I’ve been thinking about this while preparing my own DL module to show to my course team colleagues, because we are going to go for a homogenous look and feel of our DL courses. I didn’t add any podcasts to my newly designed module, not only because the resource-based module is incredibly time intensive to set up initially, (no PPT anywhere in sight) but because I began to realise that I absolutely need written equivalents of audio information.
I’ve learned this in the module I am curently participating in as a student, where I am supposed to subscribe and listen to podcasts, but I just can’t and won’t. I can’t, because this is completely against how I learn, and I cannot listen to podcasts. Never did, never will. Goes against the very grain of my being. I need something to focus my eyes on, but if I do, and it is not a video, then I cannot follow what is being said.
I had a discussion with one of my colleagues about this, and we were surprised to find out how very much opposites of the audio – visual spectrum we are. My colleague is an audio learner, and says she doesn’t even notice anything visual, not even in her daily life, and that she can remember anything she has been told. I, on the other hand, am a visual learner and my visuals/surroundings are most important to me, and I never forget anything I’ve seen.
We didn’t touch on (see what I did there? 
) kinesthetic learners. I do think I have a lot of that, too, and it would fit with the visuals. However, I can’t see a way of incorporating this in a DL course, can you?
Thus I came to the conclusion that while I will be offering audio resources in the next incarnation of my module, they will either have written content (transcripts are not always necessary) or they are freely available educational resources I can link to, which offer transcripts anyway, such as JISC.
Resources
Felder, R.M. & Silverman, L.K. (1988) ‘Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education’, Engr. Education, 78(7), 674–681
Sadly I couldn’t get full text access to the following article:
James, W. B. & Gardner, D. L. (1995) ‘Learning styles: Implications for distance learning’, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1995: 19–31
