Abstract:

The main contributions of digital transformation of education aim to foster personalization by multiplying the thresholds of choice and promoting adjustment to the student's own interests. They can also adapt learning activities to student´s time and place, as well as the pace at which they want to undertake their own learning. This claim for personalization need to be assessed carefully.

In order to make this assessment possible, the paper will propose a theoretical framework that identifies five different and complementary meanings of personalized education: autonomous choice-opened education, tailored education, personalized accompaniment, self-regulated learning and comprehensive education. It will also analyze the two orientations that these personalizing efforts may have, extrinsic and intrinsic, and identify the prevailing orientation in each of the five meanings.

As for personalized accompaniment, the paper will draw attention to what Digital transformation poses as a central question: whether the technologies can, by themselves, and based on the use of Big Data and IA, deliver a type of accompaniment that should be considered personalized, even more than the one performed by teachers.

As e-learning arisen, during the 20th century, the recognition of teacher´s role of “digital curator” helped to calm agitation within schools and universities. However, the massive irruption and extension of e-learning during COVID Pandemic, as well as recent emergence of adaptive platforms, have reinstalled the discussion about the role of teacher, somehow putting into question their irreplaceability. These new platforms, despite their germinal and incipient stage of development, boast of their ability to select the best resources and mediations for each student based on the information delivered in their own learning process.

Are we facing the beginning of the end of teaching as we know it? In order to answer this question, the paper will explore the conclusions of recent research on the subject, and face them with some theoretical traditional insights, exploring the differences between the role of curating and of mirroring within education processes.
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Keywords:

Digitization of education, role of teacher, personalized education, digital curation, mirroring.