Personalized Learning Experience Group Project
Your goal is to create a personalized learning experience—something that a learner could actually use, explore, or take part in. This could be a lesson, workshop, online module, website, learning pathway, video, podcast, series of activities, or pretty much any format that works for your idea.
Think beyond simply giving learners choices. Consider how your experience can support learner agency, motivation, learning, and meaningful connections with others.
As you complete this project, you will be able to:
- Apply relevant theories of personalized learning, agency, motivation, and social learning to your design.
- Create opportunities for learner choice, agency, and meaningful social connection.
- Critically reflect on the benefits, limitations, and implications of personalized learning.
- Engage in design thinking to create your learning experience
Deliverables
Personalized Learning Experience
Topic: The subject can be about anything you want so long as it is educational.
Your design should include:
- Learning outcomes
- Learning activities, resources, and learning materials
- Opportunities for choice or personalization
- Opportunities for learners to interact and learn with/from others
- Assessment or evidence of learning, and where applicable, dynamic personalization based on that assessment (i.e., can you assess where a learner is during the experience and change the experience to meet the learner? In some instances this may be technically complicated, and a short write-up would suffice)
Your artifact can take many forms and is ultimately your choice. Select a medium that is appropriate to the learning experience you are designing, and defend your choice. For example:
- Website or interactive learning environment (how-to)
- Lesson or workshop
- Video-based learning experience
- Podcast/audio learning experience
- Series of activities or learning posts
Supporting Materials
In addition to your final experience, you must submit a design journal that explains the rationale to your final learnign experience. Before you develop your personalized learning experience, you should consider the following sections. You do not need to address every single prompt below so long as you adequately explore and support your design decisions. Wherever appropriate, you should justify your design with relevant theories and concepts from the course.
- Educational Subject
What is the subject of your learning experience and why did you choose it? - Learning Context and Learners
Clearly outline the context of your learning experience and who will participate in it. This provides the foundation for the rest of your design, helping you make meaningful decisions about how and why learning will be personalized. Consider:- Who are the learners?
- What are their interests, goals, and motivations?
- What prior knowledge or experience might they bring?
- What needs, strengths, or challenges might they have?
- What contextual factors might influence their learning?
- What do you need to know about learners in order to personalize their experience?
- Personalization Plan
Determine what, how, and when learning will be personalized. Consider:- What aspects of the experience will be personalized?
- What choices or pathways will learners have?
- What will remain common across learners?
- How will learners exercise agency or control over their learning?
- How will the design respond to differences in learners’ needs, interests, prior knowledge, or goals?
- How will you avoid making personalization simply a matter of giving learners more choices?
- Social Learning
Design opportunities for learners to connect with and learn from other people, groups, communities, and sources of knowledge. Consider:- How will learners interact with one another?
- How can they share ideas, experiences, or knowledge?
- How can learners provide or receive feedback?
- Are there opportunities to collaborate?
- Can learners connect with experts, communities, or people beyond the course?
- How might social interaction itself be personalized?
- Theory Applied
Explain and reference the theory guiding your learning experience and reference. Consider:- Which theories meaningfully inform your design and why.
- Teamwork Reflections
Each team member should write a paragraph about their own contributions and those of their teammates. Keep it constructive and positive, while offering suggestions for improvement.
Assessment Rubric
| 0 – 2 (Needs Additional Work) | 3 (Marginally Meets Expectations) | 4 (Fully Meets Expectations) | 5 (Exceeds Expectations) | |
| Learner & Context | Learners and context are unclear or insufficiently considered | Identifies learners and context but provides limited consideration of their characteristics or needs | Clearly identifies learners and context and thoughtfully considers their needs, goals, interests, and prior knowledge | Demonstrates a nuanced understanding of learners and context and uses this understanding to inform the design |
| Personalization | Provides limited evidence of meaningful personalization | Includes some personalization but pathways, choices, or learner responsiveness are limited | Meaningfully personalizes aspects of the learning experience to support learner agency, motivation, and learning | Demonstrates sophisticated and purposeful personalization that responds to learners in meaningful ways |
| Social Learning | Provides few opportunities for interaction, contribution, or connection | Provides some opportunities for social interaction, but these are limited or underdeveloped | Provides meaningful opportunities for learners to engage, contribute, reflect, and connect with others | Creates rich opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, connection, and learning with and through others |
| Theoretical Rationale | Demonstrates limited understanding or application of relevant theories | Makes some connections to theory, but they are underdeveloped or primarily descriptive | Clearly connects relevant theories and concepts to design decisions | Critically and thoughtfully applies theory to justify and extend the design |
| Learning Experience Design | Design is incomplete, unclear, or poorly aligned with the intended learning | Design addresses the intended learning but contains gaps or inconsistencies | Design is coherent, purposeful, and appropriately aligns learning outcomes, activities, resources, and assessment | Design is highly coherent, creative, and demonstrates thoughtful attention to the learner experience |
Generative AI Guideline
This assignment allows for structured and defined support from AI tools at the each stage. In general, you must begin each phase of the assignment without the use of AI and incorporate it for very specific tasks of refinement, iteration, and feedback. Generally, You CANNOT use GenAI to think or write for you. The difficult parts of education is where all of the learning happens. If you use any AI in this project, you must disclose how and why you used.
If you have any questions about permitted AI use, please contact me before you use the AI tools.
| Stage | Permitted AI Use | Not Permitted |
| Understand / Plan / Reflect & Refine | Refining and deepening your work after you have attempted it on your own To aid in brainstorming of further ideas after you have attempted it on your own | Generating statements, arguments, outlining, paraphrasing, or full paragraphs The creation of a complete or semi-complete story |
| Artifact | Thoughtful prompting to create individual assets with a preconceived vision (e.g., images, videos), often with multiple iterations to refine the output. You must cite AI and comment on the biases (more below) | Using the assignment description or full paragraphs to ‘auto-generate’ a final product or meaning-making through multimedia The creation of a complete artifact |
| Project Write-up | Receiving feedback on structure, coherence, and alignment with the rubric | Rewriting content via AI suggestions |
Disclosing / Citing AI
When using AI, you must cite it’s use. This is necessary to be transparent on which tools were used and why. Learn more on specific citation requirements here: Scholarly use of GenAI tools
An acknowledgement statement provides a general overview of what GenAI tools you used, what prompts you used, and how you used the tool’s output.
Sample statement: I acknowledge the use of [insert genAI tool name(s) and link(s)] to [specific use of genAI tool]. The prompts used include [list of prompts]. The output from these prompts was used to [explain use].
Example: I acknowledge the use of ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/) to generate materials for background research and self-study in the drafting of this assessment. I entered the following prompts on [insert date]: [insert prompt(s)].
UVic, Scholarly use of GenAI tools
Biases
One of the biggest issues with AI is the way in which it perpetuates biases. Generative AI is based on statistical probability, that is it draws from all its training data and creates the most common patterns. This is often what is popular, not the quiet nor marginalized voices. If you are using AI to create images or videos you must comment on the biases that occur (ex., are the generated images only depicting White individuals?)
