EDU 655 Week 5 - Assignment 1 The Next Frontier: Personalized Learning

Ashford 6: - Week 5 - Assignment 1

The Next Frontier: Personalized Learning
 

“We must move from the learner as prisoner (in a system that not only locks in the student, but also the teacher) to the learner as explorer, where students move easily and freely to areas of learning that stimulate their creativity, allowing them to explore new worlds.” Bill Flores, President, University of Houston - Downtown (Freedman, 2009, p. 5).
 

Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School and various different stakeholders in education warn that our educational system is one where learning and teaching is mass produced without sufficient regard for personalized learning. However, without adequate resources personalized learning in classrooms of more than 30+ students and 1 teacher is a pipedream.
 

Technology and productivity tools are advancing at an alarming rate and many believe education has only scratched the surface of what is possible. The Federal Government recently published the 2010 Technology Plan titled Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology.
 

This is a short excerpt from the 2010 Federal Technology Plan on personalized learning, an instrumental part of the call to action designed to literally “transform education”:
 

"Personalization refers to instruction that is paced to learning needs [i.e. individualized], tailored to learning preferences [i.e. differentiated], and tailored to the specific interests of different learners. In an environment that is fully personalized, the learning objectives and content as well as the method and pace may all vary" (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 12).
 

For more examples of personalized learning, check out the following sites:
 

School of One
Reinventing Schools Coalition
Florida Virtual Schools
 

For this assignment, you will need to complete an analysis of how the current system (mass production) will differ from a personalized system by completing the table below. In your analysis of the shift to a more personalized learning system, explain possible implications and/or consequences for the changes:

Current   System

Personalized   Learning System 

One   size fits all

Assessment   leads to individual learning plan

Then, provide at least three recommendations of how our educational system could take strategic steps towards a more personalized learning approach. Your recommendations should be constructed in a convincing, logically supported fashion and justified by credible resources (on a separate reference page, cite appropriate sources using APA formatting - at least one per recommendation). Additionally, each recommendation should be a minimum of 100 words.
 

Once you develop your analysis of the current system versus the personalized system, post your work in the “Document Sharing” tab titled Week5YourfullnameAssignmentTitle, i.e., Week5andrewsheanPersonalizedLearning.  For instructions on how to use Doc Sharing, see the following pdf.
 

Similar to Week Two and Three, you are not required to evaluate your peers formally. However, you may provide your peers with constructive feedback and/or use this experience to gain ideas for your own work.
 

You must also submit your assignment to the Assignment Submission button for grading. Be sure to submit a Word document title page along with your completed assignment.
 

Carefully review the Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.