Personalised Learning: Developing a Vygotskian Framework for E-learning

Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sense-making framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development