Flipped Learning as a Path to Personalization

Digital technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in schools. One-to-one computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives are helping to ensure that each student has a device with which to work. Although these technologies can support personalized learning, they haven’t yet transformed our schools into 21st-century utopias where students engage in interactive, individualized learning applications and access information in order to collaboratively solve problems while teachers roam the learning space, coaching and mentoring as their engaged and self-directed students happily work.

In fact, there have been some large, public failures. Consider, for example, Los Angeles Unified School District’s $1.3 billion iPad initiative in 2013. Experts suggested that part of the reason this initiative failed so spectacularly was that it put technology first. Without a clear plan in place, the district purchased iPads not to solve a problem but simply for the sake of incorporating the technology (Lapowsky, 2015).