Personalized Virtual Teachers
What is Personalized Learning?
Personalized learning is an instructional approach that empowers students to learn by the method and pace that best suits their needs. This learning strategy accommodates not only students’ academic strengths and weaknesses, but also their interests, lived experiences and comprehension levels.
Personalized learning is an essential part of making the classroom engaging and inviting. This pedagogy acknowledges that, more than ever, teaching and learning may not occur at the same time and place. It takes into consideration the fact that academia now competes with familial, employment and caretaking responsibilities. Unlike active learning or blended learning, which are more prescriptive, personalized learning sees educators tailor the course experience according to specific student needs.
Neuroscience reveals that students show a great deal of variability in three areas: in what they find motivating (the ‘why’ of learning), in how they’re able to take in and process information to make meaning from it (the ‘what’ of learning) and in how they demonstrate their understanding (the ‘how’ of learning).1 There are two models for implementing personalized learning in the classroom: personalized learning ‘for the learner’ and ‘by the learner.’
What is Virtual Learning?
Virtual learning is a learning experience that is enhanced through utilizing computers and/or the internet both outside and inside the facilities of the educational organization. The instruction most commonly takes place in an online environment. The teaching activities are carried out online whereby the teacher and learners are physically separated (in terms of place, time, or both).
We can define virtual learning as:
Distance learning conducted in a virtual learning environment with electronic study content designed for self-paced (asynchronous) or live web-conferencing (synchronous) online teaching and tutoring.
Benefits of Personalized Learning.
By catering course content to students’ unique circumstances and learning needs, you encourage student-centered learning, which drives engagement — the ultimate goal of any class. And when course content is more representative of your course cohort, students are more likely to feel comfortable engaging with the material.
Even if you teach fully in person, technology can help meet student needs in a more timely fashion. There are a number of other benefits of using education technology to create more tailored learning experiences. By using technology to create personalized learning plans, student achievement and test scores improved by an average of 30 percent. Personalized learning also provides more accurate data of where learners have excelled and struggled.
Adjusting your teaching strategies and course delivery to make the learning experience more inclusive, personalized and inviting for all students will empower all learners — no matter where learning takes place.
Conclusion
Personalized learning in a digital classroom is changing the definition of education. By using an online learning platform and implementing these five considerations, educators can provide a student-centered, customized learning experience that is accessible for all students that will prepare them for the digital world. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I first started learning from home was that it was not as easy as I had hoped it would have been. Learning from home and learning in a classroom are two very different things. It took me a while to get the hang of online school, so as a teacher, I would try to anticipate a learning curve with your students as they adjust to this new normal. Some students may have a longer learning curve than others, the best thing you can do to help students with this, is to encourage them to come to you with any questions and concerns that they have.
