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There is great enthusiasm for personalized learning, but is it all it promises?
The traditional approach where teaching is the same for all people has become an obsolete concept. It seems that personalized learning is the new key to achieving excellence, but is this method all that it promises? The unprecedented changes that education experienced during COVID-19 raised questions about what teaching should look like and what curricula should look like. One of the most talked-about topics around this is personalized learning, as the pandemic excited many about its potential to transform education. Although it is not a new concept, it still does not have an exact definition and generates a lot of debate because it does not have a way to measure its effectiveness.
For Dr. Shawn Smith, Chief Innovation Officer at McGraw Hill Education, scalable personalized learning is the best way to deliver the content each student needs, at the right time, and in a way that directly connects with their interests. “Not only do we need to meet individual children where they are, but we also need to ease the burden that teachers face, or we will lose so many in this profession,” Smith told EdSurge. “Many brilliant educators love to teach and love children, but they are physically and emotionally drained. We have to use technology to alleviate some of that exhaustion.”
The Qatar Foundation, together with Economist Impact, conducted two studies to understand how the pandemic has affected perceptions of personalized learning in the UK and the US. The authors described how educational institutions were forced to experiment with methods and techniques aligned with personalized learning. In addition, they show that educators see this model as something positive due to its potential. The foundation said that “there is almost universal enthusiasm for ‘personalized learning,’“ but there is no clarity about what this means in practice. All educators surveyed (100%) say teachers support the idea of personalized learning and 99% say “school administrators support it.”
In another Economist Impact survey in the same report for the Qatar Foundation, 99% of educators agreed that COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of personalized learning at their institutions, making that approach “more relevant than ever.” What caused the pandemic was that they adapted critical elements of this method; however, they are not equivalent to a personalized pedagogy, which shows that there is no clarity about what personalized learning is in practice. The popularity of this approach is that it seems particularly effective in building 21st-century skills. More than half of teachers find that it helps them “develop problem-solving skills (70%), critical thinking (69%), creativity (53%), confidence (51%) and communication skills (50%).”
One of the biggest problems with this method is that measurement and evaluation do not always reflect the benefits of personalized learning, mainly as this approach ranges from being teacher-led to student-led. The first is more traditional since the educator prepares the lessons according to the student’s needs; the second, in broad terms, the teacher becomes a mentor so that each student internalizes the information and discovers it for himself. Most interviewees prefer the first method because it represents a moderate innovation in traditional pedagogy.
In the field of innovation, the report also surveyed different institutions to learn about their approaches. It was found that 73% only include learning plans tailored to the needs of students, 26% commented that instruction is developed according to the needs of individual students, and only 14% say that students have a say in what they do, when and where do they learn.
The role of technology
Technology is a vital tool for delivering personalized learning, but it depends on the choice of software. The schools of almost all respondents (92%) have adopted Learning Management Systems (LMS) to reinforce personalized learning. However, 46% of respondents’ schools have invested in exploratory learning environments, 32% in game-based learning tools; 24% in dialogue-based education; and 8% in virtual agents. Technology has been key to the approach; however, it is not enough on its own. Still, 70% of educational institutions surveyed use it to deliver personalized learning, and 98% feel that, especially after the pandemic, the current discussion is too focused on the technology itself; This is because technology and personalized learning are too often conflated.
According to the Qatar Foundation report, “providing personalized education at scale requires technology, but it is most valuable when it provides teachers with information about their students and improves the interaction between them. Greater cooperation between educational technology companies and schools is needed to develop more effective products.” More than 90% of educators and top business executives agree that collaboration between the two needs to be improved to develop practical tools. Mutual support will benefit both parties, companies to design better products that suit the needs of teachers and them to have better tools.
Students and families are not so convinced of the approach; only 26% of parents support personalized learning. Only 8% of students do because it represents a significant change from how they are used to education and how other generations were taught. The only way this educational method will be successful is to convince them of its benefits; For the report’s experts, “the personalized learning experience is the most effective way to do it.”
Still, for the Qatar Foundation, “personalized learning must be much more than technology.” According to their report, 98% of those surveyed believe the discussion is too focused on technology. Antonia Kerle, manager of policy and knowledge research for technology, media, and education at Economist Impact, confirms the feeling of families, saying that, although it is crucial and helpful, the culture, the school, the acceptance of all, the quality of the teacher, etc., have a more significant impact.
A survey by the Education Week Research Center found worrying results about the use of technology. According to their findings, educators felt that they could not assess students’ academic strengths, weaknesses, and interests as well as before, diminishing the ability to adapt to personalized learning.
For Dr. Shawn Smith, Director of Innovation at McGraw Hill, it’s important to have a tool that brings data together in one place so that it can be manipulated to be visualized and understood, and used by teachers. Visualizing each student’s performance allows you to determine what actions to take to improve the performance of each student. He says that “we need to make teachers more efficient and let technology do what manual labor did in the past.” Each student has a style of assimilating the classes; for example, some are visual while
others prefer audio. That’s why some thrive in the classroom, and others do better learning independently. Personalized learning is the best approach to creating an educational experience perfectly tailored to the needs of each student.
While the pandemic has posed many challenges, the disruption has forced educational institutions to rethink teaching and question how best to teach. Capturing learning and the new flexibility that applying technology has brought will allow teachers to be more intentional about how and when to lead to benefit students through a more personalized learning experience. Technology is opening up a variety of new combinations of in-person, remote, synchronous, and asynchronous learning that, if harnessed correctly, will drive success for both students and teachers and help shape a flexible way of learning.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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