Audio vs visual learning: How to make the most of your audio learning

A common question we get often at Alpe Audio is about the differences between audio learning and visual learning. Many students, parents and teachers have heard about the existence of ‘learning styles’ and firmly believe that they’re in one camp or another. They’re either ‘visual learners’ or they have ‘to write it out to understand it’ (which would make them so called ‘kinetic learners’.

Unfortunately, learning styles is a myth, and actually doesn’t have that much to do with your ability to learn. In this article we’ll explore the myth briefly and dive into best practices to make the most of your auditory learning.

The myth of learning styles

Daniel T. Willingham is the author of ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom’. In his book he eloquently brings the evidence that learning styles is simply a myth (a topic we covered in a separate post on audio vs visual learning). What matters to our capability to learning are factors that are far more mundane:

• Our interest level: Willingham calls this ‘meaning’. We remember information when it means something to us.
• Repetition: we remember what we repeat, especially over time. If we don’t review things after hearing them, we’ll never actually remember them.
• Cognitive overload: our working memory is easily taxed. If we’re focusing on too many things at once or are trying to hold too many pieces of the puzzle in our brain at once, we’re bound to forget things.

All three of these aspects come into play very often when we’re comparing how we learn, process and remember things when we’re learning in an auditory style vs a visual style.

How to make the most of your audio learning

This article is the result of my own hours upon hours of listening to audiobooks and podcasts. Wondering: are audiobooks good for learning? On the one hand, I love audio based learning. It’s convenient, fast and most important accessible. On the other hand, it happens too often that I finish a drive home, have listened to something interesting and well, don’t remember it.

A way I’ve gotten over this is by actively listening to audiobooks:

1. Listening at a slower speed than I normally do.

2. Taking notes: actively writing important takeaways and summarizing.

— Yehoshua Zlotogorski (@yehoshzl) April 12, 2021

What it really comes down to is implementing best practices for learning. Remember our three key aspects of learning according to Daniel T. Willingham:

1. Meaning
2. Repetition
3. Cognitive overload

When you plan your audio learning, if you really care about learning and remembering, you have to take those three aspects into account.

In visual based learning, a lot of those aspects are assumed, and while they’re often not actually taken care of, in auditory based learning, the assumption is the opposite.

Meaning

There’s no actual difference between visual and audio learning for this one. We learn what means something to us just as often as we’re forced to listen to a teacher drone on and on about a topic we couldn’t care less about. Meaning is a function of how good a teacher is at making what we’re learning relatable and relevant to us. It doesn’t matter at all whether we’re listening or watching. Anecdotally I’ve seen audio based learning perform better here. Why? Because we’re adding a constraint on the teacher. Teachers who teach via podcasts or know their audience is looking at them know they have to be more interesting, more compelling, to keep their students’ attention. When we lecture in front of a captive class, we’re less concerned with that aspect. 

Repetition

Again, there is no inherent advantage to either medium of visual vs audio learning when it comes to structuring repetition. This is very much up to the student to structure how often they want to repeat what they’ve learned. However, it’s clearly much easier to repeat what you’ve learned when it’s convenient, and here audio is so much more convenient than visual learning. Visual learning, like watching a lecture on Coursera forces you to choose that web tab over the rest of your very interesting web tabs. Audio learning on the other hand usually slides right into a part of your day that would otherwise be ‘boring’ — when you’re driving or at the gym.

Cognitive overload

This category has a big difference between visual and audio based learning. Visual learning usually implies you’re focusing on just one thing — learning. While we know that’s not true and most students multitask to an embarrassing degree, it’s still different from auditory based learning where the assumption is the opposite: that audio learning is happening by default during a time when you’re focusing on something else.
What this means is that cognitive overload is a real problem when we’re learning with audio. Information isn’t processed as fully before we move onto the next topic. And most learners aren’t aware of this, and definitely not teachers. Which makes the problem compound.

“the learning is never quite complete because our brains don’t quite ‘get’ everything. The chunks of information don’t sit well. They’re not fully absorbed, simply because it’s a book, not an audio focused piece of content.”

Are Audiobooks good for learning? – Alpe Audio: Courses online

But there are ways to fix this. Now that we’ve diagnosed the problem — it’s rather easy to tweak your learning methodology to improve your retention. 

Improving your audio vs visual learning outcomes

To fix your cognitive overload and repetition problem you have to become an active auditory learner (or use a platform like Alpe Audio that has all of these elements built in). What does being an active auditory learner mean?

1. Listening at a slower speed. Give your working memory more time to absorb information, process and internalize it. It makes all the difference
   
2. Stop to take notes. Pausing the listening to actively write down notes is important. It forces your working memory to work on ‘retrieval’ — a memory improvement technique. Writing down takeaways and summarizing in your words are perfect activities for this. Doing this verbally without writing also works. A good learning hack is to use a speech to text tool, dictate your takeaways.
   
3. Review your notes. Go back to the notes you’ve dictated and review them. fix them up, improve them and re-read. This acts as spaced repetition and greatly improves the learning.
   
4. Put a flash cards system in place. Turn your key takeaways into flash cards that you review at increasing intervals. 
   
5. Looking at additional material or adding a new sense to the learning. Add a different medium for information you’ve already learned. Charts & graphs usually are a great way to visualize things you’ve already learned. Add a location based trigger to enhance memory.

Audio vs visual learning: How to make the most of your audio learning

Is audio based learning that different from visual learning? The answer is no. They both rely on the same learning principles: meaning, repetition and avoiding cognitive overload. There are easy ways to implement all principles into your learning routine. Turn your audio based learning into active learning and enjoy the benefits of real learning!