Instructors need to take steps to make the online classroom a comfortable and supportive learning environment regardless of students' online learning experience or learning style preferences-a particularly important consideration when teaching students from multiple generations.

Online courses offer several advantages over face-to-face courses when it comes to teaching critical thinking (analysis, evaluation, and deduction), according to according to Linda Armstrong, science professor at Sullivan County Community College in New York. The challenge is to engage students by addressing various learning styles and to find ways to build in critical thinking throughout the course.

Start with a list of 12 familiar ways to learn course content: reading texts or other printed material; writing term papers, participating in group activities in class, doing major team projects, doing cases, taking multiple choice exams, giving presentations to the class, learning about different theories, doing practical exercises, solving problems, doing library research, or exercising a lot of creativity. Now hypothesize as to which learning style prefers which of these approaches to learning.

Research on learning styles now spans four decades. The amount of work ebbs and flows with more flowing recently. Interestingly, work on learning styles continues to occur across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including many quite removed from psychology, the disciplinary home of many of the central concepts and theories that ground notions of learning style.