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Imagine a parent and student have access to and control of information about the student and could choose when and how to share that information with other stakeholders. Imagine that it is not only available 24 hours a day but stays with the family regardless of school transfer. An expanded learner profile could make this vision a reality by building on the current "official transcript" with an expanded electronic student record highlighting learner strengths, needs, interests, preferences and more. A learner profile could simultaneously drive personalization and safeguard privacy.

A student's data backpack could be populated by a common set of data elements for all students and the components of each student's learner profile could be further customized based on student needs, family decisions and data requirements.

Learner profiles have the potential to power personalized learning through better data that can inform learning in new and meaningful ways as well as facilitate a transition to a competency-based education system. Competency-based environments encourage ownership over learning and allow students to have flexibility in how they learn, how they demonstrate learning and advancing at a flexible pace and according to their own needs. For students with high mobility, competency-based education allows students to pick up right where they leave off. Learner profiles can play an important role in supporting competency-based learning.

Here are 5 ways learner profiles promote competency-based learning:

1.Learner profiles encourage student ownership.

Chris Sturgis, co-founder of Competency Works , said, "Learner profiles should support student ownership of learning." If a student can update his or her learner profile with information, including a collection of personal best work, the student can share his or her own work and even permit and control sharing capabilities.

Assessment of learning. Learner profiles can be used as part of a mechanism educators use to ensure mastery before moving to the next level. Expeditionary Learning schools require a year end Passages presentations , "an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning and their readiness to move on to the next phase of their education."

A portfolio as part of a comprehensive profile provides an a structure for organizing a collection of personal bests linked to learning goals. A digital portfolio facilitates easy sharing with multiple stakeholder groups-parents, community members, prospective employers, and colleges.

Assessment for learning. In this scenario, the learner profile is used for formative assessment as well as summative assessment. The student uses the learner profile not only as a place to house information or as simply a location for the school system or teacher to place important data (including courses, evaluations, and transcript information) but also a place where students reflect meaningfully on their work through writing and journaling, upload and own the creation of documents and tools that are then housed within the profile.

2. Learner profiles encourage anytime, anywhere learning.

The learner profile can be a structure that houses a variety of data, including data that goes beyond what might be found in a data backpack or an official transcript. The learner profile could contain data and measurement from a variety of providers (e.g. or DreamBox Learning ) that are accessible by parents, therapists, community-based organizations, after-school programs or tutors, safeguarding for privacy and with sharing settings controlled by parents.

3. Learner profiles encourage personalization.

Karla Phillips, Director of Competency-Based Learning at the Foundation for Excellence in Education said, "When I think about the role new technological tools can play in competency-based education (CBE), I think about instructional technologies such as Khan Academy or instructional apps but I also think about a school or district's LMS/SIS system that the schools develop or choose and how these should go hand in hand with the data backpack and the learner profile. For example, I would love my daughter's teacher to know she did this great project in kindergarten. A learner profile, maybe in the form of a parent app, would be a way for parents and teachers to connect and pass information along to my child's future educators."

Right now, most data portability systems can transfer the hard data to an educator, but in a personalized instruction system, Karla said, "Data has to be more than just numbers and test scores; it has to be personal. I would like my daughter's teacher to know what experiences have made the biggest difference in my child's life as well as what we as parents do at home to support her learning."

4. Learner profiles allow for portability across systems.

Much like what we are seeing take shape in Utah with their data backpack legislation , we know that data backpacks enhance portability across systems. If a student transfers, their student records, transcripts and other data move with them. If a student moves, his or her informations moves with them, and teachers and other providers can learn about the student's strengths, needs, interests and other pertinent information, thus providing the best and most personalized access to high quality learning. As a student thinks about applying to post secondary institutions or applying for a job, the information in a learner profile could be gleaned and mined for use in a college and/or career application scenario.

