The Personal Learning Environment (PLE): A Student-Centered Approach that Supports a Techno-Social Digital Transformation in Higher Education

This chapter describes the origins and history of personalized learning (PL) and argues that the personalized learning interaction framework or PLiF, and the personal learning environments or PLE, are contemporary approaches of PL that have the potential to address the challenges we are facing in higher education. The chapter describes the learning ecology, research underpinnings, and applications of PLiF and PLEs in higher education settings, and suggests that these socio-technical frameworks support the development of agency in lifelong learning, continuous learning, and learning on demand. The chapter also proposes the PLE as a digital transformation system that recognizes the ecologies in which people learn, how the elements of those ecologies interact to transform the learning process, what this means for the practice of teaching and learning, and how organizations such as higher education institutions can leverage the PLE as a student-centered digital learning ecosystem to create a de-centralized approach that can handle impending changes in the technological, pedagogical, and organizational infrastructure of university systems.