There is nothing new about personalized learning. Our first teachers are our parents: they teach us to walk, read, count, eat and live with others. Only when we go to school, college and university do we enter into mass education – classes, exams and qualifications. At the postgraduate level, we again find ourselves in personalized learning – with our supervisor.
Learning in classes and groups poses considerable challenges to each individual. Perhaps you can remember from your school and college days: someone has already understood everything; someone got distracted and missed part of the material; someone simply does not understand what it is all about; another is misbehaving.
Having worked in education for over 40 years, I would like to share the many examples and models of creating personalized learning from the departments and institutes where I have worked. Instead, I want to go back to when I was still a student and studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural State University. In the Soviet Union, in those days, it was not customary to talk about individual education, intellectuals had to attend universities rather as workers attended factories to fulfill the tasks of the Communist Party. Fortunately for me, I entered a faculty which welcomed creativity and independence – there is no politics in mathematics.
However, by the second year of study, I realized that I was not very happy with the training, which consisted of group lectures, practicals and seminars. In the classroom, I was often distracted and stupid. 
And the most terrible thing was my lecture notes, written from the teachers' words. My notes were written in a clumsy handwriting, they missed words, formulas, and they were full of crazy drawings. When I was nervous and did not understand something, I began to intensively draw all sorts of geometric shapes that had nothing to do with the content.
Finally, I realized that books and printed articles helped me to understand in a way that lectures and notes did not.
An existential question arose: if there are such texts that communicate so clearly what I need to learn, then why do I go to classes? It was impossible not to attend, attendance was strictly monitored, but sitting in the classroom and reading, for example, Kafka, and then studying the material outside of lectures seemed wrong to me. So I decided to conduct an experiment.
At the beginning of the fourth semester, I approached one of the teachers and asked him for a full recommendation on the necessary literature, assignments, exam questions, etc. I told the teacher that I was in a difficult situation (it was true, there was a serious battle in my head), I couldn't go to classes all the time, I had to work and earn money (which was also true). “May I come back in a week and take the course exam?" I asked him. 
He was very surprised, but nevertheless agreed and decided to give me a chance. I came back in a week and passed everything. In this way, I switched to self-regulated learning and personalized assessment right inside the university. In general, it was very difficult to study at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics, many students did not pass their exams on the first attempt. As a consequence, lecturers routinely permitted students to retake exams, when they were ready, throughout the year. Standards were maintained and many students failed their retakes and left the programme. In those days, the such failure was considered normal: if you cannot acquire knowledge and skills, they used to say, do not torture yourself or your teachers.
Once I had discovered my own pathway, I set about negotiating the same arrangement with the teachers of my other subjects: giving up the lectures in favour of private study. There were, of course, a few stubborn and principled teachers, and I had to learn to cope with standard methods of passing tests and exams.
Looking back on my university years, it seems to me now that the most striking thing in this story is the trust that my teachers placed in me. They believed that I could prepare myself and they made it possible for me to follow this pathway, to meet the assessment demands and to graduate. I am very grateful to my teachers of the Department of Theoretical Mechanics that they let me create my own learning pathway. For my part, I understood that it would be a mistake to openly challenge the system. I did not advertise my method among my fellow students and tried to keep quiet about why I rarely attended classes. If this became more widely known, then it could damage my teachers, who took a certain risk by violating the established procedure.
This story also shows the limits of what an individual learner can do to create a personalized learning pathway. We know now that teachers and education managers have the power to create a personalized learning environment – that Innovations come together with Innovators. However, it is important to remember that part of any such system will be the trust and respect that teachers and learners need to negotiate their modes and pathways of teaching and learning.
A personalized environment is both active and complex, and it emphasizes individual learner growth, often in the context of skill based and cooperative student grouping. If designed and implemented correctly, personalized learning is extremely disruptive to the traditional education system. For instance, a personalized system places very little to no emphasis on whole group measures or on measuring academic growth based on single assessments. Further, personalization implies less emphasis upon measuring performance compared to a hypothetical ‘‘average’’ student following an average curriculum and more focus on each student’s skill growth as an individual learner.
If we accept the idea that each learner is unique and had that he/she will progress at his/her own pace, based on a wide number of variables, then the notion of an average student or learner is no longer a useful reference. Personalization does away with the factory model of education. In his book on establishing a new vision for how we should think about individuals, Todd Rose (2016) shows how the traditional notions of the average have provided an outdated emphasis on planning and educating the average student when no one is truly average. In reality, each individual has enormous learning variability, and personalized educational environments should consider these differences in the instructional process.
Personalized learning has the potential to revolutionize the education system. Nonetheless, without mutual trust between faculty and students personalized learning may undermine the confidence of teachers and learners, may only be partially and poorly implemented, eventually demonized, and then viewed as an unrealistic fad in education.
Resources
Pedagogy and Personalised learning
Project-based learning: a promising personalised and differentiated practice
Is there a ‘ready-made recipe’ on how to personalised and differentiate learning?
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