Learning Envision / The Recurring Announcement

Scalable, personal and cheap: the impossible triple promise

The recurring claim is that one change delivers three benefits at once, and that combination is where the trouble starts.

Scale, personalisation and low cost are each achievable in isolation, and education has achieved each of them at various points. Large group instruction scales. Individual tutoring personalises. Self directed study using printed material is cheap. The recurring promise is not any one of these but all three simultaneously, delivered by the same mechanism, with no compensating loss. That is a strong claim, and it is usually asserted rather than demonstrated. The demonstrations that accompany it tend to show one of the three working well in conditions that quietly supply the other two by other means, usually by involving unusually motivated learners and unusually attentive staff.

The tension is structural rather than technical. Genuine personalisation requires knowing where a particular learner is, which requires assessment, interpretation and a decision about what to do next. Automating the first part of that chain is often feasible. The interpretation and the decision are harder, because they depend on knowing why a learner is stuck, and the same wrong answer can have several distinct causes. When the interpretive work is retained by a person, the cost does not fall as promised. When it is removed, the personalisation becomes shallow: adaptive in pace, uniform in approach.

There is a more forgiving way to hold this. Any two of the three, delivered reliably, would still be a substantial gain, and several waves have delivered two of the three for particular purposes. Materials that a learner can return to as often as they like, at no additional cost, are a real and durable benefit. The failure is not in the achievement but in the framing, which promises all three, sets the evaluation criteria accordingly, and then records a genuine partial success as a disappointment. Better framing would have protected the gains that were actually made.