Personalized Learning
Personalized learning encourages students to take on an active role in their learning. This comes with the responsibilities of setting their own due dates, the opportunity to reach for competency through resubmissions and reflect on their performance and progress. Giving students the freedom to take ownership of learning at a personalized pace can create benefits if regulated properly or bring problems if neglected. For students to be successful, they need a support system, whether that is the instructor or their teammates, they need to know they are not alone.
Individual Advancement
When students have the freedom to self-regulate their learning, they take on an active role rather than a passive stance in the process. Self-regulated theories reveal that students have an active role in developing skills and knowledge to reach learning goals established by the course. To meet those goals, learners set their own goals and decide how to achieve them, allowing them to monitor their process (Debruler, Freidhoff & Kennedy 2015). Thus, students become more critical about the strategies they use to achieve learning goals and become self-reflective in the process. In my students, I noticed that they focused on two major components that they reflected on as they regulated their learning: pace and performance. The example below highlights similar responses across my students, where they emphasize the effects of self-determination as motivation and self-regulation to increase performance:
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"Working at my own pace and not having any due dates has actually taught me a lot. Due to the fact that I won’t be penalized for late submission, I had to push myself and get motivated to do the work. This had good and bad effects. At one point during the quests, I think I fell a little too far behind and got too relaxed, this is was the only downside I faced in this system. But I experienced many benefits from this system too. Working at my own pace allowed me to stop and really understand what I was learning. An example of this is when we were learning about the Qin/Han dynasty. After reading all the texts I didn’t quite get it and couldn’t quite figure out how to connect all the dots, so I needed time to slow down and look back. The way the course is set up allowed me to that with falling too far behind. In conclusion, I have learned a lot from this course, both content and new skills."
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As the student reflects on her experience with self-regulation through the quests, I noticed her awareness for freedom to choose how to regulate her time and frequency with the quests, causing "good and bad effects" when it came to pacing. This can be a place of uncertainty and risk for the student. Traditionally, teachers have more regulation on the pacing of the curriculum; I argue that, while this does expose students to procrastination, self-regulation can benefit performance, allowing for the freedom to personalize learning by taking the desired time.
She describes the benefits of setting a personalized pace, as she could go back and spend more time re-reading content regarding the Qin/Han dynasty. She reflected on her learning outcomes and comprehension of the content, and taking advantage of not being penalized for "late" submissions, she had the freedom to return and as she "needed to slow down and look back.
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Individual advancement requires a sense of self-reflection of pace and performance. In my students, I noticed that having this freedom was beneficial, developing skills of self-determination and self-regulation. However, not all students had the same independence which is where I came in to support and encourage the development of taking an active role in their learning. ​
Strategies for progress
Allowing students to take ownership of their learning presented exciting challenges that created new opportunities for motivation, problem-solving, and strategies. Giving students the freedom to create their own goals, monitor their progress, and reflect on their performance gave them more responsibilities and an active role to rely on themselves and be unique. At the start of the Winter Term, my students had learning experiences with gamification from the previous term. They had experienced the responsibilities of self-determination and self-regulation and how this could be a double-edged sword that may create benefits if managed properly or problems if neglected.
At the end of the term, I asked students to write me letters to express their experiences and suggestions for our gamified course. I was quite pleased with seeing students grow in their comfort with self-regulation, self-determination, goal-setting, and badge acquisition. I saw students' growth in their self-exploration as they had identified how much determination motivation takes and the benefits and rewards that come when having the freedom to have more control of their learning.
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The example below is one of the letters I received. I decided to include this student's letter, as she had experienced a tremendous improvement in her performances as she aimed to be her best self in history. In this letter, she reflected on the "painful mistakes" of procrastination and decided to learn from them. She created strategies of collaboration, consistent self-regulation, and accountability with other students as a support system.
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Personalized learning created opportunities that worked for each individual. The process of self-exploration and self-determination is by no mean an easy task but is the preliminary step for students to find what works and does not work for them. As a teacher, this was never-wrecking. Knowing that students were out there in different places in the curriculum made me wonder if I was supporting them appropriately. At times, I even blamed myself when a student fell behind or was having trouble with their own motivation. Even though there were moments when students felt frustrated, most of them learned valuable lessons of reaching for help from the instructor or other teammates and creating strategies that will help them attain the goals they set forth in the course.
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