The four types of learning styles: How digital humans cater to all

“If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” – Ignacio Estrada.

The way we learn is built into who we are – it’s in our hardware.

But how we teach people is up to us – that’s our software.

People are different and they learn things in different ways. We have to build our software so it works best with their hardware. Not the other way round and presume they all understand it.

To do that conversational AI is offering the education sector a more complete look at which learning methods are used in teaching environments. And it’s not just in the classroom. Because, in truth, we’re always learning, and businesses are understanding the impacts of educating their audiences, too.

The retailer telling a customer in-store about products. Banks giving financial guidance. Insurers helping people make a claim step by step. Healthcare providers giving counsel on wellbeing, diet, health and medicine.

All these businesses – every business – provide information in some way. And how well those businesses do it dramatically impacts the customer experience and therefore bottom line.

As we enter an age where artificial intelligence begins to impact and automate virtually everything, we have to make sure technologies (from chatbots to digital humans) provide quality, regardless of who your customer is, so everyone gets an exceptional experience.

For that, VARK is a useful framework.

What are the four types of learning?

The VARK methodology breaks down learning types into four categories:

• Visual learners
• Auditory learners
• Reading/writing learners (also known as verbal learners)
• Kinaesthetic learners.

Let’s quickly look at the key characteristics of each style of learning:

Visual learners

Education for the eyes. Those who find visual teaching methods most effective take in information best when it is presented as imagery (a chart, an infographic or some other stimulus for the eyes). Most people are visual learners – about 65% of us.

Auditory learners

Education for the ears. Those who fall into the category of auditory learners find listening to information most effective – the type that like to educate themselves with audiobooks, or by asking questions in seminars so they can have a spoken conversation. Research shows 30% of people learn best in this way.

Reading/writing learners

Education via text. People who find themselves scribbling notes in a class or seminar are reading/writing learners. They find education works best for them when they can see it as text, be it a quiz or some annotations to go along with a presentation. These learners can sometimes fall into the kinaesthetic category when it’s the action of making their own notes that helps the information sink in.

Kinaesthetic learners

Education for the hands. Hands-on teaching methods work best for kinaesthetic learners, when they can be active in the lesson. That can be anything from choosing answers in a multiple-choice quiz or doing some sort of action or activity. Around 5% of people fall into this category.

Why allowing for multimodal learning is most important

But wait! Before you start making all of your content into graphs, know that it’s not enough to present information in any one way to help the four different types of learners. In fact, studies show the majority of people learn best when multiple modes are blended together and used at once.

Of those who learn best from multiple modes, the most effective combinations are:

• Visual and auditory
• Visual and kinaesthetic
• Auditory and kinaesthetic

That makes a huge difference. You can see that while kinaesthetic learning alone is the preferred technique for only a small number of people (5%), when combined with auditory and visual learning, it’s one of the most preferred and effective ways people take in information.

For those looking at using AI to educate staff or customers, it means not only making sure that all types of learning are catered for, but that the technology can provide multiple types of learning at once. No pressure, then!

AI in education: How digital humans teach

If you’re reading this blog post, you might be familiar with AI-powered digital humans and how they’re being used around the world.

If not, you can get a quick catch-up (visually and via text) in our free eBook titled what are digital humans.

One of the most central benefits to businesses employing intelligent digital humans is how they communicate with users in an educative, multimodal manner. Using all aspects of the VARK methodology, digital humans cater for:

Visual learners

For the 65% of us who like visual information, digital humans are already adept at using on-screen visuals to explain a concept or give step-by-step instructions. For examples of using on-screen visual experiences in the modern eCommerce setting, our UI expert and Experience Designer, Kartika, has unpacked the scenario in a similar blog post here.

Auditory learners

The voice is a powerful tool, but also a largely universal one. Today, four-year-olds can say: “OK Google, play Peppa Pig on YouTube” if they want to interface with technology, while older generations who may struggle to use modern computer interfaces are often adept at simply saying what they want.

In fact, studies show older people love digital humans because they don’t have to read or write into tiny boxes on their phones.

Do for the 30% of auditory learners, they get to speak to a digital human, and be spoken to through natural language with the benefits of body language and tone of voice adding to the effectiveness of understanding.  

Reading/writing learners

Similarly to visual learners, those who take in information best through text can have it presented by the digital human on the screen they’re learning from.

That's why the majority of our digital human experiences include subtitles, to help readers take in information better.

Kinaesthetic learners

Kinaesthetic learners are accommodated for by being active in a real-time conversation – they learn by doing. Multiple choice elements can also be used on-screen to create deeper engagement with the materials being taught, or in some cases they can interact using objects that the digital human can recognise.

Blending all this together for exceptional CX

But, as we know, learning is best when it’s multimodal. As a form of conversational AI, digital humans not only cater for all types of teaching, but can blend any combination of them together.

One of our favorite ever projects was the digital human "clone" of a particularly great educator – Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Albert Einstein.

In collaboration with his estate, we created Digital Einstein as a companion and an educator, to open him up to a new generation who might not be all too familiar with his life and seminal works in the field of physics.

Importantly, Digital Einstein uses a combination of voice, on-screen text, and visuals to convey information in a way that best suits different people. By interacting with him in conversation – not to mention via his daily quiz – kinaesthetic learners also have a way to get hands-on as they learn.

The same is true of all digital humans; they're great educators and distributors of information, whether they're used in banking, healthcare, retail, or even by governments to help their residents better access information, just like the City of Amarillo has done with its digital human, Emma.

And perhaps the most obvious use case is in training itself, where L&D teams have used digital humans to effectively double how much people remember of their workplace training. Because when information is presented in the way they learn best, they remember it better.

Can other virtual assistants do the same?

Not quite. Although virtual assistants are very “smart”, but one-dimensional in their experience. Siri: voice. Alexa: voice. ChatGPT: text.

Digital humans, meanwhile, allow for a human-to-machine conversation with more VARK aspects beyond what you can get with a chatbot, voice assistant, or LLM. Similarly, they provide interactivity, a key part of kinaesthetic learning, which AI video avatars also fail to provide in education contexts.

You can’t interact with a video, you can’t read or see most of what Alexa says, and you can’t visualize text outputs from LLMs. But with a digital human, learners get their specific learning style (or combination of them) catered for.

The future of educating people is digital, human, multimodal, and inclusive

If you have tried to teach someone something multiple times, and they still don’t get it, they aren’t the slow learner: it's your product, your training resources, and your customer experience that needs to level up.

We’re about to enter an exciting chapter in artificial intelligence; and the winning combination will be where every interaction a company has with its users accommodates for every single person the way they learn best. It goes beyond personalization, into the realm of individualization. That is why the more you think about it, the more it makes sense that AI is given a human face and can interact naturally with human conversation.  

This is where the digital human experience is unmatched.

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