Screencasts and Learning Styles
Learning styles appear to explain something that is obvious: people learn in different ways. In this chapter, the emphasis is on the different sensory modalities by which students prefer to perceive stimuli from the outside. Professors can use several didactic materials to deliver instruction to their students (particularly in e-learning). One of these is screencasts, which are digital recordings of computer screen output, including audio voiceover. If well-planned and recorded, screencasts can include text, images, diagrams, audio, video, and simulations, thus aiming to reach several learning modalities. This chapter explores the relation between screencasts and sensory preferences (measured by the VARK questionnaire) in a sample of nursing students. The data was analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics methods. The majority of these students were multimodal (61.4%), as opposed to unimodal (38.6%), and screencasts were found to be more appealing to the former, and face-to-face classes were more appealing to the latter.