A literature synthesis of personalised technology-enhanced learning: what works and why

Abstract

Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner's needs, or individual feedback on a student's assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attracting interest from philanthropists and venture capitalists indicating a new level of enthusiasm for the area and a potential growth industry. However, these industries may be driven by profit rather than pedagogy, and hence it is vital these new developments are informed by relevant, evidence-based research. For many people, personalised learning is an ambiguous and even loaded term that promises much but does not always deliver. This paper provides an in-depth and critical review and synthesis of how personalisation has been represented in the literature since 2000, with a particular focus on TEL. We examine the reasons why personalised learning can be beneficial and examine how TEL can contribute to this. We also unpack how personalisation can contribute to more effective learning. Lastly, we examine the limitations of personalised learning and discuss the potential impacts on wider stakeholders.

Is There a Social Life in Open Data? The Case of Open Data Practices in Educational Technology Research

“…However, only some subfields of Educational Technology are represented in the sample if we consider the landscape of topics recently identified in the sector [11]. The significant presence of datasets concerned with educational data mining and learning analytics may be properly explained with the increasing popularity of this research topic in recent years [11,46,53,54].…”

Pedagogical model to train specialists for Industry 4.0 at University

“…[25], Surtayeva N.N. [26], FitzGerald E., Jones A., Kucirkova N., Scanlon E. [27], Iatrellis, O., Kameas, A., Fitsilis, P. [28] suggest that personalization of learning may be an effective tool for self-development. The idea of personalization of learning and self-development abilities are to be the consequence of social demand for proper specialists, psychological study in the field of cognitive development and the implementation of the humanistic approach in education.…”

Preface to the special issue on learning analytics and personalised support across spaces

“…Learning rarely happens in a single physical space or using a single digital environment (Looi et al 2015;Sharples and Roschelle 2010). Recent literature reviews have shown that most of the work in the areas of learning analytics and personalised technologyenhanced learning has focused on modelling student knowledge or skills from interaction traces automatically captured as students use a specific educational system (Abyaa et al 2019;FitzGerald et al 2018;Normadhi et al 2019). Yet, students commonly work outside the boundaries of institutional learning systems.…”

“…In short, learning is happening in an increasing number of spaces, at different times and with the support of different tools and technologies. However, creating mechanisms to model and provide support to learning happening "across spaces" is challenging and still remains underexplored (FitzGerald et al 2018;Martinez-Maldonado et al 2016). Providing continued support in fully digital spaces (e.g.…”