Personalized learning is the tailoring of pedagogy, curriculum, and learning environments to meet the needs and aspirations of individual learners. Typically technology is used to facilitate personalized learning environments.
According to the National Educational Technology Plan developed by the US Department of Education, personalized learning is defined as adjusting the pace (individualization), adjusting the approach (differentiation), and connecting to the learner's interests and experiences. Personalization is broader than just individualization or differentiation in that it affords the learner a degree of choice about what is learned, when it is learned and how it is learned. The rhetoric is often phrased in terms of learning 'anytime, anywhere or any place. ' This may not indicate unlimited choice, since learners will still have targets to be met. However, it may provide learners the opportunity to learn in ways that suit their individual learning styles and multiple intelligences.
Personalized Learning is characterized by the following:
- Different objective for each learner
- Applying of differentiated teaching strategies for individual learners
- The learner actively participates to the construction of his or her own curriculum
- Development of all dimensions of learner, not only the cognitive (emotional, social, life experience, etc.)
- Emphasis on previous knowledge, competence, life and work skills
- Learner's self-direction becomes a fundamental skill
Personal Learning Environments
Communications technology can be a powerful tool for personalized learning as it allows learners access to research and information, and provides a mechanism for communication, debate, and recording learning achievements. Personal Learning Environments (PLE) are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to:
- set their own learning goals
- manage their learning, both content and process
- communicate with others in the process of learning
Technically, the PLE represents the integration of a number of "Web 2.0" technologies like blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc.— around the independent learner. Using the term "e-learning 2.0," Stephen Downes describes the PLE as: "... one node in a web of content, connected to other nodes and content creation services used by other students. It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student's own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications—an environment rather than a system. "
PLE puts the individual learner at the center, connecting him or her to both information and to communities to: "... provide personal spaces, which belong to and are controlled by the user, [and also provide] a social context by offering means to connect with other personal spaces for effective knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation. " emphasis on community, conceptualizing it in terms of "groups," "networks" and "collectives" (2007) and thereby achieve learning goals.
Some criticisms of personalized learning warn that the approach often discounts the highly relational and socially-constructed space well-defined in the research on learning. Narrowing personalized learning to its digital form also raises the concern of the echo chamber effect emerging in (hyper)personalized online experiences, that is, isolation from alternative viewpoints, subjects, and instructional techniques which may challenge a learner.
Personalized Learning
Personalized learning often involves the use of technologies such as the Internet, which take learning out of the traditional classroom.