Although “personalized learning” has been a buzz term in the education field, there are not many concrete examples of holistic edtech approaches to the change in teachers’ work that actually supports personalized learning for their students.
A team of Finnish researchers, in collaboration with Eduix, have addressed this problem within the core task of university’s students: thesis writing and project management. For that, they developed Wihi to support the supervision and management of thesis work, considering the needs of the three players involved in such academic projects : the students, their supervisors, and the faculty coordinators – who need to monitor the progress of such work.
“On one hand, Wihi is a tool for teachers to supervise thesis processes, but on the other hand, it is a tool helping the thesis-writing students to organize their work in individual level.”
Lindstedt et al. (2021)
In a study published last year, Lindstedt and colleagues reported the Finnish students’ impressions of Wihi after using it for 2 years. In general, Wihi supported students’ thesis project and enabled personalized learning by helping students to plan and schedule their thesis project, giving a communication channel and increasing students’ confidence to achieve their goals.
The authors finish their discussion by indicating that
“Instead of more common lecture-centric approach, the developed thesis
Lindstedt et al. (2021)
management system, Wihi, represents a new kind of process-centric approach to
education Information System, and as such, has shown to be a useful tool for all parties. We see that these results are important to be considered when other process-centric solutions are developed. The personalized needs of users must be understood and supported in different situations and balanced between simplicity and usefulness.”
You can find the complete study written by Lindstedt and his colleagues (2021) here.