Everything you need to know about personalized learning
Among the common goals in schools include enhancing students’ engagement and achievements, molding students as long-term learners, preparing students for college life and careers, and reducing immorality.
As it is known, accomplishing these objectives may not be easy. However, it does not imply that they are impossible. According to researchers, educators, and experts in the education field, personalized learning can help achieve these goals and bring a significant difference to students when done correctly.
Throughout this post, we will outline everything you need to know about personalized learning, including its benefits to students.
Let’s delve in.
What is personalized learning?
Often referred to as student-centered learning, personalized learning is an educational model that aims to customize learning to fit each learner’s strengths, interests, needs, skills, and background.
This method is not like the standard “one size fits all” approach in education as it seeks to provide every learner with the same type of assignments, instruction, and assessments with a bit of variation from student to student.
Personalized learning places the students at the center of focus. With that, the primary aim is to make the individual learning needs a significant concern in vital instructional and educational decisions instead of what might be considered easier by the school and teachers.
What is the importance of personalized learning?
Most people have a story of that particular teacher who made a positive change in our studies or our children’s learning. These teachers recognized our needs, interests, and passion. They offered special support, which ended up making a positive, meaningful, and lasting impact in our lives.
Besides this personal impact, personalized learning has the following importance:
- It promotes student agency.
- It creates life-long learners.
- Increases students’ achievements.
- Boosts learner’s engagement.
- Focuses on the students, strengths, needs, and interests.
Benefits of personalized learning
If you are undecided about implementing personalized learning yet, here are its benefits that should compel you to do so.
1. Increased student engagement
One of the significant benefits of this learning model is its ability to keep your learners engaged for longer. When students are given customized lessons, they become more engaged and will spend more of their time learning and absorbing more of the information being taught.
Personalizing could be as simple as using colors, pictures, or games for each individual; it can also be more sophisticated based on the students’ preference. Students are allowed to choose a specific learning method, what units they need to learn first etc., allowing them to take a self-directed approach to their studies.
2. Improved motivation.
With increased engagement comes an improved motivation. Personalized learning gives your learners the freedom to choose a learning system that suits them best. Ultimately, they will be encouraged to learn and invest more of their time in their studies.
Whether you are in education or business, it is good to have motivated learners or trainers since they will be more productive or get better results. Unmotivated learners are generally troublesome and take less of their time on studies, resulting in poor grades at the end of the training.
3. Saves time.
With personalized learning, you could assess every learner before starting the course to find out what their learning need is. The assessment can be in the form of quizzes or surveys with a series of questions to ascertain what the students know and what they don’t know.
Training programs and most courses are always linear, which forces learners to study a large amount of repetitive information before getting to what should be learned immediately. This leads to wasting a lot of time and poor engagement among students.
You can avoid wasting this time by providing relevant content to the students as required. You can as well make personalized recommendations according to the result of the questions.
4. Improved results.
Generally, when students are more engaged, they are likely to spend more time learning and understanding the concepts they are taught. As a result, learners will be well prepared to solve every problem they may face.
Whether it is completing a task satisfactorily as an employee or acing a test or exams at school, personalized learning provides better learning, leading to better results.
Conclusion.
Though developing personalized learning requires more time and effort, every input invested towards achieving it is worth the results you will get. Personalized learning is progressively becoming a lifestyle. Parents, learners, and entire consumers expect it.
Apart from the importance of promoting students’ agency and creating life-long learners, personalized learning also boosts learners’ engagement and achievement. Coupled together, these features save learning time, improves student’s result and promotes teacher-student relation.
