Does learning style impact the push toward online learning? or do we select what courses we teach in what style? Aragon, Steven R., Scott D. Johnson, and Najmuddin Shaik. "The influence of learning style preferences on student success in online versus face-to-face environments." The American Journal of Distance Education 16.4 (2002): 227-243.
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I am inclined to believe that the push toward online learning is largely driven by factors like the availability of new technologies and the increasing demand for more flexible learning options which will enable students to manage the conflicting demands of work, family/relationships, and their tertiary education. Furthermore, both traditional face-to-face delivery and online delivery can be constructed to cater for a range of learning styles.
Some studies (http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/teacher-uses-of-learning-styles(136fbb94-5d02-414d-bfeb-62ef5c0c9a7c).html) have shown that teacher's non-LS based training and daily classroom experiences (e.g. with particular students) overdetermine their work with LS (e.g. pick "styles" for students in spite of official tests), and leads them to abandon or strongly modify the LS-models they work with..
Coupled with controversies about the efficacy and predictive powers of LS among educational psychologists (just something from google scholar: http://www.idsi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/empirical-evidence.pdf), it seems to me that online/distance learning might actually hamper teachers/trainers' ability to flexibly adapt beyond LS-based ideas, so designs could create very rigid and thus fragile learning trajectories if built too heavily on LS-assumptions.
I agree with Reidar Lystad that technological opportunities are probably a much stronger driver at this time.
Whilst I think that learning styles might affect both how a lecturer delivers online learning and how students engage with online courses; I agree with both previous posts in that decisions regarding online learning are largely taken for economic or social reasons. Once the decision has been made regarding which courses are online, it is then incumbent on the academic involved to develop courses that match their own pedagogy and the likely learning style of the students. I have attached a link to a conference paper where we discuss Transactional Distance Theory as a framework for the design of courses which take into account learner autonomy, course structure and lecturer-student dialogue.
Cheers, Kevin.
http://www.merga.net.au/documents/Larkin_et_al_MERGA36-2013.pdf
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