5. Learner profiles facilitate demonstration of college and career readiness.

Higher education institutions are rethinking the college admissions process. Some members of the Common Application group are moving towards a collection of personal bests as another option for those who seek to apply for colleges. The Coalition for Access, Affordability and Access includes 80 public and private higher ed institutions. The new coalition has included a high school portfolio as an option to apply for college which is described below:

The high school student's portfolio: This would be offered to all high school students, free, and they would be encouraged to add to it, starting in ninth grade, examples of their best work, short essays on what they most proud of, descriptions of their extracurricular activities and so forth. Students could opt to share or not share all or part of their portfolios, but college admissions leaders would provide regular prompts, appropriate for grades nine and up, and questions students should ask about how they are preparing for college.

Students in portfolio-based and competency-based schools will enjoy this option for college admissions. Portfolio-based platforms such as Buzz by Agilix , Project Foundry , , eduClipper (and don't forget Google docs ) have components that allow for students to have an eportfolio. Learner Profiles can take this a step further by allowing for a collection that includes a portfolio and the transcript, as well as other data points and even project-based learning work.

Karla also noted that simultaneously higher education is beginning to think differently about the traditional diploma. There are organizations such as Lumina Foundation who are thinking about how higher education is communicating what a student knows and is able to do as a result of their college education. The learner profile could be a tool for college and career applications and as a knowledge sharing tool and personal bests.

The K-12 system could use learner profiles as both a structural support to achieving competency-based learning and as a tool for students and their learning.

For more on learner profiles, see:
Agilix is a Getting Smart Advocacy Partner.

Bonnie Lathram is a student advocate and former teacher. Follow her on Twitter: @belathram

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5 Ways Learner Profiles Can Promote Competency-Based Education

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Imagine a parent and student have access to and control of information about the student and could choose when and how to share that information with other stakeholders. Imagine that it is not only available 24 hours a day but stays with the family regardless of school transfer.

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Personalized learning paths, designed to meet the needs and goals of each learner, can lead to a redefinition and a new understanding of lifelong learning to include informal as well as formal learning, delivered at scale.
Peter Smith is President of the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU). He blogs at Rethinking Higher Education.
Every now and then, I read something that provides a framework for organizing previously disconnected understandings into a more coherent logic. Such an experience occurred when I read the September/October 2013 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, with its organizing theme of "Higher Education in the Connected Age." In her Homepage department column, EDUCAUSE President and CEO Diana Oblinger elaborated on the theme:

Connecting is about reaching out and bringing in, about building synergies to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. . . . Everyone and everything-people, resources, data, ideas-are interconnected: linked and tagged, tweeted and texted, followed and friended. Anyone can participate. . . . In "A New Architecture of Learning," [the authors] describe an environment that "offers new ways to connect things that were previously considered disparate and 'unconnectable': people, resources, experiences, diverse content, and communities, as well as experts and novices, formal and informal modes, mentors and advisors." . . . When things and people are connected, they form pathways. One activity feeds forward to another. Learners understand the progress they have made, the improvements they still need, and what will come next. With connected learning, the focus is on these pathways-not on gates or gatekeeping. With connected learning, the idea is to connect-the-dots: to connect learning with life. ¹

The pieces of a theretofore unfinished puzzle fell into place for me, explaining contemporary solutions to problems I had wrestled with for forty years and encouraging a transition that had been five years in the making. In my 2010 book Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, I described why an emerging information abundance would have an impact on the traditional model of higher education:

Our system of higher education is based on and organized around the principle of scarcity, that the resources needed to provide an education must be collected in one place-a campus-because there is an insufficient supply of those resources in the general community. Not enough faculty members . . . classrooms . . . laboratories . . . library books. . . . The principle of scarcity says that for an institution to be valuable to the community around it, it must offer a service that community members can't get more cheaply or with higher quality somewhere else. The scarcity . . . controls the market.²

I then noted how abundant information-in its many, divergent forms and uses-would create a new ecology that supports learning in ways we could have only dreamed about ten years ago: "There are three big changes, unleashed by technology and the global economy, which affect education. They eliminate scarcity as we have experienced it, creating a new ecology of learning that will drive successful change." ³

Two of those changes are unlimited content and unlimited access:

