Personalized Learning

Objective 
“The same three effects emerged (in education): the change of the market, a more personalized experience, and the creation of a single global market.” (Bowen, 2012)

Reflective
The proliferation of technology has resulted in revolutions in every aspect of teaching and learning. Given the fact that learning content can be delivered online, many lecture videos from world-class institutions are accessible from the internet, even many of the local university professors start to post their lectures online, what actually attracts students to your classroom, what exactly makes a real teacher special – compared to all that can be offered in a virtual world? The quote above gave me the answer – personalized learning experience.

When I was a student back in China, I was one of the two hundred sitting in the lecture hall, passively listening, working on the same homework, and receiving a right-or-wrong kind of feedback from the grader. With deep appreciations to PIDP program instructors, I have had completely different learning experience – a more personalized learning experience. Students get to choose from three directions, social media, digital media and low tech – which acknowledge individual’s background, existing knowledge, personal interest and future career paths. Students also have options of what topics are discussed in the forum, and topics to research about in the journals, and videos; based on these options, we also receive personalized and tailored feedback. In other words, learning content, assessment, and feedback – most components of our learning experience is personalized and we as learners, take the ownership to construct our own learning map. The outcomes are obvious. Being a passive, unmotivated learner in the past, I am now more engaged in my self-constructed learning experience, more motivated to put in time and effort to those that most interest me. The difference in my own learning experience convinces me the effectiveness of personalized learning. It also motivates me to research further on the meaning, values and implications of personalized learning.

Interpretative 

            We live in an era when personalizing learning experience is not just a possibility but almost becoming a natural expectation from learners. We read personalized news from Flipboard; we listen to personalized music playlist from Pandora; Amazon personalizes our recommendation list based on purchasing history; Google personalizes search results based on browsing history. In the midst of everything being customized, have we done enough to personalize learning for our students?

The term personalized learning often refers to “a diverse variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual students” (Personalized Learning, 2014). Personalization of learning is one of the most effective ways of improving the quality of learning. It includes thoughtful consideration of numerous factors such as learner’s profiles, learning materials, learning strategies, learning styles, cognitive styles, multiple intelligence and many more (Samah, Yahaya, & Ali, 2011). In a highly personalized learning environment, learner is responsible to organize, customize and shape the learning environment with instructor’s guidance. Attentions on individual difference was found to increase learner’s satisfaction, motivation and eventually academic performance significantly (Lim, Morris, & Yoon, 2006). One of the theoretical frameworks on personalized learning is intentional learning theory. This theory hypothesizes that, awareness of the individual’s intentions about learning (e.g. strategies, importance, timing, and personal learning goals) is the fundamental of how an individual effectively learns, interact, performs and engages in learning. (Martinez, 1999).

            A few strategies of personalized approach have been proposed (Gagne, Wager, Golas, & Keller, 2005)

·       Whole-person strategy: focuses on the cognitive, emotion, intention and social aspects of learners.

·       Name-recognized strategy: emphasizes the recognition of learners’ names, which is valued by most of people as being acknowledged as an individual

·       Self-described strategy: based on answers provided by learners

·       Cognitive-based strategy: is an approach that only refers to the cognitive process, strategy and ability of learners

Among these strategies, the whole-person strategy is the most comprehensive approach towards the most personalized learning environment that recognizes the most complete aspects of different learning profiles. However, due to time, technological and administrative constrains, other strategies can be implemented as a compromised solution. 

As the importance and effectiveness of personalized learning is increasingly recognized increasingly in the society in recent years, there also exist many issues and challenges in this field (Santos, Baldiris, & Boticario, 2011), which includes:

·       the need of support for adaptive learning scenarios

·       lack of frameworks for providing layered-based infrastructure covering the interoperability required to manage the whole range of standards

·       limited research and shortage of best practices

Decisional 

Despite having talked about personalized learning for many years, most of educational professionals, including myself, have been slow to implement personalized. At least, on the content level, we can help student to create their own learning experience yet still meet the expectations of the general curriculum. This is actually being experimented in many classrooms. At Hunterdon Central Regional Central High School in New Jersey, students have started creating their own personalized learning plans with teacher’s help (Richardson, 2012).

