Over the last few months I’ve heard a lot of people arguing that one of the great uses of large language models will be to personalise learning.
I am pretty dubious about personalised education. I wrote a long chapter about it in my 2020 book Teachers vs Tech, where I argued that most forms of personalisation don’t work.
I have also found that many advocates of personalisation rely on a sleight-of-hand. They will start out by asking if, when you were a student, you felt that the pace of a class was too fast or slow. Almost everyone who has ever been a student will have at least one memory of this happening, so that will predispose you to think well of the basic concept of personalisation.
But then when you look at what many actual examples of personalised classrooms involve, you’ll see kids sitting at screens on their own, constructing their own playlists on YouTube and choosing their own form of assessment.
This is a complete bait-and-switch! If the problem is “my maths teacher went too fast and I wish they could repeat that middle step again” the solution is not “demonstrate how to solve equations with iMovie videos in the style of a cooking show. Use props to represent variables and numbers. Combine with other videos to create an equations cookbook.”1