Multimodal Engagement

Learning with

For the longest time I was under the impression that there were in fact different ways to learn. That our learning preferences were fixed and did not change. It made intuitive sense and I was told about this theory by someone I trusted so I never questioned it. However, when I first say the video by Veritassium, I was surprised to find that this was not the case at all. In fact we learn in multimodal ways, and we are always learning and the way we learn are not fixed. In my subjects I often try to ensure we have more than one way to teach the student.

My subjects are arranged with the following pattern. Pre-class reading and videos: To introduce students to the terminology |-> In-Class Discussion: In class we discuss the reading material and engage with each other to make sense of the reading. |-> In-Class Tutorial: Then students apply their learning in the tutorial where they solve a problem using this thinking. |-> In-Class Practical: Student then build something (like a circuit) in a guided workshop. |-> Self-guided Application: Finally students build a full device using all the content taught.

Here are some of the students project from 2024

This year the students built a hearing aid works like prototype, which comprised of a microphone, amplification, filtering and sound level indication. This is not easy to design but the hope is that if students engage in all the ways of learning and don’t take shortcuts they will have built a mental model that can be accessed in the future. However, there is nothing stopping students from taking shortcuts and if students take shortcuts they are unlikely to be able to build the mental model. This is a challenge, when we look at marks as the main outcome we tend to choose shortcuts to achieve the outcome over when we choose learning as the outcome we take the path that optimized learning. However, most often the student to get to the end with a good project, tend to have taken the long road to learning and they also end up with the best marks. But in the end marks are still the measured outcome and we need to change this paradigm and make learning the outcome not marks.