eLearning Solutions Enable All Styles of Learning

How do the members of your healthcare team learn?

While face-to-face training has real value, the costs and scheduling issues involved can be overwhelming; not to mention the lack of convenience to participants, and the potential effect on patient care, as individual providers are removed from the treatment environment.

As a viable and cost-effective solution, eLearning can be employed to enhance and augment traditional training for healthcare professionals. Not only is it more convenient, and less disruptive to scheduling and patient care, but eLearning enables your staff to learn at their own pace and in their own way; whether they be visual, aural, verbal or physical learners, the flexibility of a customized eLearning solution enables and empowers your team with a variety of training methods available.

Improve learning with a variety of teaching styles

With a cloud-based training system in place, your healthcare organization can present training materials in a variety of formats that will appeal to all learning styles. Through the use of video, audio, text, workbooks, and other presentation styles, you can make it far easier for your staff to acquire critical knowledge, based on the way that they learn best.

According to a study by Stanford University, this type of interactive learning is far more effective, and enjoyable for students. Needless to say, when students enjoyed themselves they learned more.

Further, individual learning styles can have a profound effect on how well information is gathered and retained. Statistics published by Lake Superior State University illustrates the percentages of the population with particular learning styles:

• Visual Learners – Approximately 65% of the population learns visually, responding well to visual cues such as pictures, notes and diagrams.

• Auditory Learners – Approximately 30% of the population tends to retain information after hearing it.

• Kinesthetic (Physical) Learners – Approximately 5% of the population picks things up through touch or imitation.

Since it is virtually impossible for your organization to identify a specific learning style for each member of your staff, presenting your training materials in a variety of formats will allow them to choose the style in which they are most comfortable, and in which they learn best. Because your cloud-based eLearning platform will have almost unlimited space in which to store your continuing education materials, the various formats can easily be made available for all learning styles.

Among the potential benefits of eLearning for clinicians, physicians, and other healthcare professionals, the ability to appeal to individual learning styles may be the most important.

Have you begun to augment your traditional training cycles with eLearning? How has it been working for you? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.