5.2 Differentiation and personalisation

"To use digital technologies to address learners’ diverse learning needs, by allowing learners to advance at different levels and speeds, and to follow individual learning pathways and objectives." DigCompEdu reminds us of the scope that technologies, including digital content can enable students to explore lessons and learning materials at their own pace, and that with appropriate design use different routes to knowledge and understanding.

A concern that many teachers, at all levels of education, have is that students will learn at different paces to one another and it can sometimes be particularly challenging for some students to maintain the same general pace as the scheduling of a course imposes. In part, this is a design issue, where it is difficult anyway to know how long it will take any student to learn new concepts and how much time to spend on each, but it is also an equity issue where some students may have distinct personal challenges to overcome.

By providing content, materials, and asynchronous interaction in a course, we can make opportunities for students to catch up, move ahead, and also potentially choose different pathways through our learning materials. This aligns with the aspirations of accessibility and inclusion that we have just discussed but it also enables all students to feel a little more control over their learning. Indeed, we can extend such flexibility to forms of assessment, and even deadlines and timeframes. If we specify our courses in terms of a set of stated intended learning outcomes, then there could be a case to make that all the student needs to be able to do is convince us that they have fully met those outcomes and could do this in a number of different ways rather than having to complete the exact same type of assignment/assessment on the same schedule as everyone else. Yes, of course, there are logistic and administrative constraints, but it is worth considering what scope there is for such flexibility and indeed whether students with particular needs are being appropriately empowered as self-directed learners.

Note

Educational Technology companies and enthusiasts make a great deal of claims about 'personalisation' of learning and being attuned to individual learner needs in many of the products they are selling or developing. It is worth noting that there has been a long history of such claims and there's no more informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking history of this concept than Audrey Watters' book "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning." It provides insights and a strong cautionary tale which will inoculate the reader against hype and false claims from vendors and over-enthusiastic advocates. If we are to seriously identify the potential roles of technologies, including new developments such as AI, then we need to have a critical awareness to make informed, realistic decisions. We'll say more about this aspect in a later lesson in this course.