Abstract:

Current changes in educational policy and practice indicate a turn towards digitalization of education, personalized learning, and interdisciplinary curriculum, as well as the flexible organization of schooling. Personalized learning is an active involvement of the learner by planning one’s learning path taking into account one’s learning skills, needs, and opportunities (Bray, McClaskey, 2021). Deeper learning is an academic mindset to master critical thinking and solving complex problems, working collaboratively, and being empowered through self-directed learning (Martinez, (2014). In order to bring it into practice teachers need efficient and reliable tools. The smart learning experience platform is a learning software designed to create more personalized learning opportunities by combining learning content, recommending, and delivering it with the support of artificial intelligence. Learning experience platforms, such as Eduten Playground and LearnLab allow learners to personalize what they learn and how they learn. Learners can identify their specific learning needs, interests or gaps getting learning analytics data and proposals for further actions. Eduten Playground (https://eduten.com/) is an exercise library co-designed and validated with thousands of Finnish teachers. It comes with ready-made weekly numeracy exercise programs for ages 6 to 15. At the core of its impact is a carefully crafted learning environment based on gamification, differentiation, and easy goal setting. Learnlab (https://learnlab.net/en/ ) consists of a unique collection of learning tools and content, designed to be engaging, collaborative, and interactive, giving educators insight into new types of assessment. Each Learnlab session can be created, using various interactive tasks, to fit specific concepts, visualize, cooperate, and communicate in an engaging way. During the three-month action research, 40 teachers shared their experiences of testing Eduten Playground and Learnlab, analyzing learning situations, and discussing how to improve classroom practice. The researchers working with teachers were interested in how smart digital platforms based on artificial intelligence can contribute to personalized and deeper learning. Results of action research show that the use of smart digital platforms conforms to the idea of deeper learning: it helps students not only to memorize information but also to better understand it, relate it to existing experience, and discover connections between concepts, phenomena, and objects. The following features empowering personalized learning are highlighted: the possibility to collect and visualize students' learning outcomes in real-time, quickly identify strengths and weaknesses in student learning, accumulate data on the learning of the individual student and the whole class over time, and use that data for personalization and differentiation helping each learner to make progress to the fullest extent possible. Digital technologies built on the progressive pedagogy can speed up change from „one-size-fits-all, factory-style schools to more individualizable, free-range learning“ (OECD, 2021). In the paper, we will provide recommendations to teachers and policymakers on how smart learning experience platforms could help to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and what challenges and risks using technologies based on artificial intelligence for teachers and students could occur.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, deeper learning, a smart learning experience platform.