4.2. Personalized learning
The concept of personalizing learning has been around for a
long time. There is the well known paper by Bloom (1984)
on individual tutoring in which individualized one-to-one
tutoring resulted in a two standard deviation improvement in
learning in several subject areas. Part of the effect was a result
of increased and focused time on task but part was also due to
the ability of a human tutor to adjust the instruction to fit the
individual learner. Ever since, educational technologists have
been trying to find ways to gain a similar effect through
technology since not every student can have a personal tutor.
The intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) movement in the
1980s represented a concerted effort to accomplish this. However,
the successes of ITSs were limited to very well-structured
learning domains in which the common problems and misconceptions
were well known so that when a particular student
made a recognizable error, the instruction was automatically
adjusted to address particular student’s individual and specific
misunderstanding or problem. ITSs had a pre-construction
representation of the knowledge to be learned, pre-constructed
libraries of common errors as well as a pre-constructed
inference engine that indicated where in the instructional
knowledge domain to focus when a particular problem was
encountered.