Abstract:

The use of rapidly advancing digital technologies in education is now having a significant impact on teaching and learning, but also vice versa - digital technologies used in education are aligning with educational approaches and trends. One such approach that is gaining importance is personalized learning. This is an approach where the form of learning, its content, and its pace are 'tailored' to the needs of each individual learner.

In teaching a number of courses at our faculty, especially in the study programs of applied informatics and informatics teacher training, we use our own community portal customized to the needs of the courses. The portal includes an LMS, but also several tools supporting collaboration and mutual evaluation of students, such as wiki, blog, peer-review, and code-review tools, etc. Our intention is to enhance this learning environment with features of personalization so that we can better help our students to optimize their learning by, for example, recommending the type of learning, learning activities, etc. that are appropriate for them. In addition, such an enhanced personalized learning environment should also take into account the learning objectives of the course as well as the ideas and requirements of the lecturers. Therefore, we conducted a survey among the teachers and students of our faculty focusing on personalized teaching in a virtual learning environment.

In this paper, we focus only on a survey among university teachers. Preliminary results show that teachers are already using several elements of personalization in their teaching; however, they are not fully prepared to use virtual personalized learning environments.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, personalized learning environment, higher education teachers, survey.