Personalized Learning Environment: A New Trend in Online Learning

Abstract

Online learning has changed the ways in which education has been conducted.
Unfortunately, many educational websites do not employ principles of effective learning
(Cook and Dupras, 2004). Since learners move online, how can we attend to the basic
human attraction for individualized attention? Learners have heterogeneous
backgrounds and differ in traits such as skills, aptitude, and preferences for processing
information, constructing meaning from information and applying it to real situations.
Hence, this paper discusses the concept of Personalized Learning Environment (PLE)

Full text

Personalized Learning Environment: New Trend in Online Learning
Noor Dayana Abd Halim, Mohamad Bilal Ali, Prof Madya Dr., Noraffandy Yahaya, Dr.
ABSTRACT
Online learning has changed the ways in which education has been conducted. Unfortunately,
many educational websites do not employ principles of effective learning (Cook and Dupras,
2004). Since learners move online, how can we attend to the basic human attraction for
individualized attention? Learners have heterogeneous backgrounds and differ in traits such as
skills, aptitude, and preferences for processing information, constructing meaning from
information and applying it to real situations. Hence, this paper discusses the concept of
Personalized Learning Environment (PLE) and describes how individual differences cater the
personalized issue in the website.
Keyword : Personalized learning environment, individual differences, learner‟s need
Introduction
In recent years, the learning process has been moving towards the application of online
learning (White and Weight, 2000; Alessi and Trollip, 2001; Liaw et al. 2007). What
differentiates between online learning and traditional learning is the method used. However,
the objectives, materials, books and syllabus are the same. Online learning as defined by
Chang and Fisher (2003) is a system and process that connects learners with the materials
and information that distributed online. According to Allan and Seaman (2010), online
learning occurs when the content is obtained via online. Typically there are no face-to-face
meetings in the classroom. Studies conducted by them showed up in 2008 about 4.8 million
students are moving towards online learning.
One of the popular online applications has been for educational use is web-based
learning. Many studies have shown a web-based learning benefits and the potential to
enhance teaching and learning process (Mistler-Jackson and Songer, 2000; Linn et al. 2003;
Clark, 2004). This is because, the use of the Web as an educational tool has provided
learners a new learning experiences and educators an interesting teaching environments
(Nam & Smith-Jackson, 2007). The popularity of the web base learning is due to the concept
of learning “anywhere” and “anytime” (Neo et al. 2008). As mentioned by Killedar (2008),
web can be globally distributed and has a high personalized media for delivery information.
So, teaching process is no longer confined to a time and place. By using this medium, the
students and teacher become spatially and temporally dispersed learners. The time and the

physical boundaries of the traditional classroom are no longer existed (Khalifa and Lam,
2002).
As is well known, the main advantage of learning via website is a non-linear
interaction. This gives students the more control over their learning path. However,
according to Alomyan (2004) this freedom may cause for some students problems such as
disorientation, cognitive overload and control problems. Thus, in order to examine these
problems, nowadays researchers shift towards finding on how web-based learning is used
by learners with difference style and characteristic (Alomyan, 2004). The recognition of
individual learning preferences is increasingly becoming an important consideration for
designing and delivering course (McLouhlin, 1999; Brickell, 1999, Martinez, 2001; Foster
and Lin, 2003; Magoulas et al., 2003; Inan and Grant, 2008; Inan et al. 2010).
Since online learning has different setting from the conventional classroom,
educators need to use some special techniques to make students can learn best based on
their preference. Therefore, educators require an understanding on the characteristics of the
learners that might affect how they interact with the learning environment. This also helps
educators to design an appropriate learning environment based on student‟s preferences.
Alomyan (2004) was suggested the characteristics that must be concerned by educators
such as the amount of prior knowledge of the learning domain, cognitive style, motivation,
age, gender and so on. Once the profile of the learners is determined, the process of
learning through hypermedia will be easily adapted with the student‟s needs (Alomyan,
2004).
In this day and age, a personal learning environment (PLE) has emerged in
educational field around the world. PLE is a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to
engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and
resources (Downes, 2006). PLE is a new concept in designing and developing an online
learning. PLE is more focused on individual learning rather than the instructor, facilities,
resources and tools. PLE has also played an active role in improving the effectiveness of
learning (Li and Gu, 2009). According to Atwell (2006, 2007), PLE is an environment that
constructs by individual. Individuals are responsible for their own learning process. They
also need to manage the process of learning more effectively and takes a larger stake in the
ownership of content. In general, personalize learning approach has the potential to meet
the educational needs in the future as well as providing a new alternative to encourage
students‟ learning (Bentley and Miller, 2004).

