Personalized Learning for Future of Education: Learnings from SHAPE Live

SHAPE Education , a joint initiative from Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Business School , recently organized an insightful session as part of its series of bite-size events spotlighting key challenges and opportunities in the EdTech sector. The latest session took a deep dive into?What do you mean ‘personalised learning’??with unique perspectives on what personalized learning is and the value it can bring to learning, both in terms of an individual's learning journey and how education should be.?

Liqvid’s founder Vivek Agarwal was one of the two changemakers who shared their perspectives at the event along with Rosina Dorelli , founder and director of DaVinci Life Skills , an organization based in Cambridge, UK. It’s building a new vision for the future of education through research and development, teacher training in transdisciplinary, contextual, project-based learning, and formative assessment.

Extensive data analysis with a combination of data points is key, says Vivek

Vivek started the session with his take on personalization. As per him, though the field has been around since the 1960s, it’s only today because of advanced technologies that educators can deliver at scale. Advanced and systematic data collection techniques through AI have enabled the easier dissemination of insights, leading to much faster improvements in the content and methodologies.

But the biggest problem with learning is gauging what the learner wants to do, which isn’t always easy. Even with the best instructors or environment, the learner might not want to learn. In such situations, educators have a tough task at hand to work out loads of possibilities or probabilities for achieving personalization.

And the solution lies in extensive data analysis through a combination of data points by leveraging the platforms used by the learners. Liqvid has taken the approach of extensive statistics – deep math, linear equations, clustering - to create forecasting for personalization of the learning paths. We use all the data to arrive at the probabilities attached to our solutions to work towards creating personalized journeys.

But again, learning also has a broader scope because of the emotional tangent – decision-making is not all raw data; it’s also cognitive. Vivek recalled the example of his daughter picking up things quickly when she's more inclined or in a good mood. So,?emotions play a big part. A third element is that of a style agent - personality in terms of learning styles and visual kinesthetics. If educators must use these frameworks, then they would need different types of content for each type of learner. And that is not a feasible option for most learning solutions. So, we have continued to focus on observing the behavior and?analyzing?the data.

Vivek also cited the example of a course being offered at Coursera on “small talk and conversation vocabulary” by the Georgia Institute of Technology. There are a lot of variations in the course feedback with some finding it great with five stars while others rating it as one star. Vivek emphasized that these variations don’t mean the course is bad; just that it’s not there where some learners want it to be and this is what is a style agent data point. So, designing a learning path based on these insights is a very good way of achieving personalization. When you also take into account cluster data, it’s much better. For instance, the number of time larners spends on a course on weekdays versus the weekends and you know the real value you are delivering.?

Education curriculum must be a mix of tech and socio-emotional attributes, feels Rosina

Rosina was excited to ell the story of how DaVinci Life Skills is building a showcase model for the future of education, which focuses on educating the entrepreneurs and world builders of the future in a creative, ethical, and sustainable way. She took the attendees back to the days when children were taught through storytelling, dance, song, adornment rituals, and rites of passages. But we can’t rely on the same methodologies today. She quoted John Dewey, “If we teach today's students as we talked yesterday, we rob them of tomorrow.” So, looking at the problems that we've currently, the one-size-fits-all model won’t work. The question DaVinci asks frequently is - is our current education system really preparing students with all the skills that they need in life?

Rosina recalled from her teaching days experience in state secondary schools that grades seemed to be a huge thing and of value. This is leading to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression among kids, which in her opinion, is a worrying statistic. It’s in a sense allowing one-third of the young children to go into the world, feeling like failures, which isn't really ethical or sustainable. On top of that businesses feel that students coming out of schools and universities lack fundamental skills like teamwork, self-management, customer awareness, problem-solving, as well as communication and literacy.?

Gert Biester, Rosina says, summed up the conundrum facing educators too well. “This has to do with the question of whether we are indeed measuring what we value, or whether we're just measuring what we can easily measure so that targets and indicators of quality become mistaken for the quality itself.” So, the way you can go forward from here is how well you converge the ancestral wisdom with the advances in technology, sciences, engineering, maths, and the arts to arrive at a biophilic, sustainable future.

Rosina believes in the vision for the future of education that revolves around tech, where a lot of subjects like maths and sciences could be assessed online. This creates possibilities for education to be more global where teachers from all over the world could be connected so learning could be more self-paced, personalized, collaborative, and student-driven. She said education needs community spaces so schools could become a place of community, where the biophilic education movement thrives. Biophilic design has been found to support not only physical health and psychological well-being but also cognitive function. If we make our environments more suited to where we can flourish, places become more organic and can make a difference to how well we think.

Rosina elaborated on a curriculum designed by DaVinci with five project pathways, which are contextual and transdisciplinary. The firm is bringing together all of the traditional subjects into these five projects and each of these projects is a mix of academic critical thinking, reasoning, as well as the social-emotional side with attributes like self-management, teamwork, creative and intuitive ideation, and problem-solving.

Q&A – interesting insights

Earlier in the event, a poll was conducted to ask the attendees which types of data they think are most important for personalizing learning. Just over a quarter of respondents picked previous learning, interests, preferences, followed by confidence scores/self-evaluation as important data points for personalizing learning. There were a couple of interesting questions from the attendees.?

To the question of whether there is evidence of the data suggesting why some learners are more engaged than others, Vivek said Liqvid’s approach is to look at the course usage patterns, create a hypothesis, and test it on data. Once the pilot is successful, we expand the data pool and based on the feedback, deploy solutions at scale. So, there is plenty of evidence for achieving a learning model with a high level of engagement.

Rosina took the question about what is enough for personalization? Just give the learners what we think is best for them or entrust them with a sense of control over their learning??It’s important to have a feeling of self-motivation in contrast to the dictatorship that we currently have in our education system where students are spoon-fed data.?Vivek also agreed with the idea, giving an example of a project in India that Liqvid is pursuing right now. He explained how our team is leveraging technology to personalize learning by giving students different sets of automated questions for home assignments based on the assessment done by teachers.?

Another interesting question on whether?learners be given what they prefer or should it be what they need?elicited interesting ideas from both speakers. Rosina feels completely democratizing learning for students right now won’t be the right way as it’d create a lot of pressure on students as well as teachers. She feels schools must follow a boundary where they can push students to think about what they can do and constantly introduce them to new things. She believes schools must allow students to fail so and then get back up again to finally achieve that sense of self-achievement.

On the idea of one definition of personalization as not only tailoring the pace of study or the order of content but the learning objectives themselves for the individual learners, Vivek said it’s a definite possibility in the future. Right now, the focus is more on packaging, tagging, and managing the content.?

Both speakers also agreed on the importance of training teachers to act as facilitators of data so students can draw their own outcomes and for the system to be flexible enough to enable such learning in the future. Rosina shared from her teaching experience that to do it right now without training the teachers would be disastrous as they are overburdened and don’t have enough time for personal development.?

The event concluded with the question on the problem that both speakers haven’t been able to solve yet and what help they would need in order to do so. Rosina chimed in with the model of teacher training they are pursuing right now to empower students to create their own learning objectives for efficient personalized learning. Vivek agreed that they have barely scratched the surface and the next big challenge would obviously be ensuring how each learner can leverage technology to learn the way they like!

Watch ?the complete recording for more insights!