I find some issues that have yet to be solved with the push to individualized self paced learning. I can see its benefits, but it really lacks the ability for the students to develop those vital “soft-skills” that universities and businesses are demanding from their new applicants. On his other point, I agree with the frequent, yet appropriate, assessment of students to help with interventions and assisted learning. These assessments just need to be in multiple formats beyond testing.

The biggest I’ve seen regarding private companies roles in innovation in education is cost and the ability of an institution to not just say, “do this”, but to have the educator learn how to use it and apply it in an individualized manner. Theoretically, the idea should be perfect, but for an educator to be able to still control the learning environment with students at different levels in their learning, I can imagine can be quite the challenge. I also equate it to government telling teachers how to teach, if the private companies are made of current and former educators than I can see there being actual buy-in but without that, I can see some push back happening quick.

This is a conversation we were having last week—how tightly should pacing be controlled? Here, Hughes argues for self-pacing, but frequent feedback and interventions, which to me is a fairly recent combination of ideas in education. Digital tools make self-paced curriculum more possible than a traditional classroom.

Mr. Hughes described personalized learning as being able to provide additional support and products when needed depending on the student. Extra help for those sections the student is struggling and advancement in areas that the student has mastered. This theoretically enables the learner to constantly be challenged but not overwhelmed. This is very different from personal learning which allows the learner to control their learning process. The learner gets to follow what intrigues them and engages their interest most at that time. Mr. Hughes is describing a personalized approach that is determined by an instructor to address what they see as the needs of the student.

One embedded assumption is the value of instructor feedback. There have been lots of studies about student motivation, and one of the findings that occurs again and again is the fact that students place a high value instructor feedback. Even in studies that try to “push” peer feedback, those peers still often find instructor feedback to be more valuable. The fact that education executives from the private sector place a premium on feedback should be somewhat heartening to those who are wary of ed corporations.

Mr. Hughes describes personalized learning as a targeted way to catch students up by trying to pinpoint where the holes in understanding are and filling those holes, but he is explaining it as if it were best done as an addition to what students are doing at their current level. The assumption he makes in this format is that the time is there for students to do this. My first thought was, when will that hour happen? Maybe it is just me being cynical, but I know if a high school student were asked to attend additional classes that would be a non starter unless there was plenty of support from home. Considering the kids who usually need these types of interventions have less of that for various reasons could make that type of personalization hard. I feel like he is discussing personalized tutoring, not personalized learning.

I am hearing a lot of things that the government is doing, but they seem like the same thing that has always been done. Tell people about this, give grants for technology use, make this more available. I am just not sure they are going to get the results that they want with this same “in the box” thinking.

I agree with Todd’s point and think the overall issue is how resistant humans are to change. The federal government can set basic standards but for those to be used/achieved by overall 50 million students is, in my mind, an unrealistic goal (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372).). Technology is such a broad idea, some schools don’t even have tvs in every room or enough functioning computers for their students. I understand her statement about the school in NC that was successful without a lot of funding but I can only imagine the amount of work and time they put into it. Realistic expectations are key, and I think setting basics by the government can be helpful, but funding is a huge factor. Also, making sure students know the basics, like the first gentleman speaking mentioned, some students are behind in 8th grade because of something they missed in 5th. Starting from the very beginning, before thinking about how students should be using technology in high school is a proper process to go through.

At the Federal level, I think the most appropriate action would be to put forth standards and benchmarks about educational technology to improve communication and evaluation. Recent federal programs that attempt radical change in the funding model of education (Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind) tend to have unintended consequences for curriculum.

I will say that I loved how she mentioned that the federal government knows that multiple choice bubble tests and the approaches that come with it are not serving our students. Yet, somehow the school I worked at gave 4 different standardized tests today to the bulk of the students in the school. I have yet to see the scale back on those tests. Also the addition of grants is great, but what tends to happen is the grant money runs out and the district is left to figure out how to fund a project or program. Many times it gets dropped because of the lack of money.

He says that it’s very hard to create an engagement mechanism in an area like gaming. It seems like the key to scaling upward in this area would be to pinpoint these engagement mechanisms and make them part of the game designer’s toolkit. As every gamer knows, it often takes one fundamental flaw in a game to make a gamer turn it off completely. Every game is a very complex ecosystem with lots of moving parts. Trying to make them fun is one challenge, but trying to make them educational is a challenge within a challenge. The benefit, as he points out, is that you then have a perfect test environment that produces valuable data about the learning process as the users navigate the game itself.

I think for something to be scalable it has to be flexible especially when we are talking about education. A program that focuses on personalization, individualization, or differentiation cannot be the same across the board. It needs to have a few pillars that are set as a guide and from there you have to allow the local experts (teachers of the other students) to make it work for them. This does two things 1. it truly allows for something to not only grow but to grow and fill the needs where it is growing and 2. it makes those who are implementing the opportunity have some ownership and ownership equals buy in which means a better chance of success.

She uses the terms grants, funding, and economy quite frequently which goes against her argument that the school in NC was successful without a lot of funding. I appreciate that a small rural school is able to do what they did, I can’t imagine what Boston or NY city schools would have to go through to implement technologies into their classrooms. She also uses the term novel a bit. I don’t think that we as a country are unaware of how to integrate technology, however, we run into the problem that half the students in a school may react well and half might not (leading back to individualized learning/asynch characteristics). If we want to lean towards not teaching students like robots, integrating technology needs to be looked at the same way.

I think his ideas about educational games has a lot of potential. It is incorporating the idea of personal learning with game learning to create an experience to meet the needs of all the students. I don’t know what this assumes about the teachers, but it assumes engagement and self interest is a great way to get students to learn and utilize new material.

So this isn’t an education reference, but in terms of being a high school or college football player (the game) the athlete (the student) has A LOT to learn, and they tend to do so because of the intrinsic motivation they have. If someone doesn’t like football they’re not going to take the time to learn routes and formations. Relating to education, I learned basic math with number munchers and loved every second of playing it. It was a way of looking at something to learn as more than just numbers or letters, it applied to something most kids at the time used/played with, video games. I would assume this applicability has changed a bit with different technologies and almost all students access to phones and tablets. In terms of assumptions of educators, educating educators needs to be done the same way we expect students to learn. If educators are not learning about games in the classroom, the conversation needs to start back at that point to move forward for the student.

I wonder, keep in mind that I am not a computer scientist and I don’t pretend to know how alga rhythms work, but if a computer program is set up to make decisions based on the data that was put in by the programmer couldn’t that be off too? I mean, think about the numbers of times that programmers have programmed something and it turns out the program itself is bias, sexist, or racist because of the type of data fed into it in the first place. I just don’t think that this approach would work for all kids as he seems to think it would. I could see this for a lesson or unit maybe, but an entire course no. This is one of the reasons why I refuse to take “at your own pace” type classes that don’t have a facilitator. Computer programs are only as good as those who are programming them.

Ms Zolt seems to focus more on collaboration and engagement as core values for learning. This is very different from the previous speakers who where talking more about having students working on their own to receive learning tailored for their needs. Ms. Holtz is taking the personalized idea of having a one-on-one collaborator for students to discuss learning and topics. I think this idea is great, but extremely difficult to pull off on a large scale.

This panel really has some extremes as far as their focus for learning. I think the best is a mix of the panel. None of them really covers all the bases and the best solution is going to incorporate some of the self directed personalized learning, but the solution must also incorporate activities that bolster the soft skills of collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. All of those are extremely important and very difficult to incorporate into the “personalized self-learning” format.