3 Here’s how Understanding the Two Types of Students can Help You!

On our Resources page, we have a section on our Educational Philosophy which says the following:

‘Our courses have been designed to be “experiential based” learning which means we guide students through the learning experience.  The knowledge they acquire in the course lessons are part of the learning experience, but there is always a lot more to it than just reading.  All the way through the learning experience, students have access to the full support of their tutor: so if things get too hard, we can help them get over the bumps, but if things get too easy, the tutor can guide and challenge them to extend their knowledge further.  In this way we are more able to adjust to the varying potential of each student.

There are two types of students:  “Information Gathers” and “Information Processors”.  The former is only interested in acquiring facts for the sake of facts, while the latter is more interested in acquiring information and then processing what they have learnt.  It is the “Information Processors” that find our courses suitable to their needs.

We continue to develop  our style of education that is more relevant to the world of the future; where our students benefit from the knowledge acquired and graduate with a worthy qualification …’

As a lifelong learner, I thought I would unpack our philosophy and hopefully help some of you on any quests for knowledge and self-improvement that you might be pursuing at the moment.

Gathering and Processing

When learning about an unfamiliar topic, you are bombarded by information, facts, methods and important names; many of these will be vital to understand the subject successfully. An information gatherer will seek to collect snippets of information or little facts. This could be an excellent way to show off at a dinner party or use in conversation but is of limited use to improving knowledge.

More work needs to be done with that information to turn disparate facts into knowledge that can be used to solve problems and answer questions. We need to put that knowledge into a structure of how a problem works. For instance, knowing that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s (I had to Google that) is not useful on its own; it is much more helpful when you know that the Sun is also 14,900,000,000 meters away (I had to look this up too). From these together, we can work out that light takes roughly 5 seconds to reach the Earth. With enough of these chunks of information, I can start doing some seriously useful things; but only after putting the pieces of the puzzle together. This is what the processor does that the gatherer neglects.

What Now?

We all can be gatherers or processors depending on our mindset and should check our attitude when going about learning. I’ve noticed that a good sign that I am processing information is that I’m connecting what I’ve learnt to what I know. This is how we come up with new ideas (or hypotheses if you’re feeling scientific) by combining existing understandings to make original observations. So see what you can come up with and keep yourself on your toes!

At the moment most of us are working from home instead of our usual cubical or if we’re lucky, personal office. I thought that it would be fascinating to find out more about offices, where most businesses take place and where research innovations come to light with an aim to see how productivity can be improved. It goes without saying that each office is different and operate within very different circumstances to each other so not all of the following will apply.

Offices have high CO₂ levels

So what you may ask? It’s not a surprise that offices have higher levels of CO₂ as people breath out the stuff and are tightly packed together. Well, a recent study found that most offices lost 15% of their decision-making power to higher CO₂ levels. Given that a vast chunk of human achievement is made from work in office buildings, maybe it’s time to open a window and boost your productivity.

We’re also being distracted

Some of you will be shocked to discover that office workers spend an average of 1.7 days a week on social media or non-work activities. While some downtime is undoubtedly needed to keep us focused, this is taking it to another level. The addictive effects of social media mean that it can be easy for us to get lost in virtual space.

If you find yourself in this position, then read up on some techniques to boost productivity and reduce distractions, point 3 is particularly useful for combating such a problem. If you are an employer and are concerned about this, then Workplace Insight has found that scheduled 15-minute media social media breaks improve office productivity as your employees will be able to segment their time on and off social media.

Emails, Smartphones and Multi-tasking

On a similar note to the previous point, we spend a lot of time checking up on things that distract us, which makes us switch our focus rapidly. The most way to work through any set of tasks is to, as much as it possible, break them down and tackle them one at a time. Complete the first task before moving on to the second and so on. Emailing and smartphones will force us to split our attention which will lower our overall productivity.

The remedy to this problem is simple, block out time to check and answer emails to get the most done. There are plenty of setting that you can play with to control when and from who you can receive notifications. You can rest easy that your supervisor will be able to flag anything vital and get your work done in peace.

Do you have any nuggets of wisdom to share with your fellow office workers? Then comment them below and see what we can learn from each other.