Technology is obliterating the old boundaries defined by the campus and its schedule, leaving multiple possibilities to provide organized learning opportunities. . . . [A] content-rich world, accessible and diverse, is developing more rapidly every day. Technology [is putting] curricular scarcity out of business. . . . Knowledge about how people learn, coupled with the capacity of Web 2.0, creates a high-potential learning environment in which rich curricular materials, combined with highly personalized support and adaptation, can be delivered to capable but previously excluded learners. Degree-level services can be delivered anytime, anywhere, to anyone. [In this world of unlimited content and access] the only actual barriers to access are capacity to do the work and ability to pay.⁴

If I had known then what has become apparent to me now, I would have added several additional consequences of abundant information: since 2010, the emergence of social networks, big-data analysis, abundant content in multiple forms, and the ever-evolving Internet have become primary enablers of mass personalization in higher education. Beyond content and access, these additional enablers give us the capacity to truly put the learner in the center and build programs around the learner's needs and requirements. This new ecology, as it is fleshed out, supports the development of personalized learning paths, designed to meet the needs of each learner. The result is a redefinition and a new understanding of lifelong learning to include informal as well as formal learning, delivered at scale. With these resources, we can envision learners' conscious lifelong efforts to set personal, professional, and/or academic goals, to make meaning from their experiences, formal and informal, and to achieve those goals with explicit plans and actions.
For more from Peter Smith, please see this video.
Then: Personal Learning Paths Are Not New

Let's begin with some history. In the 1960s, the Canadian researcher Allen Tough, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), began his lifelong work of identifying and characterizing what he called "The Adult's Learning Projects." ⁵

I was a young college president, developing the Community College of Vermont (CCV) when I first saw Tough's work, in 1971. We were building a college model and learning program that was community-based and adult-oriented; it included a strong commitment to value and a recognition of students' experiential learning for academic credit and for shaping the learning program around students' needs.

Tough's research identified and defined a unit of personal learning that he labeled the "learning project." Through his initial and subsequent studies, he determined that the average adult conducted eight to ten such projects every year, committing over 700 hours to these cumulative endeavors. I was deeply affected by this information, believing that if adults learned in this fashion, the learning, once recognized, could be both the foundation for and a part of the core of their postsecondary education. Furthermore, I reasoned that if there was a natural learning cycle and instinct to learn purposefully, even if informally, then a college that could harness that instinct to learn would be a powerful partner for the learner.

CCV was a member of the group that founded the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), an organization dedicated then, as now, to developing principles of good practice that undergird the high-quality assessment of experiential learning. I saw an immediate connection between the natural learning process described by Tough and the prior-learning assessment championed by CAEL. And I became extremely interested in the role played by an individual's personal and professional experience, along with its assessment, as a form of pedagogy or as a "teacher" of the individual. Again, it seemed to me that figuring out ways to include this learning in an individual's portfolio could be of significant educational value.

Although he did not coin the phrase personalized learning path or address the concept, each of Tough's learning projects included a learning path. De facto, he identified the existence of personalized learning paths before the first personal computer or the web, before Xerox and its copiers. Similarly, he demonstrated that adults had an informal learning cycle. At CCV, we asserted that as they engaged with a learning project, adults

identified a "problem" that required learning to rectify (assess),

planned and acquired resources (e.g., colleagues, libraries) to carry out the learning (plan),

learned what they needed to learn (implement), and

determined when "enough was enough," ending the learning cycle (evaluate).

But there were huge problems with learning projects in the 1970s and 1980s. They were entirely invisible to the outside world, as well as to most colleges and universities, and they were largely unrecognized even by the people doing them. In fact, when Tough interviewed adult learners, most initially answered his questions about learning projects by saying that they had not done any! Those projects had resulted in tacit knowledge, rarely recognized explicitly for its value or its impact. Our dream at CAEL and CCV was to surface this learning and give it fair value.

As known by anyone who either has experienced the assessment of prior learning or has worked with learners who do so, the act of reflecting on personal experience and what it has "taught" you is a profound educational activity. Reflection is, I believe, the process of extracting meaning from experience, of transforming tacit knowledge to identified knowledge and understanding.

