Today’s college campuses are increasingly populated by students older and more diverse than the traditional student body. As we summarized in The Changing Face of Today’s Student: More Diverse, Older and Requiring More Personalized Learning, these diverse student demographics are on track to continue into the next decade. If they are to succeed, these students require instruction tailored to address their unique needs and knowledge gaps.
Statistics from the Pell Institute underscore the struggle that non-traditional students encounter in college. In 2014, 87 percent of high school graduates from top-earning families continued on to college compared to 60 percent for those whose families had lower incomes.
They are also more racially and ethnically diverse. Fifty-nine percent of non-Hispanic white high school graduates had enrolled in college in 2014. For African-Americans, the percentage was 58 percent. Hispanics entered at a rate of 49 percent.
As the Pell Institute study notes, gaps between low- and high-income and minority college enrollment have narrowed since the 1970s but without closing the gap in actual degree attainment. If educational institutions want to improve opportunities for today’s students, new instructional approaches that personalize the learning experience must be employed.
Every learner is unique
When college campuses were more homogenous, teachers could “teach to the middle” and have successful results. With today’s more diverse student populations, however, instructors confront the challenge of teaching students from a broad range of backgrounds. Teaching to the middle no longer works. Every student brings to the classroom a different learning style informed by past experiences in and out of the classroom.
Consequently, higher education institutions increasingly employ personalized learning techniques that place the student at the center of the learning process. Instructional design grows from each student’s individual needs, interests, knowledge gaps, and goals. Personalized learning also allows learners to advance at their own pace, motivating them with content relevant to their unique circumstances. By drawing from a student’s own learning touchpoints and experiences, he or she becomes more engaged and, therefore, more committed to the process.
Technology plays a vital role in personalized learning. Through online learning modules, instructors view data on each student’s progress. By evaluating data analytics, course design is customized for each student’s individual requirements. Teachers know where each student needs more help, whether it be in subject matter knowledge or study skills, and can adjust their instruction accordingly.
In particular, personalized learning promotes academic success for students challenged in a college setting. A diverse college population demands instruction customized for every student so each can achieve their goals.
Personalized learning principles
Some basic tenets of personalized learning are critical to the effective design and use of digital learning platforms. Embedding these following four principles into personalized learning can empower educators to work with a diverse student population and close the degree attainment gap.
Assesses knowledge gaps. Before a personalized learning program begins, instructors assess prior knowledge. As the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University notes, “Since new knowledge and skill is dependent on pre-existing knowledge and skill, knowing what students know and can do when they come into the classroom or before they begin a new topic of study, can help us craft instructional activities that build off of student strengths and acknowledge and address their weaknesses.” Adaptive learning software works by observing a student’s early practice activities to determine their knowledge relative to the course objectives.
Designs courses to fill those gaps. Good course design in this method takes into account the differences in knowledge gaps. Personalized learning instruction adapts to shore up each student’s knowledge gaps as they progress through the course. Guided by the data, students are directed to the material and practice opportunities most relevant to their needs.
Creates customized courses. Personalized learning instruction integrates timely and targeted feedback based on the individual student’s profile. The success of personalized learning relies on goal-directed practice. Students learn best by working on relevant activities aligned with a specific skill that is tied to a specific overall objective. This mapping between material, practice, and goals is often referred to as a skills graph.
Uses data analytics to monitor student progress. Here is where technological tools enable true personalized learning. Through data mined as students take digital courses, instructors monitor areas where students (or an individual student) aren’t progressing. Then, faculty,instructional designers and student support services can adapt their mentoring, their classroom instruction, or the online content and activities to optimize the learning experience.
Personalized learning in action: Essex County College
Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill, founders of MindWires Consulting, an edtech consulting group, visited a number of campuses to view personalized learning in practice. In an article inEducause Review, they wrote about a program at Essex County College (ECC) in Newark, N.J. where many incoming students from diverse backgrounds needed to take a developmental math course to obtain their degree. However, when they took the course, many failed. Wanting to reverse this trend, administrators undertook an in-depth evaluation of the students’ learning profiles before they signed up for the course.
What the ECC faculty found was that students entering the course possessed widely divergent knowledge gaps. Some had only a fourth-grade math education, while others lacked proficiency in only a few concepts. Yet the course assumed all students were at the same level. This left the lower-spectrum students even further behind and those with more knowledge bored. The result? Students either dropped out or failed because the instructional design failed to address their individual needs.
ECC faculty redesigned the course based on what it termed Self-Regulated Learning. Under this framework, developmental math students complete coursework in a computer lab. There, students advance at their own pace. Students with more knowledge fast-forward through concepts familiar to them and concentrate on the areas where they need instruction. Meanwhile, students with greater knowledge gaps receive material and practice opportunities customized for their needs. In the classroom, the instructor focuses on the individual needs of each student.
The ECC math program illustrates the main components of personalized instruction: Students learn at their own pace based on an analytical assessment of their knowledge gaps. Software links instruction to those gaps and measures student progress. This data, in turn, enables instructors to tailor their lessons to each student, whether in class or digitally. Personalized learning emphasizes student mastery of a predetermined skill (such as math concepts) by undertaking relevant, goal-oriented assignments and progress toward the ultimate goal — a degree — not merely a passing grade.
Acrobatiq has seen similar stories unfold, as you can read about in several case studies. What all these examples have in common is a demonstration of the need to personalize learning for today’s changing student population by taking a learner-centric approach. As Feldstein and Hill assert, this is no longer a “nice-to-have goal,” but a requirement if institutions are going to succeed in closing the degree attainment gap.
Maria Wood is a freelance writer and journalist who specializes in business reporting, finance, education, and technology.