Text | 522oer

PERSONALIZED LEARNING

The text curriculum

Below are 4 written sections on the topics outlined on the home page, designed to give you an insight into this new Educational Technology with reference to it's form, usability and possible future venture markets. At the end of each section there are 3 questions aimed at assisting in reflection and understanding of the content we are imparting on you. At the end of this module you can find some discussion prompts and a padlet space for you to share your questions or ideas and respond to the posts and comments of others. Enjoy!

Introduction to Personalized Learning

As with various new theories and educational approaches, no one has been able to settle on a shared definition of personalized learning yet. However, it is generally characterized by three features:

Systems and approaches that accelerate and deepen student learning by tailoring instruction to each student’s individual needs, skills, and interests.

A variety of rich learning experiences that collectively prepare students for success in the college and career of their choice

The teachers’ role in designing and managing the learning environment, leading instruction, and providing students with expert guidance and support to help them take increasing ownership of their learning.

This model builds on the back of Benjamin Bloom’s 1984 research which showed that there was a massive improvement for students who were tutored one-on-one compared to students taught in the classroom. This teacher-and-student tutoring method was not scalable or cost-effective though, but now that we have various technologies that can assist us, personalized learning is a possibility in the 21st century when technology is used as a supporting tool. When personalized learning is applied in this type of blended learning environment, it would include the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience as well as communication methods to expand beyond geographic boundaries. The pedagogy behind personalized learning therefore offers a portal to the world through which learners can explore and create, according to their own interests and directions, interacting as they choose with their friends and learning community. Here they would be able to move beyond just being able to memorize knowledge toward being experienced in 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking whilst building character traits such as mindfulness, courage, ethics and leadership along with the meta-learning skill of fostering a love for lifelong learning.

Personalized learning therefore combines the “how” and “what” of learning whilst maintaining an approach that there are still core requirements and expectations in an educational setting. The school subjects we know and recognize now will still all exist within a personalized learning curriculum but there will be simultaneous increased emphasis on competencies; innovation, problem-solving, digital literacy, social responsibility, global and cultural understanding, environmental stewardship, healthy living and ethics which learners would develop by being asked to apply their skills and knowledge in new, often interdisciplinary situations and to use their own motivation and insight to see how they are relevant to the tasks at hand. Applied personalized learning subsequently seeks to empower learners to shape what, how, and when they learn, thus engaging them through their explicit and implicit choices.

Applying and implementing personalized learning authentically would entail a fundamental redesign of the school structure and the role of teachers. This entails undertaking some major shifts such as:

Moving from mass production of educational products to mass customization

Changing from hours of seated learning time to mastery and competency-based activities and deconstructing the industrial age, assembly line learning model to one better suited to the variable, individualized pace of the knowledge age.

Testing and assessment would no longer be incrementally conducted but would instead become ongoing and be embedded and dynamic assessments of knowledge, skills, learning styles and interests.

Learning would be both in fixed locations and mobile with flexible schedules and extra assistance ‘on demand’ and,

Knowledge would no longer be transferred from teacher to student and then memorized but instead a teacher would teach and then guide the student and their peers to be co-creators of knowledge within a learning community.

Learning would therefore be integrated, and learning resources would become digital, portable and interactive with multiple instructional sources.

Properly applied personalized learning therefore rests on a foundational principle of being flexible, anytime, everywhere and would be incorporated into a curriculum and expanded as redefined teacher roles are developed. Personalized Learning is thus currently still in its developmental phases with “true” personalized learning needing much more data, content and curriculum, technology architecture, research and development, and human capacity before we will see it applied in our classrooms as a new normal way of learning.

Reflection Questions

1. Of the three features of personalized learning, which do you consider to be the most important? Why?

2. As Bloom’s research has shown, there is a massive difference in performance between students who are tutored one-to-one compared to students who are taught in a traditional classroom. What do you hope that technology can do to bride this gap?

3. A few foundations of personalized learning must be in place for it to be properly applied to any classroom, including flexibility, the ability for it to happen at any time, and the ability for it to happen anywhere. Why do you think these three principles are so important? Is there one that you find particularly challenging or intimidating?

Components of Personalized Learning

There are four core aspects of personalized learning.

Flexible content and tools

Targeted instruction

Data-driven decisions

Student reflection and ownership of learning.

This does not imply that all personalized learning requires 1-on-1 teaching but rather that classroom content will be flexible enough to be introduced and assessed in different but equally thorough ways, and that sufficient support for students is provided. It is about making an appropriate level of challenge, method of learning, and pace for each student available and giving the student more responsibility for their learning.

This could entail a number of approaches. For example, a science curriculum could simply set up stations for each module of the course and let students do them in any order they like, spending as much time as they need to get through each station.

