From the course: Using Gen AI to Develop Personalized Learning Plans

Why personalized learning is so challenging

From the course: Using Gen AI to Develop Personalized Learning Plans

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Why personalized learning is so challenging

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Personalized learning is actually a long standing pursuit in education, and its path has been paved with encouraging successes and disappointing failures. As computers became more affordable in the 2000, we started to look to technology to solve the scaling problem, presenting different options to the learner or giving learners their own ability to explore a library of content in any order. But our vision was greater than our technology. It's simply impossible for a human designer to predict all the possible responses for every learner. The approach also ignores culture, prior experiences, or learner preferences. So why is personalized learning so difficult? Let's take an example. You've just hired an intern to help you write training materials. The first thing you need to do is train your new assistant, right? So you make a list of things you need to cover. Now imagine your project goes really well. So well, you've been asked to develop a training program for 100 interns who will be joining your department next month. What will you have to do differently? What parts of your plan work well for an audience of one, but won't scale effectively to an audience of 100. The challenge of scale is the number one barrier to achieving personalized learning in today's workplace. Here are a few other issues I've seen in my work as a consultant. First of all, there's only one of me. I can teach a single person to pick up some of my routine tasks, but it takes so much time, it's almost not worth the effort. Trust me, I've tried. You might also run into a lack of buy-in or support. Even in a one-person shop like mine, I have to change my workflow to train an assistant. Imagine if I tried to train multiple assistants at once. No two people will have the same background or skill set. Why have I always done so much myself? The alternative just isn't very appealing. There might be a lack of budget or staffing. Has this ever happened to you? You recommend a robust learning solution, but your client needs it next week. No time to build your personalized learning masterpiece. Right. And sometimes you just don't have the right technology to pull it off. Why is it so hard to achieve? It's simple. Humans can't be everything to everyone all the time. All budgets, whether they're about money, time, or staff are finite. And traditional technology is just as limited. But when we throw the power of generative AI at the problem, the impossible becomes possible.

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