The more I teach, the more impressed I am at just how personal learning really is. As I take stock of my observations about learners and learning, I have become more and more convinced that the more personalized I can make an experience for students, the more likely they are to engage and meet learning goals. Thus, this week when prompted to research an aspect of learning, it seemed a no brainer to choose “personalized learning.” More specifically I am interested in personalizing online learning, as I work in the online portion for a blended school (part online, part face-to-face). My research led to two articles that focus on ways to provide more personalized experiences for online or e-learning.
The first article explores how animated Virtual Change Agents (VCAs) can add a layer of personalization to e-learning by focusing on emotion control and motivation. (Kim 2012) Kim recommends two guidelines when designing VCAs: “Design Guideline 1: Design VCAs to convey strategies that facilitate students’ reappraisal of a situation,” and “Design Guideline 2: Design VCAs to promote students’ interactions with VCAs.” (Kim p. 569, 572) The guidelines are informed by a number of studies Kim and other researchers have done on motivation and emotion regulation. The focus on emotion regulation would be an especial focus, according to Kim, “which would be more practical than to program to address every single possible problem that students can encounter,” (Kim, p.578) and based on the previous studies have a huge impact on helping students gain success over difficult course material.
The second article details the development and piloting of a learning platform that functions for e-learning as well as on mobile devices, and which students and teachers could use on any device to track their progress and gather data. (Nedunggadi & Raman 2012) Specifically used for formative assessment of material, the program tracks right and wrong answer and prompts with a variety of scaffolds based on a students results. The study pilot found that “students could indeed seamlessly move between e-learning and m-learning systems without significantly affecting the learning outcomes.” (Nedungadi & Raman, p.676) Performance was slightly lower when students used the mobile devices, but it was minor and could have been due to the fact that students spent more time per question due to the program running more slowly. (Nedungadi & Raman, p.676)
Both articles give insight into specific ways to use technology to personalize learning in online e-learning, reminding me of Richard Culatta’s TED Talk about how we can use technology to reimagine education. By using interactive programs, students get a customized experience that speaks directly to their specific needs at the specific moment when intervention would be most helpful. The idea of using VCAs to help students regulate emotion and motivation (Kim 2012) and the variety of specific scaffolding (Nedungadi & Raman 2012) would truly are the types of innovations Culatta has in mind, I think, because they move far beyond digitizing traditional learning formats. Instead of having to wait for a teacher to ask a question and redirect the student toward a scaffold, the scaffolds are instantly available and embedded. Similarly with the VCAs, it would be nearly impossible for a teacher to monitor a class full of students’ motivation and emotion regulation on a moment by moment basis.
In thinking about how this applies to the maker movement in education, there seems to be a lot of freedom made possible by integrating scaffolds and emotion regulation prompts into mobile learning. Choosing the place and time learning takes place can be a huge for a young person, and would certainly free educators to rethink the structure of school in general. If we are wanting to make makers, providing them the freedom to explore learning in a variety of ways seems almost intuitive. The more we can encourage students to learn in out-of-the-box ways while engaging in robust learning environments, the more we will enable them to create and make in out-of-the-box ways. Modeling plays a big role in the learning process – the more teachers have the ability to model ingenuity for their students, the better.
References
Nedungadi, Prema & Raghu Raman. (27 Apr 2012). “A new approach to personalization: integrating e-learing and m-learning.” Education Tech Research Dev. 60: 659-678. DOI 10.1007/s11423-012-9250-9
Kim, ChanMin. (1 May 2012). “The role of affective and motivational factors in designing personalized learning environments.” Education Tech Research Dev. 60: 563-584. DOI 10.1007/s11423-012-9253-6
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