My point? Reflection-based assessment is a form of pedagogy, through which active reflection and the development of evidence to support the claims of learning transform the learner's experience from passive to active engagement and understanding. And in fact, research done at both CAEL and Kaplan University affirms this point. ⁶ People who successfully complete such an assessment not only do better academically after completing a portfolio but also graduate in significantly higher numbers.

Personalized learning paths are nothing new; they were just invisible. And learning projects were there for Tough to identify in the 1960s. Some educators have been capitalizing on the value of such learning through assessments for almost fifty years.

Yet all of this learning and assessment activity has remained marginal to the mainstream of higher education and career education activity, for several reasons:

1. Academic bias. There was, and remains, an extremely strong bias that if something wasn't learned "here" or "in a classroom," it isn't legitimate learning. Although this bias has weakened more recently, it was academic dogma forty years ago. In the mid-1970s, a progressive academic told me: "I am here to move you from where you are to a higher level-to add to your knowledge, not just recognize what you already have." That was an enlightened position compared with the views of those who believed that experiential learning was, by definition, low quality and irrelevant to the academic purpose. In addition, as we clearly understand today, there were economic underpinnings to this academic conceit. The more study done at the college or university, the more money was paid to the institution. Academic tradition and economic incentives went hand-in-hand.

2. Academic structure. The structure of degree programs, requirements, and calendars, including residency requirements, reinforced and institutionalized this bias. Instead of focusing on what learners knew and how well they knew it, colleges and universities paid attention to where students had taken courses, whether the courses would transfer, and what residency requirements had been fulfilled. Additionally, this structure emphasized the liberal arts side of the curriculum, downplaying preprofessional and other job-related studies as less worthy. Personal and experiential learning were not on the list at all.

3. A paper-heavy process. Even when the assessment of prior experiential learning was practiced and valued, the process was a time-intensive and grueling task of identifying and collecting the evidence of learning via the U.S. Postal Service. I can vividly remember a learner coming into a review session with subject matter experts carrying three cardboard cartons of files, employment reviews, and other evidence to support his credit claims. Portfolios were paper files. Because of the information-management limitations of that era, the assessment of personalized, experiential learning could never grow beyond a "boutique" status because it was a people-intensive process that could serve only limited numbers of students at each institution every year. The requirements for the learner-in personal time to manage the collection of evidence, in discipline to organize and prepare it, and in persistence to "see it through"-were additional inhibitors to completing a portfolio.

As was pointed out in the EDUCAUSE Review "Connected Age" feature articles, many of these issues can be laid off to tradition, politics, and culture. But even if those elements had been more sympathetic to experiential and personal learning projects and to the personalized learning pathways they populated, there was one more, insurmountable problem:

An information-poor environment. There was no technology to support and enrich personal learning. Personalized learning paths were the private experience of the individual adult learner. Adult learning projects were manual and direct. And there was no way to manage these projects in any other fashion, no way to scale them, and no way to bring information and analytics to the fingertips of the learner. Hence, the ability to harness the value of experiential learning and personal learning projects and define their academic value was largely nonexistent. It was, at best, a boutique business.

Now: We Have the Capacity to Scale Mass Personalized Learning Paths

Virtually the only thing that has not changed in the nearly forty-five years since Tough published The Adult's Learning Projects is the validity of his research on learning projects. People still spend over 700 hours learning each year, and that learning is still personal, involving the cycle described above: assess, plan, implement, evaluate. But the processes that are available to support the learning, intrinsically and extrinsically, have been transformed by technology into a powerful, progressive, and disruptive force in higher education and workforce preparation. Our ability to access content and world-class diagnostics, to understand learner behavior, and to harness and mine big data for the purposes of learning assessment, academic advising, and career exploration has expanded at rates that actually outstrip institutions' ability to understand, invest, and respond.