It could mean individual goal-setting for students with regular reflections on goal progress or students and teachers could co-create personalized “playlists” of content for students to go through each week. It could be a more project based phenomenological approach in which students and teachers work together to decide a topic the students will holistically study.

Personalized learning would require students to have good executive functioning skills although it would help them improve in this area. It would also provide students agency in how they are assessed, but assessment would still be conducted, monitored or requested by a teacher or guiding figure to assure that it is an accurate reflection of student progress and skill. At the end of the day, no matter the application, personalized learning encapsulates both differentiated and individualized learning with multi-modal instruction, flexible pace and assessment and varies depth of content coverage and curriculum based on student needs and interests.

The benefits of technological integration is that it provides a way for students with less resources to access education and can help vary the ways content is presented and, to some extent and provide summative assessments. The benefits of making this learning style technology enabled is that it could include multiple ongoing assessments and data collection that can dynamically identify a student’s needs and strengths relative to their learning goal and thus match students with customized playlists of content or support from multiple sources based on relevant connections to things like prior learning, interest or experience. The hopes with technologically-linked personalized learning is that it will improve achievements for all students, implement education in which competency is linked to practical mastery of a task or skill, increase student engagement and entail a new learning model in which students are empowered and involved in their learning path . There are lingering data-privacy concerns in this area though, and these are being addressed whilst more research and development is done. Personalized learning can therefore be technologically linked but it is not required. As long as students have a means to manage their own learning and participate in every aspect of their education from curriculum content to assessment, personalized learning will occur.

Reflection Questions

1. What do you consider to be the major differences between differentiated, personalized, and individualized learning? Which do you consider to be the most effective? Why?

2. We provided several examples of personalized learning. Given these, is there an example of an educational session in that you have undertaken that you think could be added to our list?

3. The word “flexible” was used multiple times throughout our analysis of the components of personalized learning. Why do you think that this is such an important word when discussing personalized learning? Is there another word that you think should be tied to it instead?

Usability of

Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning has a good reputation thus far and is being hailed as a new solution to many of the problems being identified by teachers and researchers about the way that learning has been occurring for the last 100 years, particularly in the sense that it hasn’t notably changed with our society and technology and that it's usability hasn't grown. With it’s core focus on differentiating and individualizing learning to help cater to the skills and competencies required for the knowledge age, it is a brilliant Edtech direction that has a primary concern for ensuring usability for the learner. The end result, however, will depend on the products brought to market and the solutions developed by teachers, learners, researchers and entrepreneurs.

There are some genuine concerns about personalized learning which may impact usability of products if not addressed. The most widely reported one is that of privacy and user data concerns on digital or AI based personalized learning platforms. Since the foundation of this implementation of personalized learning relies on computers collecting user data to customize the educational experience on offer and cater specifically to their interests and needs, software for personalized learning is still being flagged as problematic in terms of user safety and protection. This will impact the true usability of personalized learning on a widespread scale until resolved. A second concern, also specifically aimed at technologically based personalized learning, is that the structure of the software will keep educational progress very modulated and may restrict students to merely undertaking learning in small bites and bits that lend themselves to the kind of assessment and record-keeping that a software can handle. Essentially, this criticism says that the usability of personalized learning envisions a series of discrete skills and scraps of knowledge, acquired in a particular sequence, ignoring everything we know about integrating learning into prior knowledge and the world at large.

Personalized learning enables individualization, differentiation, and personalization and the usability of a personalized learning product will therefore rest on how well it enables these core features for a user. This will likely mean that mass production of personalized learning products is unlikely as the products would need to fulfill specific needs and requirements of different user groups in both their hardware and software designs. However, some research is looking to find some core features of personalized learning products that would impact usability of a product or service in order to find a few baseline features that would underlie all personalized learning products. A recent study of this kind had participants engage in trial testing of personalized learning products and compiled their feedback to put together 8 features of usability that they recommend. Participants reported wanting personalized learning products or services to:

Both assist them in accessing information as well as in learning.
Contain only appropriate or related content to their learning goals or requirements.

Have a concise knowledge base.

Be mobile.
Have a cloud storage type access to it on their desktop computers.
Integrate learning solutions that are learner-centric and context aware.

Act as an interesting tool and information browser when used

Allow both use of the provided content and the navigation of relation information.

Whilst more research will be needed before this content can be conclusively generalized, it is a great starting point to look at how to design and shape future personalized learning content to make it excel in usability. Future personalized learning products, services and tools will likely also be informed by leading theories for teaching and learning such as constructivism, learner centered design, social/cognitive development, connectivism, behaviourism and situated learning to ensure its effectiveness, enjoyableness and usability for all to benefit from.