Here is what I decided to do in my future practice to implement more of the personalized learning features -

Mindset Change - First of all, this means a change of skillset, and also a mindset. I have to be comfortable with the diverse routes that students choose, which may mean, a surprisingly variety of student’s questions, reflections, activities, and plans. It is both risk and reward, requiring lots of adjusting. The mindset change also involves a different view of my role. I am in the classroom to help our students connect course goals with their own passion. In some cases, students have real difficulties finding their passions. My challenge is to probe targeted questions, to steer students to multiple resources that may spark interests, and at the end, encourage students to collect and share what they enjoy in their learning, and to help students see the connections.

Offering Flexibility in Learning - Secondly, in order to personalize student’s learning experience, I am going to offer some flexibilities in at least some of the assessments. Many Learning Management Systems (LMS) offer personalization of the interface for individual students and student groups. Although I have used Blackboard Learn for quite a while, I haven’t given my students enough opportunities to personalize their online environment. In the future, I will enable customization features, and demonstrate students how to customize their page and their group page, encourage them to add built-in tools, incorporate online forum and journal writing into the curriculum so that my students can add content, construct and monitor their own learning. Technological tools, such as ALEKS (an assessment-based learning aid which designs learning topics based on student’s assessment results) can also be involved to help personalized learning experience. At the end, I should realize that, learning occurs within a specific didactical setting and with the aid of appropriate tools, therefore, learners should be provided possibilities but not too many to be overwhelmed.

Giving Personalized and Adaptive Feedback – Feedback is especially critical in personalized learning. The feedback should not only address on the content level – what students have understood, and what corrections they should make, but also consider the affective and motivational factors. I think a personalized learning experience should also emphasize on the affection domain and this might be something that technological tool cannot replace from a real and considerable teacher (Kim, 2012). Cultivating positive emotions and reducing negative emotions can benefit learning process and outcomes. Including individual and personalized support for positive affective experiences is one of the central concerns for personalized learning. To implement this idea in my feedback, I decide to write at least one personal message to each student, recognizing their academic improvement, stimulating curiosity, promoting student’s perception of task value based on their majors and personal goals in the long term. In all other formative assessment feedback, I will always address their names at the very beginning, and point out what they have achieved, and offer personalized advice of future learning strategies.

Preparing Self-Directed Learners – I believe the ultimate goal of personalized learning is to let learners decide what to learn, to identify a problem that requires learning to rectify; to let learners plan and acquire resources and carry out this learning plan; to implement the learning plan and evaluate learning outcomes, and decide when to end the learning cycle when learning is complete. Guiding our students to personalize learning experience is also to cultivate life-long learning skills, and eventually help our learners become a self-directed learner.  

Bibliography

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Teaching Naked: Howe Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom will Improve Student Learning (1st Edition ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Gagne, R. M., Wager, W. W., Golas, K. C., & Keller, J. M. (2005). Introduction to Instructional Design (5th ed.). Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth, Cengage.

Kim, C.-M. (2012). The role of affective and motivational factors in designing personalized learning environments. Education Tech Research Dev, 563.

Lim, D. H., Morris, M. L., & Yoon, S. W. (2006). Combined Effect of Instructional. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 5(3), 255.

Martinez, M. (1999). Intentional Learning in an Intentional World: New Perspectives on Audience Analysis and Instructional System Design. Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Conference on Systems Documentation, 211. Retrieved from http://ikit.org/fulltext/1989intentional.pdf

Personalized Learning. (2014). Retrieved from The Glossary of Education Reform: http://edglossary.org/personalized-learning/

Richardson, W. (2012). Preparing Students to Learn Without Us. For Each to Excel, 22.

Samah, N. A., Yahaya, N., & Ali, M. B. (2011). Individual differences in online personalized learning environment. Educational Research and Reviews, 6(7), 516.

Santos, O. C., Baldiris, S., & Boticario, J. G. (2011). Open Issues in Personalized Inclusive Learning Scenarios. International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE 2011), (p. 54). Girona, Spain.