The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) is pleased to publish its synthetic and concise report, Personalized Learning: The State of the Field and Future Directions, clarifying the confusions over terminology and structure and including its recommendations for progress.

The vision of a highly-personalized learning experience in education is a long-standing “Holy Grail” advocated for by educators for many decades. The report quotes renowned inventor Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines and Google Knowledge Graph fame), “ …consider what kind of automated tutor could be created using today’s best technology. First, imagine that this tutor program can get to know you over a long period of time. Like a good teacher, it knows what you already understand and what you are ready to learn. It also knows what types of explanations are most meaningful to you. It knows your learning style: whether you prefer pictures or stories, examples or abstractions. Imagine that this tutor has access to a database containing all the world’s knowledge. This database is organized according to concepts and ways of understanding them. It contains specific knowledge about how the concepts relate, who believes them and why, and what they are useful for. I will call this database the knowledge web, to distinguish it from the database of linked documents that is the World Wide Web.”

The report highlights concrete steps needed to make this vision a reality, which starts with “a reference framework [like CCR’s] for aligning learning experiences, resources, assessment and reporting to the competencies” (iNACOL).