Personalized and Differentiated Learning Platform

Since Summer of 2018, I and my 12-year old daughter have separately signed up, via our individual accounts, for Code Academy to learn the Python programming language. Due to her routine school work, which is quite intensive, she is only able to develop her coding skills on Saturdays. Sometimes, if she gets excited about a concept, like recursive loops, she spends the entire weekend to master that module; otherwise, it is only 3-4 hours of effort per week that she is able to spend on learning this important skill. She has already upgraded herself from the free / beginner version to the pro/paid version because she was finding the free version not too challenging, after a month of learning Python through this amazingly interactive platform. Towards the end, probably around Summer of 2019, she plans to upgrade to the Intensive/10-week accelerated version to take her skills to the next level. My vision for her is that she is able to become a good/professional category programmer by the time she finishes up High School, since I believe computer programming and computational problem solving skills are as fundamental as learning English language and/or Mathematics, to compete and thrive in the new globalized environment driven by the 4th Industrial Revolution. However, her school administration does not subscribe to this fundamental assertion, at least not to the level I do; hence, the need for this Code Academy solution.

The points I am trying to make by mentioning the details above are:

1. Code Academy is an example, where, at least for learning programming, one is able to have a personalized, interactive learning experience. The experience is personalized in a cost effective manner, not only in terms of it being self-paced, but also in terms of various difficulty levels, more or less content/exercises, and different tracks, depending upon ones learning objectives and learning successes.

2. Despite being in the same course, trying to learn the same skill, my and her progress are different and even her course content, exercises and tests are different depending upon our chosen tracks and individual progress and time spent. I.e. not only we are learning at our own pace, our learning is also personalized (Cope & Kalantzis, 2018) and differentiated .

3. Although the programming assignments are checked automatically by the computer and hints are provided to rectify the problems, we help each other out if the solutions / instructions, given by the computer, are not clear. I.e. peer to peer learning is at work here as well.

In short, affordances of such an e-learning platform - at your own pace, individualized content, peer to peer learning and automated grading and hints within a simulator- make it a cost-effective, differentiated, personalized learning platform for learning computer programming for all ages at more or less the same time, and on the same platform. In a traditional classroom, this would not have been possible.

References –

1. Skills for the 4th Industrial Revolution - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

2. (Cope & Kalantzis, 2018): https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/Bk6lw/differentiated-learning-part-7b-personalized-learning

3 (Cope & Kalantzis, Differentiated, 2018): https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/EKcgc/differentiated-learning-part-7a-learner-differences-in-old-classrooms-and-new