Equally important, as part of this technological and web-driven disruption, learners' capacity to develop and store evidence of learning in electronic portfolios, carefully organized around career, academic, or personal interests, has also been transformed. First described eight years ago in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, the long tail supports learners' ability to, among other things, access discrete "pieces" of information that they need, participate in socially networked discussion groups, and crowdsource the quality of their work. ⁷ Pieces of knowledge, or modules of curriculum that used to be scarce and rarely used, are no longer inaccessible. Put another way, an arcane piece of information, or a module of curriculum that could never justify a semester-long lecture course, is now available for the occasional user whenever it is needed.

To sum up, in the past an adult learner assessed, planned, implemented, and evaluated his or her personal learning in near complete (and often lonely) isolation and off the higher education and career radar. Now, learners can bring that learning forward as part of a personalized lifelong learning plan that can be assessed for credit toward a degree or for advancement toward a new job or recareering.

Not incidentally, this ever-expanding, information-rich environment and the open door to mass personalized learning that it has created seriously disrupt the dominant value proposition that has been the definition of higher education: the campus, where students go to learn, and faculty, with all the controls that they imply. Personal and informal learning has come out of the academic closet. Now, coupled with formal learning from outlets other than traditional colleges and universities, it can constitute a foundation for further conscious and purposeful learning.

Even in this emerging environment, a cautionary question might arise: "What kind of institutional model can prepare for and support the learning aspirations of millions of people? Surely there has to be some homogenization of learning needs to allow for those needs to be resourced and supported appropriately." This concern, though logical and appropriate, misses the fundamental power that lies behind personal learning because of new technologies.

First, the personal learning, though specific to each learner, may have many common elements across multiple learners' experiences. There need not be and will not be one million unique solutions for one million individual learners. But there can be a personalized learning plan for each person-a plan that connects the learner and his/her history to a chosen future. The components of the plan are not unique to each learner; what is unique is how the plan fits to the learner's needs and aspirations.

Second, though some personal learning enabled by the college or university may be specific to the learner, personal learning does not have to be unique. It does, however, have to be understood by the learner and reflect on the learner's needs. In other words, if learning plans connect learners' past and present to a future they desire, and if learners help "architect" their plans, then the learning will be deeply personal.

Third, with the right learning support structure designed and in place, the learner is, for the first time, in the driver's seat. Emerging understandings of how to organize and employ data to identify and then meet learners' needs, based on an assessment of what they already know, have created an environment in which learners, with good data and good advice, can make their own educational decisions.

We have come to a significant crossroads. Our societal ability to support mass personalized learning paths, coupled with our knowledge and the technology to do so, exists and is growing every day. The challenge is: How will we react to the opportunity that this increased capacity gives us?

One Example

As Chris Dede wrote in his article in the "Connected Age" issue of EDUCAUSE Review: "The primary barriers to [transformation] are not conceptual, technical, or economic. The primary barriers are psychological, political, and cultural. . . . Whether we have the professional commitment and the societal will to actualize such a vision remains to be seen." ⁸

Three years ago, I was asked to come up with a model for higher education in the future. As I looked at the world then, my experience told me that a linear path forward, from where an institution was at that time to where it might be in the future, standing alone, was likely a pathway to failure for most. So I assembled an informal team of innovative yet practical thinkers and posed the question: "If you could start with a clean slate, what is the institution and organizational structure that you would start with?"

After looking for a starting point for the conversation, we settled on the following additional questions:

What would a learning model look like if higher education was situated not as a required passage but, rather, as a collaborator for clarifying and supporting the needs, desires, and goals of the learner?

What would a learning model look like if it included certificates and degrees but only as an option (unless required by professional standards or law)?

What would a learning model look like if learners could use existing resources to understand learning requirements and to design their own learning pathways with the support of mentors?

What would a learning model look like if career and academic needs were treated as equal and complementary?

What would a learning model look like if it was organized to begin with the learner's current knowledge and build toward the learner's goals?

Put another way, our team asked what would happen if the adults referenced by Tough's research had the tools of the Internet, including big data and multiple assessments, at their disposal to support their personal learning projects.

