Getting Personal: The Promise of Personalized Learning

Personalized learning’s basic premise—that instruction should be tailored for each student and that the student should be the prime actor in directing learning—is not new. Four tensions in education, however, are reigniting interest in personalized learning:

Accompanying the impetus to address these problems and the resulting revival of interest in personalized learning is the sense that new technologies may actually make such learning feasible. By reforming schooling’s time–pace– place traditions and utilizing new technologies, personalized learning proponents assert that the bulging curriculum could be accommodated, data and instruction efficiently managed, students motivated, and people connected. Figure 1 illustrates the problematic tensions in education, the possible technological solutions, and the application of the technologies in the practice of personalization.