Who will benefit?

Empowerment of the learners

Learners will be given the power to co-determine and to become co-responsible for different aspects of their learning process. This implies to offer her choices among which to select, to track and record choices made and to provide her opportunities to reflect about them in order to improve her self-knowledge and self-management. Boosting learner's self-regulatory potential, as both preparation for and achievement in school, as both an aptitude for and a desirable outcome of schooling is considered as a necessary condition for raising motivation, engagement and ownership of learning and for meeting the social and economic requirement of permanently updating skills.

Empowerment of the teacher

Empowerment of the teacher is highlighted as a means of supporting the organisation of teaching. It entails to provide powerful support to the teacher to break away from treating all students in the same way, but rather be responsive to individual needs. Virtually all interviews with teachers about the use of ICT will reveal the lack of time as one of the inhibitors for change, and the recent interviews held within the iClass project were no exception. While teachers in general welcome the idea of personalised learning and show a real commitment in trying to achieve it, the lack of time is perceived as the greatest inhibitor. Teachers need to be supported in activities such as the preparation for and delivery of the self-regulated teaching, monitoring pupil progress, assessment of learner outcomes and scaffolding their development of autonomous learning.

iClass philosophy looks for a balance between what would be a "Sumerhill personalization" (the student decides for everything) and a "Robocop personalization" (the system decides for everything). The iClass tools are intended to support tutoring with a design, structuring and pre-selection of learning activities in a way that helps, encourages, enables (but not control) the learners to personalize their learning paths. It does so by namely providing learning paths embedding affordances for strategic self-regulated learning. In the instantiation of those options by an individual, the path allows open choices (of strategies, activities, resources). The role of the teacher is therefore to create activities that simultaneously limit and enable possibilities. This will be tested both in curriculum-embedded approach and in curriculum self-building approach.