There will certainly be various answers to these questions. But three years later, after a series of starts, stops, stumbles, and breakdowns, along with some affirmations and the conceptual breakthrough legitimized by the EDUCAUSE Review articles, we have a model for mass personalized learning-a model whose quality, we believe, will be as high as its costs are low. Our answer is a personalized learning service, or learning support hub, housed at the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU). This service includes access to mentoring, assessment, certificates, and degrees. But of equal importance is what it does for learners. It encourages learners to

understand their current state in terms of career aspirations and current knowledge,

define their next, or ultimate, learning goal in either academic or career terms,

examine the resulting gap analysis between current state and ultimate goals, and

find open education resources that, coupled with our support and assessments, will fill the gap identified.

We have developed several tools to support these inquiries, including the following three:

Learning Recognition Course. The Learning Recognition Course is a free course that walks the learner through the steps to build a prior learning portfolio, including requests for credit based on prior experiential learning.

CareerJourney. CareerJourney is a free course that inspires and guides people in their career journey. It provides a personalized experience that integrates data based on the individual's LinkedIn profile and drawing from the LinkedIn database.

LearningAdvisor. LearningAdvisor is a hub that includes free courses, paid courses, certificates, degree programs, insights, and inspiration to help adult learners explore their learning possibilities.

We also have a primary relationship with AARP's new LifeReimagined service, which serves their members using Kaplan's LearningAdvisor.

All of these services are free and can connect the individual to multiple futures:

1. Informal learning using LearningAdvisor's MOOC index

2. Career clarification using the CareerJourney database and job information

3. An informal estimate of the value of the learner's combined formal and experiential learning analyzed against learning goals using the Learning Recognition Course

4. The OC@KU Bachelor of Science in Professional Studies, where an Individualized Learning Plan populated with maximum transfer credit and with credit for experiential learning allows learners to use MOOCs for completing their study with assessments conducted by the college

5. Challenge and portfolio assessments connected to OC@KU and to the course outcomes throughout the entire KU course catalog

6. A college consortium currently including OC@KU, Charter Oak State College, Kaplan University, and Mount Washington College, where transfer credit is maximized and degrees are assessment-based

By storing historic and ongoing learning evidence in an electronic portfolio, OC@KU learners can also access "off-the shelf" services-such as CLA+ to quantify their cross-cutting intellectual abilities, or Gallup's StrengthsFinder, to understand their strong behavioral traits and how those traits align with career choices. If and when a learner either needs or wants a certificate or degree or a transcript of his/her learning, OC@KU will conduct assessments to convert the information in the electronic portfolio to academic and/or career outcomes, adding the value that comes as a result of moving from self-assertion to third-party affirmation of one's knowledge, skills, and abilities.

The personalized learning service at OC@KU is high quality because it aligns free learning resources with identified learning needs and "seals the deal" with rigorous assessments via challenge exams, portfolio review, and oral exams when the learner seeks formal review. The service is also low cost, for two reasons. First, access to the apps and open resources is free. Second, learners pay only when they enroll in the degree program and/or when they convert their learning to value, through assessment, including their prior experiential learning and college-level learning done in noncollegiate environments, reducing time and expense to degree. In this environment, the degree is not a price point. It is a recognition that the learner has chosen to satisfy those requirements and has done so.

Mass personalization in higher education is here to stay. It is another tool in the ever-expanding toolbox that educators have at hand.

Conclusion

As conceptualized in the "Higher Education in the Connected Age" issue of EDUCAUSE Review, connection enabled by technology can lead to the individualized support of personalized learning projects. The same data and tools can be used in multiple adaptations by employers, career services, nonprofits, education service companies, and higher education institutions to widen their offerings and increase their ability to meet the needs of individuals, one person at a time. It is a short step from there to mass personalization through which learners are helped to identify their goals, assess their "current state," plan the learning that will get them where they want to go, and achieve that learning, with or without external support.

We have always had personalized learning paths. Now, thanks to social networking, big-data analysis, the Internet, and new knowledge about learning and behavior, we will be able to scale those personalized learning paths-to millions of learners in the coming era.

1. Diana G. Oblinger, "Higher Education in the Connected Age: Pathways," EDUCAUSE Review 48, no. 5 (September/October 2013). (Italics added.)

