Competencies and Personalized Learning

This chapter elaborates on a definition of personalized learning, delineates aspects of competency inherent in the definition, traces the evolution of personalized learning, and explores the complementarity of the personal and the interpersonal in personalized education. The chapter addresses and attempts to resolve tensions and tradeoffs between seemingly competing facets of personalized learning: (a) academic, career, and personal competencies; and (b) individualization, personalization, and socialization.

The term “personalized learning” sprang onto the scene in recent years as several learning technologies and repositories of information (especially via the Internet) advanced to the point of showing great promise as efficient ways to individualize instruction and enrich the curriculum. Ronald Taylor and Azeb Gebre, in their chapter in this volume, define personalized learning as “instruction that is differentiated and paced to the needs of the learner and shaped by the learning preferences and interests of the learner.” This is a lean and serviceable definition.