
Not only are the anchormen and women responsible for keeping you entertained with the most recent local or national event or topic, they’re also expected to deliver it to you the moment it happens. Journalists deserve a lot of credit for what they report. Talk about stressful!
Disadvantages:
The downside to being a visual learner is that most universities, colleges and schools in general have not caught up to this way of teaching. In fact, the farthest most have come to this is through visual overheads or power point presentations. Those teaching aids are great types of visual communication. Unfortunately, they no longer hold the appeal to keep a person engaged for a long period of time – like a movie or advertisement. This means that there is a huge gap in the system. Colleges invest hundreds of thousands of dollars each year into upgrading and maintaining their technologies around campus, which is no doubt helpful. However, those updated software applications or internal inter-web upgrades don’t hold a candle to actually coming up with a standard practice for an engaging method of teaching.
That said, removing the standard practices of teaching by replacing them with modern ones isn’t necessarily the appropriate action either. After all, it’s the teacher/professor that’s responsible for guiding a student through the material of the course.
Perhaps finding a happy medium between the two is the solution.
Whatever that may be, if you learn best through visual communication – my college hack suggestion is to search TED-ED lessons and/or documentary films discussing the subject.
Take this video for instance…
Taking classes on urbanization, land development, industrialization, or anthropology? The quick video below has everything you need to know to understand the process of how urbanization has evolved. This 4 minute video (uploaded by TED-ED’s creators Vance Kite and Keaton Tips) is a short documentation depicting the process of urbanization.
Makes learning a tad more entertaining, huh?
Not to mention quick… Youtube & Coursera are also other great resources for visual communication pieces – especially for the ‘how to videos’. The best part is they’re FREE! As a Dorm Room Movers Author, feel free to leave your comments or suggestions for additional visual communication ideas.
P.S. Check out some other ‘hack worthy’ educational websites listed on this infographic:
 |
| IMAGE CREDIT |