Whether you’ve watched a tonne of college videos on YouTube, or heard about the university from family and friends, there’s a good chance you’re wanting to make sure you have the best time possible! Besides, the university is a time for learning, making friends, and having fun while you gain the skills to succeed in the business world.

That being said, we’re here to let you know that your way of learning and specific learning techniques will change the way you experience university, so making sure you accept and nourish your ideal learning style is essential!

Just because other students tend to learn differently doesn’t mean that you have to follow their lead and copy their style. Everybody is different and it’s important to understand that!

Develop Your Techniques Over Time:

There’s a good chance that you won’t hit the nail on the head with a learning technique that works out perfectly right away, so it’s important to have a level of fluidity in your learning.

It is a good idea to remain flexible and not too rigid with regard to how you learn and be open to changing your daily processes. In some cases, that may mean skipping a lecture that’s been recorded and watching it later when you’re better able to focus on it

Another means of adapting your learning processes are working with friends! Though you may think you could get distracted and or end up with no work done, you could be surprised by just how motivating it is to work and collaborate with friends in your course.

In line with collaboration, hands-on learning is also highly effective. Whether in small children at educators like Raising Stars or in adults, working and collating ideas with friends works incredibly effectively and gets outcomes that are favorable to your degree.

There’s a good chance that you’re not going to have the answer to everything, so working with a multitude of people and merging ideas and experience is one way to go about learning – which also works well as a way of ensuring your engagement with other students remains high.

Your Learning Style Dictates Free Time at University:

One of the second things you should understand about university is that your free time and your non-studying time is dictated by your learning style!

Whether you love your degree or not, there’s a good chance you don’t want to spend every last minute of your day behind a laptop or a textbook – extracurriculars are vital – and so working to choose a learning style that allows you to get the job done and have plenty of free time is important.

For example, the blocked-out learning technique might be something to consider if you’re someone who likes to have control of their day, and also enough free time to work on their hobbies or leisure activities. Another example is the crammer, who might find it easiest to have an unplanned day or week, and simply cram their studies into a single afternoon, or wrap up assignments in a few hours.

With that in mind, your learning style does have a lot of control over your experience in university, so be sure not to disregard it.

Rely on Visual Aids

In line with our tip about speeding up and compressing your learning into chunks, you may find that relying on things such as visual aids is a way to improve your learning.

Whether it be through video, drawing, sketching or any other visual cues, you can adapt and improve your experience at university by making your learning a little more visual and tangible. A textbook-only focus on learning may be a little dreary and lackluster especially if you’re used to seeing a lot of content on a screen in your day-to-day, so working to visualize your education is a great idea!

One tip we have here is leaning toward websites that offer visual-based learning as a standard. YouTube is a great example of this, as is LinkedIn Learning where you’re able to rely on video content as opposed to simply reading.

Goal-based Learning

To end, a learning technique that rests heavily on goals is another point to consider.
You may want to feel like you have achieved something throughout your day of study, so working to list out the main goal for your studies each day is a great way to ensure this. Be sure to keep your list of goals for each day around five, as any more than this can seem overwhelming and work against your sense of ‘relief’ at the end of each day.

Keeping in mind that goal-based learning is a great motivator given that you’re also less likely to rely on stress as a motivator, but rather set goals – making it more likely that you will remember what you are learning and succeed in your assignments and exams.