Why personalized learning is so challenging

Personalized learning is actually a long standing pursuit in education, and its path has been paved with encouraging successes and disappointing failures. As computers became more affordable in the 2000, we started to look to technology to solve the scaling problem, presenting different options to the learner or giving learners their own ability to explore a library of content in any order. But our vision was greater than our technology. It's simply impossible for a human designer to predict all the possible responses for every learner. The approach also ignores culture, prior experiences, or learner preferences. So why is personalized learning so difficult? Let's take an example. You've just hired an intern to help you write training materials. The first thing you need to do is train your new assistant, right? So you make a list of things you need to cover. Now imagine your project goes really well. So well, you've been asked to develop a training program for 100 interns who will be…