Page 10: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2022)

Training Tips for Ships

Tip #34 What’s Most Effective?

Text, Video, Simulations?

Debunking the Myths

What is the optimal media for learning? tions and exists in tens or even hundreds it may appear, it’s simply not true. Not

The answer may seem obvious, but is it? of forms scattered over the internet and only that, but it is damaging because elsewhere. A representative example is people routinely make media decisions

The Cone of Learning presented below (Credit Cisco: “Multi- based on this information and other in-

As maritime trainers we’ve probably modal Learning Through Media: What formation like it. seen, and possibly even quoted, some- the Research Says”). This is very important, so let’s look at thing similar to the following informa- It appears to be great information. what the Cisco paper actually says about tion on the effectiveness of learning Or … does it? Should we believe this? this cone of learning. To quote the Cisco media. It is referred to as the Cone of Well, it turns out that we should not! De- paper about the graphic to the left (I have

Learning. The “Cone” is one of the most spite how commonly this or similar in- underlined the last two sentences for em- repeated graphics in learning conversa- formation is presented and how authentic phasis): “The person(s) who [incorrectly] added percentages to the cone of learning were looking for a silver bul- let, a simplistic approach to a complex issue. A closer look now reveals that one size does not ? t all learners. As it turns out, doing is not always more ef? cient than seeing, and seeing is not always more effective than reading.

Informed educators understand that the optimum design depends on the content, context, and the learner. For example, the bogus percentages on the cone would suggest that engaging students in collaborative learning in general would result in higher levels of learning than would a lesson where a student listens to narration or reads text about the topic. The reality is that, for the novice student engaged in ba- sic skill building ... individual learn-

Credit Cisco: “Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says” 10 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • April 2022

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