Enhancing personalised learning with artificial intelligence - Implementation challenges from educators’ perspective in vocational education and training

Abstract

With the recent uptrend of personalised learning (PL) coinciding with the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Singapore has been encouraging the mainstream education to adopt PL by tapping on the AI’s capabilities and potential. Although a Singapore’s vocational education and training (VET) institution had planned to pluralise PL with AI, they recognised that staff might face potential challenges hindering its implementation. A qualitative case study was conducted to explore the feasibility of implementing PL across the institution from the perspective of VET staff. Semi-structured interviews were carried out on six experienced VET staff members from four different faculties to gain insight into their prior knowledge, existing experience and future perspective of PL with AI. Adopting Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the data were sorted based on themes that contradict the notion of pluralising PL with AI. Through abductive reasoning approach, the findings indicated that the division of labour, community and rules contradicted the mass consumption of PL due to the lack of PL pedagogical knowledge from VET staff and the complex setup of various diploma courses in the institution. Additionally, the usage of AI to support or enhance PL and the VET institution’s direction to pluralise PL without thorough research and guidelines was further contradicted by the community and the division of labour. Therefore, this study recommends VET institutions not to pluralise AI PL too early. Instead, VET institutions are recommended to conduct small-scale AI PL to build up use cases and staff confidence prior to institutional wide adoption.