Hi Everyone,
Here are the results of the activities you have taken part in:
Pre-Learning Survey Results (based on 14 responses):
- How familiar our peers are with personalized learning:
- 71% of peers are Somewhat Familiar
- 14% are Familiar
- 14% are Unfamiliar
- Three most important factors in order of their importance are:
- Personalized learning curricular
- Formative assessment software
- Teacher professional development
- Three main benefits of personalized learning in order of their importance are:
- Higher student engagement (27%)
- Improved learning performance (22%)
- Ability of students to work at their own pace (22%)
- Four biggest drawbacks are:
- Inability of some students to take on initiative (32%)
- Lack of required professional development (18%)
- Possibility of students missing critical aspects of education (16%)
- Possibility of students missing critical aspects of education (16%)
Activity 1: School Review
Soar Program attracted more investors than AltSchool. The main arguments were that the SOAR program is easier to implement in a regular school setting, and it offers real world learning.
Activity 2: Personalized App Review
The personalized learning apps seemed to appeal to different people for different reasons. This stands to reason as we each have different educational needs and experiences. These apps were selected for their ability to support personalized learning and as educators we have an idea how they can be most used for our students. Some of us recognized the value in the gaming apps while others were drawn to the literacy apps.
The app that was most popular was Duolingo. The value of this app was recognized last week for the purposes of Microlearning. This week we recognize how this app can assist individuals as they choose their own learning path. With several languages to choose from and lessons that are tailored to match the ability of each individual student, Duolingo is an excellent app for personalized learning and has been recognized as such by our class.
Opportunity Forecast Poll:
- 75% believe that personalized learning will become more relevant over the next 1-2 years
- 50% plan to use it
Opportunity Forecast Discussion revealed:
Based on the discussion amongst the participants regarding the future of Personalized Learning, there were a few key concerns that were brought up repeatedly that could possibly impact the future of Personalized Learning. As pointed out by Laila, personalized education is still new so “more time, resources and training on a large scale will be needed to implement a system-wide acceptance”. But because the key concept for personalized learning is individualization, this form of learning can be hard to implement in a wide-scale as time needed for lesson preparation would exponentially increase if educators have to individually prepare materials for each student’s individualized topic instead of mass print or prepare materials for the same lesson but for the whole class. This, in turn, would eventually impact standardized assessments as well, as students would all have various learning experiences, making standardized assessment nearly impossible to be fair.
That said, smaller classrooms with lesser students may benefit a lot from such setups as more topics would now be covered and available if the school is short staffed. Most of the time when bringing up concerns about this topic, many worry about the culture shock from traditional classrooms to personalized classrooms, but we often miss the shock in the other direction. So another interesting concern brought up was the “culture-shock” Personalized learners would experience when they have to switch back to traditional classroom formats in higher education, as Personalized Learning hasn’t developed to that level yet. Due to these concerns and predictions, it can be concluded that Personalized Learning has a strong future, it just needs more fine tweaking and development before it can be successfully implemented into school-wide systems or bigger classrooms.
We hope you enjoyed our opportunity forecast! Please share your feedback on this page.
Galina, Andrew and Wanyi