inevitable

What?

Transformational Change or Tinkering Change.  Mass Customized Learning IS ABOUT TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE.  No “tinkering” allowed.  And to be clear, any change that retains the Industrial Age, assembly line delivery system of learning opportunities IS merely tinkering!

     The Industrial Age is about mass producing education
     The Information Age is about mass customizing learning

We are not going to tinker with the current delivery system, we are going to leapfrog it!  Mass Customized Learning (MCL) is a new and exciting vision for education that uses today’s powerful mass customizing technology to meet the personal learning needs of every learner every hour of every day. 

The reality in today’s Information Age, is......that it is now possible for:

  • anyone
  • to learn anything
  • from anywhere
  • at any time in any way
  • from worldwide experts

Yet, the reality for most public school learners today is......as it has always been:

  • a specific student
  • can learn specific subjects
  • in a specific classroom
  • on a specific schedule
  • in a specific way
  • from a specific teacher. 

Reread the above two statements.  What a stark contrast between the Industrial Age assembly line and today’s Information Age customizing technology.

Everybody is mass customizing.  Everybody.  Everybody - except education.  Pandora.com allows me (and you, of course) to customize my music radio station; My Yahoo allows me to customize my news page; Starbucks allows me to have a venti decaf with a little room; my iPad and Google allow me to go anywhere in the world while sitting having that venti decaf.

Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning presents a desirable and doable vision that allows learning systems to leave the Industrial Age, time-based approach to instruction and replace it with an Information Age, learning-based system that:

  • Meets every learner at his/her learning level,
  • Provides learning opportunities that sync with the learner’s most effective learning styles, and
  • Allows the learner to study and learn skills and concepts using content that is relevant and interesting.

A final note: MCL is not about “technology as teacher.”  It is about “technology as teacher enabler."

You will learn the “what” of MCL throughout the book, and chapter 2 gives you a good start.

Read Inevitable, chapter 2, The Future IS Now: Transformational Technologies.