PERSONALIZED LEARNING

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TOPIC: PERSONALIZED LEARNING

What is Personalized Learning?

Personalized learning is an educational approach that tailors learning for each student's needs, interests, and abilities. It aims to create a student-centered educational approach that tailors instruction to meet individual learners' unique needs, interests, and learning styles. 

How does personalized learning work?

Personalized learning centers around the task of connecting a learner’s previous knowledge, experiences, and abilities with training materials that will link that understanding with new information.

The simplest example of personalized learning would be when an instructor provides learning material with proper content and context, and in the best way for the learner.

This is done by using the existing knowledge that the instructor has of the student. The instructor understands how best to connect the learner’s previous experiences and abilities to the new information, building links between existing knowledge and new information.

Why is personalized learning important?

If an organization wants to improve learning outcomes, personalized learning is a proven way to do so.

By taking data related to a learner’s previous experience and linking that to new concepts, personalized learning results in a more complete understanding of new concepts, better engagement, and knowledge retention is improved. In short, personalized learning makes learning more effective.

By looking at the previous example, you can see how personalized learning can transform a common training program and make it more personalized for each unique user. Such changes make the learning process engaging, faster, and more effective.

Benefits of personalized learning:

• Saves time
• Increases engagement
• Increased motivation
• Improves learning results
• Improves knowledge retention

Personalized learning can help learners:

• Move at their own pace
• Take initiative over their own education
• Learn from each other
• Improve engagement
• Retain knowledge
• Apply what they've learned in a practical context 

Some examples of individualized instruction include:

• One-on-one tutoring
• Mentoring
• Online course providers
• Search engines
• Differentiated homework assignments
• Programmed instruction
• Problem-based instruction
• Inquiry-based learning
• Computer assisted instruction

Conclusion

Making learning personalized has a great impact on learning outcomes. When new concepts are linked to a person’s previous experience, it results in better understanding, and learning becomes more effective.

In an organizational environment, the creation of personalized learning requires technology solutions to make it cost-effective and scalable.\Technology, like a combination of Experience API (xAPI) and Learning Record Store (LRS), enables the collection of an employee’s experiences on a very granular level in digital form.

This information could be then leveraged in building a personalized learning experience in future learning activities using a combination of sophisticated search and personalized engines.Of course, none of the technology solutions is perfect, but by closing the feedback loop from a learner’s activities back to the solution, the quality of answers given to a learner will be constantly improving.