There are two terms — personalization and customization. In my view, the are entirely different. You have to understand this difference when developing an online course. I'll share with you our understanding of these terms. So, customization. Imagine you came to the mall to buy a new T-shirt. T-shirts are mass-produced. A huge factory somewhere in India makes millions of identical T-shirts. As a matter of fact, people buy them. However, there are some people and some situations when a nonstandard print is needed. For example, you want to have a text like "The Best Son-in-Law", "The Best Cousine", "Hi, School!" or something like that, printed on your T-shirt. In this case you don't just buy a ready-to-wear T-shirt, but go to the special counter and ask a nice assistant girl to print out the text you need. This is the example of a mass product customization. Why can we use this term here? Because an Indian factory considered that there were some people, who wouldn't be satisfied with an ordinary print. There are people who'd like to change the product in accordance with their needs. Thus, they made a special line of light T-shirts (because the mall printer can't print on black ones). They have some other distinctive features like a different type of fabric and so on. This is what we call "a mass product customization". Now, if we want to find an example not in a textile industry but in services, we can simply look at our Facebook news feed. Initially, Facebook had a news feed consisting of your friends and public pages posts, and you could configure it. Well, actually you still can do it, but to a lesser extent. You used to be able to add or remove some news... In a word, you used to customize you feed. Why did I say "used to?" The thing is, now you can't customize your news feed as it has been personalized. Personalization is the product's attempt to adapt to the particular user, meet his/her particular need. I mean, the product itself does it. That's why Facebook analizes social graphs, A/B testings, statistical information etc, and formes an individual offer for you. It makes a personalized digest of your friends' news. Why do we discuss personalization and customization? Oh, that's easy to explain. Whenever we talk about the effectiveness of education, sooner or later it turns on the idea of individual approach. We need a personalized education. I believe that you can't turn to the personalized education unless you've layed the concept of customization into the educational process itself. So, what kind of concepts am I talking about? Actually, there're just a few of them. I mean, the basic ones. Feel free to widen this list. Today I'd like to tell you about three of them. The first one is modularity. What is it? Well, imagine you went to Ikea and bought a cupboard. It's a modular, unit-type cupboard. It means that you can rearrange its parts, and there are some special holes perforated beforehands, so that you didn't have to puzzle over how to attach these parts to each other. Let me give you an example from the online courses field. We once made a robotics course. It was a course on robotics for teachers, to be precise. Lately, we had to transform this course for another audience — schoolchildren. The authors removed some videos, made some new ones, replaces the hometasks and slightly changed the whole educational program. So, the lecture №15 became the lecture №3. We knew that it was possible, and hadn't add the number of the lectures into the video itself, we'd just made the text which was shown next to the video. That's why those changes went painless: we managed to change the order of the lectures by rewriting and rearranging the text in interface, without rerendering all the videos. All the elements must be modular, so that you could rearrange them in case of need. The second concept is excludability. Imagine you've made an online course which can be maintained and modified by the author only. You deprive yourself of flexibility right away. If the author left the conference, you wouldn't be able to launch the cource. It won't be supported. That's why you have to develop courses which can be supported not only by the author. It gives us so many ways of using the course! You can start it anytime and in any configuration. Of course, the author will be still able support it. The third principle is technological features effectiveness. The thing is, after producing, customizing and adopting the educational program, you can forget the initial purpose of the course and how each element works. For example, you have a course for 10,000 people. You can provide a system of peer review. For 10,000 people it's an effective method. But peer review shows poor results if the audience is about 50 people. On the contrary, if your course was designed for a small audience, and you used to give essays as a hometask, it's a bad idea to use it for the audience of 10,000. No one will check 10,000 essays. So, you should write down what is the audience, what are the limits... It's not only about hometasks, it may also concern software, or some kind of additional conditions, whether it has subtitles, what is the language... Long story short, you should describe all the features of the cours and terms of use. The clearer your description, the easier it will be to customize your product. So, let's sum up. Simply put, personalization is an individual approach. But you won't be able to achieve the individual approach in the educational field unless your course is flexible. Customization is a set of swithes which you put (or don't put) into your course. Anyway, you have to do it counciously.
