The whole world is going for personalization.
Personalization of what you should be learning, of emails sent to you, of the food that is being served to you, of the way a website responds to you. I can keep going.
What is personalization?
The ability to customize your experience with the things you see, interact, and do — so that what is being delivered is customized just for you.
Or, is it?
I view personalization as not being just the delivery of things — tutoring, food, website content, or whatever.
What is the benefit of someone personalizing your experience if you do not resonate with it?
If you do not resonate with it, then what is the point?
We frequently come across this in the tutoring space. There are many fine companies out there that do an outstanding job of personalization. Of personalizing the content that a student is expected to consume, so that they can have better learning outcomes.
But does personalizing the delivery of content also accelerate learning?
Why acceleration? Because, by improving the speed of learning, you are effectively shrinking the time it takes someone to get expertise over a particular body of knowledge!
But one key component is missing here. Time.
Time is a critical metric that matters when you think about acquisition of knowledge. If I took just one month to gain proficiency in the entire 8th grade math content as a middle school student, then I am pretty close to being a genius. If I took three years to cover the same material, you know what you will think of me 🙂
So, time matters. Personalization alone does not!
The theory is that, by personalizing the delivery of content to a student, we can also accelerate his/her learning. But are we really measuring learning outcomes over a period of time? Do we have an auditable process to measure this? This is where many companies fail.






