Personalisation

There is a growing awareness that one-size-fits-all approaches to school knowledge and organisation are ill-adapted both to individuals’ needs and to the knowledge society at large. The move beyond uniform, mass provision can be described as “personalisation” of education and of public services more widely. Digital technologies are playing a pivotal role in enabling this to happen. (Ref: OECD: Personalising Education)

• Interfaces – increasingly, learners are able to adapt and customise the interfaces they use (e.g. i-Google, Firefox etc.) in addition, we’re seeing the emergence of interfaces that adapt in response to learner use-patterns to make them more personalised.
• Assessment – an increasing range of online and digital assessment tools are becoming available (e.g. Northern Arizona University's Online Assessment Tool). In addition, many of these tools are capable of using data to provide next-step learning recommendations, and adapt to the learner responses etc., (e.g. e-asTTle).
• Portfolios – e-portfolios provide the ideal environment to support personalised learning approaches, and the gathering of evidence for personalised assessment. E-portfolios can be “owned” by the individual, and move with the individual through his or her learning lifetime, rather than being tied to a particular institution.