The massive personalized learning experiment in new orleans schools

Personalized learning will allow winchester public schools to meet the needs of each child; challenging them with enriched instruction in innovative learning environment. This definition of personalized learning involves four components: a learner profile that contains all the student data; flexibility in schedules, classroom set-up, and student grouping; some choice for students in how and what they learn (known as personal learning paths”); and the ability for students to go through a course at their own pace (known as competency-based progression”).

Recent efforts to personalize and adapt instruction have utilized the large-scale data available from online collections of educational resources (ahmad et al., 2007; butcher & sumner, 2011; de la chica, ahmad, sumner, martin, & butcher, 2008) or crowd-sourced” recommendations from other learners (e.G., albanese, acierno, moscato, persia, & picariello, 2013).

While this strategy takes a wide variety of forms from school to school, a few of the most common approaches are smaller learning communities,” TTO , themed-based academies , or schools-within-a-school”—an approach that involves the creation of distinct academic programs, or schools,” within the operational structure of larger school.

Personalized learning is generally seen as an alternative to so-called one-size-fits-all” approaches to schooling in which teachers may, for example, provide all students in a given course with the same type of instruction, the same assignments, and the same assessments with little variation or modification from student to student.

While personalization has seen exciting changes in education, higher education is still struggling to adopt it. Nearly half of undergraduate students in the us fail to earn a degree within 6 years of entering a college while us completion rates were among the lowest amongst 18 developed countries tracked by the oecd.