Getting on for 15 years ago I put an "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course in which I played a role. I'd read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist or possibly in a digital version of Time Magazine. The Open Content licence was the precursor of Creative Commons, and Wiley is still very active and justifiably influential in this field. This post [via Stephen Downes] has an incisive observation in it about personalisation:
"There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs [link added by Seb] permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."
I agree instinctively with the emphasised section, though:
- it maybe too focused on content and not enough on the process of learning;
- there is also a role for software-driven personalisation of various kinds, including a role for software (in a centralised rather than decentralised way) doing background organisation of things like peer-assessment or ranking and filtering of user-contributions.
Some also argue that there is great scope (I'm less confident about this) for software successfully to shape adaptively which content and which learning activities are presented to which learners, when, taking account of their past performance, in a way that gives learners to feel that their learning has been personalised.
[Links to previous posts touching on personalisation.]
Comments