This post is my comment to the post “Why You Get Personalized Learning Wrong And How To Fix It With Learning Analytics” published in eLearning Industry. I am just not sure that the “Personalized Learning Pathway” by itself is a good idea that can be fixed with Learning Analytics.
The biggest mistake with Personalized Learning is trying to develop a Personalized Learning Pathway for each particular learner. It is a Sisyphean Task, endless and ineffective.
Each learner will deviate from any (best) predefined Pathway just because each learner is ever-changing, a learning process is not observable, controllable, and predictable.
Meanwhile, the simple, practical, and effective strategy are (1) using short assessment(s) to narrow down the learner’s possible states before they changed, then (2) choosing learning intervention(s) to push the learner’s state(s) to the objective one, and (3) continuing this process (1-2) up to success.
Believe me, it looks like an interplay of Loops, not a Pathway at all.
The best Personalized Learning is Off-Road Learning generated by that interplay of Loops.