2. Peter Smith, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 95-96.

3. Ibid., 99-100.

4. Ibid., 100, 104-5.

5. Allen M. Tough, The Adult's Learning Projects: A Fresh Approach to Theory and Practice in Adult Learning (Toronto, Canada: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1971).

6. Rebecca Klein-Collins, "Fueling the Race to Postsecondary Success: A 48-Institution Study of Prior Learning Assessment and Adult Student Outcomes," Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), March 2010; Kaplan University Institutional Research Office.

7. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).

8. Chris Dede, ed., "Connecting the Dots: New Technology-Based Models for Postsecondary Learning," EDUCAUSE Review 48, no. 5 (September/October 2013).

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 49, no. 6 (November/December 2014)

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the coming era of personalized learning paths

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The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths

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Personalized learning paths, designed to meet the needs and goals of each learner, can lead to a redefinition and a new understanding of lifelong learning to include informal as well as formal learning, delivered at scale. Peter Smith is President of the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU).

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As debates about ESEA reauthorization continue on the Hill, Congress is grappling with the question of how to square current accountability structures with emerging personalized learning models. A recent Bellwether Education Partners report, A Path to the Future: Creating Accountability for Personalized Learning, summarized the apparent friction facing policymakers:

Personalized learning aims to change instruction in ways that customize students' experiences-and, ultimately, lead to systemic changes in how students are assessed and progress to more advanced content. Standards-based accountability seeks to mold the K-12 system by creating common expectations for student performance-and, ultimately, incentives for instructional changes to help students achieve them. In other words, personalization and accountability meet in the middle, creating challenges for policymakers when the two appear to be in conflict.

The report's side-by-side comparison of personalized learning approaches and standards-based efforts raises important questions about the potential minefield of trying to reconcile these two worlds. But it also conflates inputs with outcomes. Indeed, the apparent tension between standards and personalization dissolves if we can better delineate prescriptive inputs and desired outcomes.

Personalized learning is a means, not an end. Standards are an end, not a means. Debates about both, however, tend to muddle these distinctions.

In the EdTech, blended learning, and competency-based reform worlds, a quiet debate about the definition of personalized learning is heating up. In an attempt to codify the often-vague concept of personalization, however, champions risk fixating on enumerating the inputs of personalized learning approaches, in turn losing laser-like focus on the outcomes we're hoping such approaches can achieve. Personalized learning is a process, not an outcome. The relevant outcome animating this work is not personalized learning but actually individual student mastery. The inputs to get there -which we often dub personalized learning-ought to be whatever it takes for particular students in particular circumstances to achieve mastery. To maximize individual student mastery, we'd probably expect radical structural shifts in how we organize and deliver education-such as moving away from lockstep grade and age cohort-based pace, using technology to assess student mastery more frequently, tapping into students' passions, and allowing students to access learning in environments beyond their school building, to name a few. But all of these strategies will look different depending on a given schools' philosophies and circumstances.

Standards, on the other hand, represent an outcome, not an input. Standards need not dictate standardization in process or approach, but rather they can provide a common set of learning objectives that states determine students must master. Accountability frameworks may nudge schools' experience of implementing standards into the realm of inputs. For example, once yearly testing may force schools to take a cohort-based approach to teaching and learning in hopes of driving up average, rather than individual, mastery across a grade level. Standards themselves, however, articulate the goals of an education system, rather than how we get there.

Putting the two outcomes-individual mastery and standards-together then, would create a system in which standards articulate the content and skills that each student must master, which we in turn measure on an individual basis. The latter piece is where the current accountability system has always fallen short: we have historically focused on average, rather than individual student performance. Only recently have we seen the advent of statewide data systems even capable of tracking individual student growth, and we still require only that schools report out on proficiency across grade levels. But to advance the frontier of what's possible in education, we must remember that focusing on individual student mastery is not at odds with holding schools accountable to standards; individual mastery is simply not the current metric that No Child Left Behind propagated in law.