Personalized Learning Environment in Education
Personalization technologies are define as approaches to adapt educational content,
presentation, navigation support, and educational services so that they match the uniqe and
specific needs, characteristics, preferences of each learner. (Magoulas and Chen, 2006).
Alexander (2009) mention that the term PLE describe the tool, communities and services
that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning
and pursue educational goal. On the contrary to the conventional instruction system, at
which students try to adapt themselves to the concept, personalized learning advocates that
the concept has to be adapted to the individual student (Karagiannidis, Sampson, and
Cardinali, 2001).
Personalization helps build a meaningful one-to-one relationship between
learner/teacher and the learning environment by understanding the needs of individual and
helps to reach a goal that efficiently and knowledgeably address each individual‟s need in a
given context (Riecken, 2000). Acccording to Magoulas and Chen (2006), in personalized
learning environment, learner modeling is the fundamental mechanism to personalize the
interaction between the system and the learner. Learner model generation involves
interpreting the information gathered during interaction in order to generate hyphotheses
about learner goals, plan, preferences, attitudes, knowledge, or beliefs.
Research showed that students taught in a personalized learning environment attain
a good academic result and build up socially through personal growth (Clements and
Douglas, 2008). These students tend to be increasingly self directed and self initiated with
excellent problem solving skills (Martinez, 1999; Allen & Seaman, 2006). As mentioned by
Clements and Douglas (2008) in their article titled Personalized Learning and Innovation in
Education, there are several features about PLE. There are :-
1. Engages students in learning process, increased the responsibility and accountability
of students. Students are become a creator instead of become a consumers of
information.
2. Encourage student ownership of knowledge.
3. Imparts a level of autonomy students desire
4. Provides real life connection
5. Promotes creativity among students
6. Fosters critical thinking, deep learning and understanding

7. Provides a forum for sharing of ideas
8. Develops an interdependence and mutual respect between the teacher and the
student.
Why Personalized Learning Environment?
Online learning has changed the ways in which education has been conducted.
Unfortunately, many educational websites do not employ principles of effective learning
(Cook and Dupras, 2004). Since users are moving toward online learning, how to attract
them individually? How to give them more motivation, independence and self-directed
learning? How to design a website to match the individuals? How to convey information with
different environments to a diverse set of personal types? How different individual learners
interact with the web-based instruction? What kind of individual differences that our users
have? (Martinez, 2001; Chen and Paul, 2003). All these kind of questions are the main key
when developing an educational web site.
To address these questions, research into individual differences and needs has
becoming an important issue in the past decade (Chen and Paul, 2003). As suggested by
Magoulas et al., (2003), he stress on the importance to accommodating individual
differences when designing web-based instructions. When the issue about individual
differences arises, which we should support individuals to customize the learning
environment according to their difference characteristics, hence what come up in the mind is
what we called the personalization issue (Santally and Senteni, 2005)
Acoording to Cristea (2004) and Rumetshofer and Wöß (2003) the main problem with
online learning environment is the lack of personalization. Thus, one of the key issues
concerning in today‟s learning is individualized learning (Wang, 2004). According to Wang
(2004), individualized learning is a learning model that places student (learner) in the center
of the learning process. Students are active participants in their learning which mean they
learn at their own pace and use their own strategies; they are more motivated and their
learning is more standardized. Else, individual learners will take advantage of self-paced
learning environments in which they have control over their pace of learning, information
flow, selection of learning activities, and time management (Jung, 2001). Therefore, more
research on the relationships between learner characteristics and online learning content
presentation modalities are needed. This kind of study will identify positive factors of online

learning delivery format that promote higher satisfaction and learning outcomes from online
instruction (Oh and Lim, 2005).
Individual Differences in Personalized Learning Environment
Designing an appropriate learning environment requires an understanding of the
learners. A large body of research has attempted to define individuals differences actually
influence learning process. Among the differences, cognitive styles and prior knowledge are
frequently addressed in previous work, which are discussed below.
Cognitive Style
Riding and Rayner (1998) define the cognitive style as how individual preferred and habitual
approach to organize and represent information. Riding (2002) claim that cognitive style
affects the ways in which events and ideas are viewed, affects how person may respond to,
how person think about, and also how person make a decisions. According to Lee (2007)
cognitive style is an individual‟s preferred and habitual mode of perception, imagery,
organization, and elaboration during knowledge acquisition or problem solving process.
Field dependence versus field independence has become widespread in the
dimension of cognitive style research. It is because these two cognitive style reflects how
learner is able to perceive and restructure information based on the use o salient cues and
field arrangement. The majority of empirical studies investigate:
(a) whether cognitive styles will significantly influence learners‟ performance within web-
based instruction;
(b) whether different cognitive style groups will favour using different types of navigation
strategies.
Witkin et al. (1977) used the term, field independence, to describe individuals who
are individualistic, internally directed and accept ideas through analysis. On the other hand,
field dependent individuals prefer working in groups, are externally directed, influenced by
salient features and they accept ideas as presented. Research shows that field independent
learners outperform field dependent learners in various conventional and web-based
learning settings due to their different characteristics aforementioned (Ford and Chen, 2000).

Prior Knowledge
Prior knowledge is one of the variables that associated with individual differences.
Individual„s prior knowledge includes an understanding of the experience gained previously.
Many studies have proved the influence of prior knowledge in web-base instruction (Chen
and Paul, 2003). Disorientation problems and additional support are considered as an
important issue in web-based instruction. Research has showed that the users with less
knowledgeable and less experienced will face more disorientation problems in a web-based
instruction (Last et al, 2001). This may be due to the new fact that they are unfamiliar with,
so they cannot rely on prior knowledge to help structure the new information. In contrast, the
more knowledgeable users will not have a problem to construct a new knowledge and able
to relate with the prior knowledge with the new one. (McDonald and Stevenson, 1998).
Conclusion
As a conclusion, educators need to develop an educational environment that will
appeal to the different learning styles of students. It is also vital that students have an
understanding of their own learning styles to improve the speed and quality of their learning.
It also demonstrate the importance of individual differences a factor in design the teaching
and learning process especially in web based instruction.
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