Learning gets personal — but always has been? June 1, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : HE, Personalised learning environments (PLE), elearning, learning, student experience , trackbackGo easy on the hype about personalised learning environments (PLEs) as something new, advises elearning expert Chris Yapp. His hypothesis is that learning always has been personal(ised) and always will be.
It’s the organisation of education that hasn’t been so personal, he suggested at a lecture last week.
He put his finger on something here. I suspect that student satisfaction is determined partly by the level of individual attention they receive from lecturers, tutors, support staff and the rest. How much is hard to say… as, too, is how much that level of individual attention in turn affects students’ learning.
Yapp, former head of public sector innovation with Microsoft, focused more on economic scaleability — and the hope that technology could make personalised learning (more) possible on a larger scale. He reckons it would take 30 years for elearning to transform the experience of education in this way, in a widespread and ‘embedded’ fashion. If so, I might be around to see it happen…
One example of research on PLEs (sometimes characterised as another step on from VLEs, virtual learning environments) is the PLE project at Bolton University.
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The reason why the “PLE” movement got such a big boost was that we realized “VLEs” were actually “LMSs” which had little to do with learning and most to do with organization/administration. Definitions:
http://www.microbiologybytes.com/tutorials/ple