Designing Personalized Online Learning Environments for Adult Learners

Customizing instruction to meet individual needs is one of the foundational cornerstones of today`s learner-centered paradigms. Adult learners have a wide range of differences in their backgrounds, interests, abilities, and learning styles; instruction, therefore, needs to be designed in such a way as to meet the highly diverse needs of adult education settings. The World Wide Web presents enormous potential for providing a technological environment for the optimal delivery of personalized instruction for individual learners. It is argued, however, that existing Web-based instruction fails to effectively customize instructions for individual learners. Therefore, we are in need of an ongoing refinement and creativity in our generation and treatment of theories of instruction geared towards the generation of personalized learning environments. Here, the attempt is made to develop an instructional-design theory for personalized online learning for online adult learners, with a special focus on the question of solving ill-structured problems. Theory, on a general level, is discussed insofar as it has emerged from the goals, preconditions, and underlying values, with an eye to the methods of instruction that are optimal for achieving the goals. The methods of instruction in this instructional-design theory are composed of four major components (goal-setting activities, engaging in the learning task, performing the task, and reviewing and reflecting upon the output of the task), with some corollaries detailing each major component. These methods incorporate the use of such Web technology as the learner management system, the learning objects system, and pedagogical agents to foster personalized learning process in online learning environments.