Designing “Concentrated Listening” for Advantageous Adult Learning With Multimedia

In the online learning space, adult learners have access to a wide variety of sound-based content (podcasts, audio books, audio recordings, and others) and multimodal contents of which the audio element is a central part. This work explores research methods used to enhance “concentrated listening” to enable learners to acquire the most from the following: pre-recorded sound files, live audio, natural language discussions through speech, and other types of auditory-based learning online. This work explore some aspects of (1) learning designs to enhance both adult “concentrated listening” in an online learning context (both synchronous and asynchronous) and (2) some tactical designs of learning based around sound for general learning (vs. domain-specific case-based learning).