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As the school year ramps up, you may start hearing about the Next Big Thing in education: “Personalized Learning.”
Personalized Learning takes a great many forms; some of them mighty sensible and attractive and some of them mighty bad news.
Here are some key terms to help you discern what flavor of “PL” you’re dealing with. (Warning: I will be oversimplifying everything. See Dr. Google for additional information.)
Personalized Learning is, loosely, the idea that the student gets an educational program tailored to her personal strengths, weaknesses, and interests. It can also refer to a student sitting at a computer working through a series of generic, digital worksheets. A quick way to get a sense of what you’re dealing with is to identify the delivery system—will a team of live human beings work with your child to develop a unique learning program for that child, or are you hearing a bunch of rhetoric that boils down to “We have some super-awesome software”?
Competency Based Education has been around a long time. You may remember Outcome Based Education from the 1990s, or “mastery learning.” Again, the concept is appealingly simple—spend the amount of time learning something that it takes to learn that thing, and then once you’ve proven you know the material, move on. This dovetails nicely with personalized learning, and can result in some very creative and impressive individualized projects that help students develop and perfect a whole constellation of complex skills.
Unfortunately, Competency Based Education can also lead to grossly oversimplified baloney. You may have at some point received a request from your human resources department commanding, “Follow this link, watch the video/slide show, and take the quiz at the end.” You let the video play in the background while you do something else, and then come back to take the quiz, which is perfunctory and easily gamed and doesn’t prove that you learned a thing. But you pass, and are “certified,” so it’s all good.
Sometimes this shows up as badges or “microcredentials”—every little skill the student displays earns her a badge, just like unlocking an Xbox achievement.
At its worst, Competency Based Education is a checklist of easy-to-score quizzes that students move through without any engagement or learning at all, in particular when highly complex tasks like essay writing are reduced to simple-to-score tasks that don’t really reflect the true goal at all.
“I took the ten-item multiple choice quiz on paragraph structure, so I now know everything I need to know about writing a scholarly essay ever,” is not a worthwhile goal. The question you want to ask about Competency Based Education is, “How will we really know if my student really learned anything?” Designing truly individualized project-based learning is hard, but thanks to computer software creating and managing large libraries of simply-scored simple tasks is easy (and it’s profitable, too).
Artificial Intelligence. The pitch here is that your child will be constantly assessed, and a wise and wonderful artificial intelligence lodged deep in the machine will choose the next appropriate activity for your student.
The reality is far less magical. What marketers call “artificial intelligence” is simply an algorithm. And it doesn’t have to be a very “smart” one, either. Your child takes ten-item quiz 144/A. The computer scores it and finds your child missed items #3 and #6. The algorithm says that everyone who misses those two items moves on to Worksheet 3214-2B. Students do not create their own personalized path; they are simply directed over a map of pre-set paths.
This is not really personalization. It’s just an algorithm and huge library of worksheets (though the smaller and less complex the system, the more profitable it will be for the vendor). Don’t accept “It’s magical artificial intelligence” as an answer—ask how the “personalization” will really be created. It’s very hard to have personalization without involving persons.
It’s very hard to have personalization without involving persons.
Data. This means a computer-based personalized learning system is going to be collecting a ton of data about your child. You should be concerned about where that’s going, and who’s going to see it. For example, one company pushing into the personalized learning business is LCA iLearning, whose big tool is software that watches the student and measures every blink and grimace and response. But that’s not the creepiest part. The creepiest part is that LCA is not an education company—they’re a marketing company.
Computer-driven personalized learning is watching your child, measuring their performance on many tasks, all day. And not always wisely—one testing company thinks it can tell how mature your student is by how long they take to answer multiple choice questions. That collected information is a gold mine; you should make sure you know who exactly is going to be swinging their pickaxe in your school’s data base.
In short, personalized learning could offer great promise, but there are many, many devils hiding in the details. If someone is touting personalized learning in your school, you’d be wise to start looking for them.