Page 66 - Looking_after_school

Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in education

Monitoring, as done through progress reports in learning management
systems or with numerous systems of formative assessment, implies
a meticulous and constant focus on processes with the intention to
constantly have the information on hand to make adjustments at any
time. Permanent monitoring assesses the gap between the current and
desired learning outcomes with respect to employability and future
performance. It is through monitoring that the student appears as ‘a
person’, meaning that they can think of themself (or can be thought
about) as someone with highly individual needs which differentiates
them from others. Those needs are always the consequence of yet-
unrealised potentialities (and thus are not indications of (ab)normality,
as is the case in the educational institutions).
Through permanent monitoring of the learning process, the learner
can always know what they are capable of and where they stand in
comparison to their performance level and in respect to their related
individual needs. Monitoring systems thus always make a preliminary
overview or a balance sheet (of accumulated learning outcomes and/
or performance levels). Instead of orientation based on a norm, this
is a form of positioning in accordance with a performance level (and
the related degree of employability). Stated differently: the written
and fixed curriculum functions as a map with signposts for students,
whilst monitoring systems function as a GPS or navigation system for
the learner, that can be used to plan and adjust their personal route.

The central mechanism of the learning environment is not the power
of corrective or normalising sanctions, but the power of continuous
personalising feedback: loops of feedback to optimise the learning pro-
cess and achieved outcomes (Bröckling, 2006). In so far as the learning
environment is a digital environment, learning analytics can (partly)
automate the focus on personal performance/employability, monitor-
ing, and feedback. Based on evaluations of the efficiency and effective-
ness of certain learning paths and other learning traces, and through
more and more refined learning profiles, learning paths can continu-
ously be customised to each learner. In the architecture of the learning
environment, it is no longer the visible educational expert who carries
out educational reform and embodies modernisation; instead, invis-
ible tracking systems, profiling, and feedback loops, make constant
innovation and re-design (or better, a constant focus on improvement)

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