Debates about the right inputs-the particulars of the act of personalizing or how to teach particular standards-should be left up to systems trying to figure out how to achieve mastery for each of their students in their own contexts. Otherwise, we stand to hamstring innovation and-ironically- standardize (different from standards) a personalized approach that should instead adjust to specific students' circumstances and the best methods to yield individual mastery.

The more urgent and complicated matter that we can and should debate is what constitutes individual student mastery and how we measure it in a reliable and equitable manner. This may involve tough questions about which standards (or "power standards") schools may need to prioritize, the degree of depth of understanding we think defines mastery, and whether older students should be afforded choice as to certain standards that they do or don't need to master. The value of wrestling with those tough questions is that we will continue to clarify our desired outcomes, rather than fixate on particular inputs.

- Julia Freeland
This first appeared on the blog of the Christensen Institute.

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Aim for Individual Mastery and the Rest Will Follow - Education Next

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As debates about ESEA reauthorization continue on the Hill, Congress is grappling with the question of how to square current accountability structures with emerging personalized learning models.

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During a visit to Aveson's eucalyptus grove this year, I was amazed to watch a group of our kindergartners demonstrating the student agency inherent to this age group. Watching these young people interact in natural surroundings was witnessing student agency at its finest.

Without prompting or instruction, students playing in the grove began building a fort using branches and other available materials. They instinctively considered how to build it and then, through trial and error, came up with a way to complete it. All the while, these young students seamlessly and confidently worked together to analyze their work and make changes to ensure the fort was sturdy.

A recent suggests that agency, the capacity and propensity to take purposeful initiative, is as essential as the basic skills involved in reading and mathematics. I agree and add that nurturing students to retain and tap into their intrinsic capabilities for agency is equally important.

Agency is a natural part of a child's life. The key for schools is to keep those innate student agency fires burning while also ensuring students learn the skills and content needed to progress through school.

Most often, we talk about agency in the context of a high school experience. It's easy to say that high school students living on the precipice of young adulthood can and should be empowered to have agency in their learning. Their brains are more advanced and they are preparing for vigorous learning environments in college and career. But we find that agency can, and actually should, be nurtured starting much earlier.

Does student agency in the early years look like student agency in high school? No, but the foundation for student agency does.

As we witnessed with the fort, our youngest students show us every day they are capable of taking purposeful initiative. The more opportunities these learners have to express voice and choice in their learning, the more they believe they have ownership of their educational experience. Scaffolding these opportunities according to students' developmental levels is key.

In a Personalized Mastery Learning kindergarten math class, students mastering addition may choose between Addition Dice, Addition Strip Board, or addition worksheets, all tasks available to them based on their readiness. Meanwhile, students in a fifth grade math classroom have more advanced, developmentally appropriate choices. They determine how they master outcomes by choosing when to stay in large group lesson time or move to independent study after a collaborative conversation with the advisor (teacher). Students are never required to learn the same way, at the same pace or at the same time as other students in the room.

In addition to scaffolding voice and choice, we can ask both high school and elementary students, " what makes you tick " or "what challenges do you face in your learning." Not all first graders will be able to respond as explicitly as twelfth graders but we can expect them to reflect on it and to critically think about it.

First graders also may not yet be able to collaborate with their advisor as heartily as a twelfth grader - or even a fifth grader - on how to determine a learning path or what learning outcomes they will tackle; however, by giving them choices like those in the math examples above, they become aware that their choices matter and, through conversations with their teacher, become increasingly aware that learning is something they are intended to drive and to own.

By intentionally creating a classroom environment that taps into a child's intrinsic ability for self-directed learning and then scaffolding it in the classroom environment beginning in the early years, we foster student agency that will flourish as the child matures into a lifelong, independent learner.

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Student Agency: The Heart of Personalized Learning

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During a visit to Aveson's eucalyptus grove this year, I was amazed to watch a group of our kindergartners demonstrating the student agency inherent to this age group. Watching these young people interact in natural surroundings was witnessing student agency at its finest.

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Personalized Learning / Flexible Learning Environments

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Student needs drive the design of the learning environment including the use of space, schedules, technology and talent. All brains learn at different rates and creating flexibility in how, when and where students learn is necessary to be responsive to learner needs.