Performance by Preferences – an Experiment in Language Learning to Argue for Personalization

Personalizing online courses is of high interest due to heterogeneous learners. Mainly, personalization is limited to learning content, or difficulty levels. Often, courses are just optimized resulting in one version, the one-size-fits-all variant. However, learners are considered as one cohort, independently of sub-groups, and their existence is seldom further analyzed. In this paper, a metric is introduced, the so-called preference discrimination index, as an indicator for a potential bias caused by the selection of instructional methods. We examine two versions of a 45min language learning online course, which cover the same learning content, but one version differs in instructional methods, enriched by simulations. The result shows that the “traditional” course without simulations discriminates more for considered preferences, indicating the need for improvements. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.