Determining Mashhad University of Medical Sciences Employees’ Learning Styles for Adaptation of in-Service Digital Learning Materials

Abstract

AbstractIntroduction: Awareness of learning styles of human resources plays a crucial role in material development for continuing professional programs. Besides, as the educational courses tend to move toward virtual and digital modalities, production of digital courses, due to their self-teaching nature, is very important. As Mashhad University of Medical Sciences is going to offer digital courses via an Online Learning management system, the present study aimed to evaluate the learning styles of the employees of this university in order to adapt the digital courses to their learning styles.Material and Methods: A comparative descriptive-analytical study was designed for this purpose. The participants comprised 232 employees working at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. The Cochran formula and stratified sampling method was used to calculate the sample size and the selection process. 202 participants filled in the online questionnaire of WARK on learning styles. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics as well as two ways ANOVA.Results: Our findings revealed that the subjects tended to prefer the auditory style (χ 2=8.99, P < 0.05). Besides, the visual style was more dominant in females (χ 2=6.38, P < 0.05), while there was no difference between genders in case of other learning styles.Conclusion: It can be concluded that the content of e-learning courses for employees in the auditory style would be more effective.

Keywords

• distance education
• in-service training
• learning styles
• digital material development
• staff development