Reflection Questions

1. Given the lack of usability studies, what do you think is the biggest concern that must be addressed when discussing the usability of Personalized Learning?

2. Why do you think that those were the 8 features of usability that study participants listed as things that they recommend? Is there something missing from the list that you would want to include?

3. There is ongoing tension between two schools of thought: those that consider personalized learning to be ‘dehumanizing’ education, and those that want to implement technology in as many places as possible. Which side of the argument would you consider yourself to be on?

Future of

Personalized Learning

Whilst personalized learning is currently limited to very manual implementations, in the sense that it is teachers designing classroom-based solutions for more differentiated and individualized learning opportunities, technologically driven personalized learning is not lagging far behind. In the corporate and venture world, personalized learning is a hot topic with data companies, app developers, neural network and AI coders racing to be the first to bring products to market.

Any future potential of personalized learning will be strongly shaped by a number of factors. The first is the new workplace models in which workers are beginning to require continuous learning throughout their work-life to update their occupational skills and knowledge or to learn new occupational competences. This need is driven by a shorter product life cycle, the increasing speed of adoption and implementation of new technologies in the workplace and the increasing instability of employment with the computer-driven industrial revolution. The second is that as we move deeper into the 21st century and the knowledge age, learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning provider. Finally, educational research is showing how extensively learners have preferences for different pedagogic approaches and learning contexts. These three factors, along with various other factors such as marketability of technologically enhanced products and services, are resulting in growing pressures for personalized learning environments as it promises access to educational technology for everyone who wishes to organise their own learning.

To make predictions on the future of personalized learning requires a consideration of a complex network of technological, educational and social factors that underlie the development of related products and services. It is worth noting that all educational software, implicitly or otherwise, either enhances or restrains certain pedagogic approaches to learning meaning that there is no such thing as pedagogically neutral software. A personal learning environment could navigate these challenges by allowing a leaner to configure and develop a learning environment to suit and enable their own style of learning if products are designed with this hurdle in mind. Designers and developers will also likely need to recognize that, following the internet enabled development of the virtual classroom and the virtual university resulting in institutionally based through Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments, personalized learning will need to avoid being a reproduction of previous, outdated, forms of learning. In order to make sure that this software embodied educational spaces are not sterile or alienating, they will need to refer to research around digital cultures and communities as well as the usability and needs of future users. An ideal future direction for personalized learning would be related to upping the numbers of available open educational resources, but whether this will occur will depend on whether corporations with profit margins dominate the future marketplace or whether it will be more of a socially-linked critical theory educational model.

Whilst clearly still developing with ongoing research and product testing occurring, personalized learning is already starting to enter the public space. We’ve seen companies partnering up with school districts to trial personalized learning with great success. Because of its broad applicability however, personalized learning is likely going to expand beyond school-based education into corporate, trade and lifelong learning environments. What is abundantly clear then, is no matter it’s form or interpretation, personalized learning is one of the most interesting directions in EdTech at the moment with people scrambling to put together minimum viable products or market ready solutions as fast as they can in order to be the first to shatter this glass ceiling. In the next few years we will likely see a huge surge in the development and implementation of personalized learning products; from paper-based curricula packages to continuing professional development courses for teachers and parents and, if the data privacy concerns are mitigated, fully automated and interactive AI solutions for all environments. This means that you - teachers, parents, lifelong learners or venture capitalists with ties to the educational realm - should keep a sharp eye on the horizon for personalized learning experiences that will be coming your way soon!

Reflection Questions

1. What impact do you think a short product life cycle could have on personalized learning and EdTech? Is there a way to combat the short life cycle?

2. Why do you think researchers claim that there is no such thing as ‘pedagogically neutral’ software? What does this mean to you? What impact does this have on educators, personalized learning advocates, and EdTech developers?

3. Are there any spaces that you have experienced that would particularly benefit from the integration of personalized learning in the near future? If so, what are they, are what type of needs would those users have that their personalized learning tools would need to cater to and what problems/challenges would personalized learning help solve?

DISCUSSION PROMPTS

Consider these inquiries when developing a reflection or question for our discussion space:

What is your instinctual reaction to the concept of personalized learning?
Do you notice any particularly glaring pros or cons to it?
Are there any major implementation barriers that you can recognise?
Does it solve or respond to any of the current challenges identified in education?
Can you see it being successfully blended with technological tools?
Would you have any interest in creating or participating in a personalized learning environment?
Have you got any predictions as to how the edtech industry will develop personalized learning in the coming years?
Who do you think personalized learning systems are best suited for?
Do you know of any companies or startups developing products of interest for investors?