Introduction

Learner agency refers to the capacity of learners to act purposefully and reflectively in their educational pursuits, making choices that affect their learning process. By enabling students to make decisions about their learning, agency encourages a sense of ownership that can foster deeper engagement and more effective learning outcomes.

Agency is a key component of effective learning as it promotes intrinsic motivation, resilience, and adaptability - skills that are critical for lifelong learning. It has also been linked to improved performance, especially when students feel they have control over pacing, content selection, and reflection processes. Research by Reeve and Tseng highlights how autonomy and agency within the classroom context lead to higher engagement and academic persistence.

When developing learning products, incorporating the concept of learner agency could help improve the learning experience. This article will cover three practical methods to foster agency in EdTech products. 

Three Practical Steps to Increase Learner Agency in Your EdTech Product

Promoting learner agency can sound like an overwhelming undertaking, especially in complex learning environments. Tracking, evaluating, and adapting to multiple, unique learner journeys requires complex frameworks, elaborate design, and lots of bandwidth, when human coaches, tutors, educators, and managers are involved. However, starting with small, relatively simple steps can already go a long way. We offer three practical steps to help you get started.

1. Consider Goal-Setting Features

Goal-setting is a powerful method for cultivating agency, as it gives learners a stake in the direction and pacing of their educational journey. When learners set personalized goals, they often engage in self-regulation and planning, which are fundamental components of learner agency. Various studies have found that learners who set goals make quicker progress and perform better. It is crucial to note that not every learner will know how to set realistic goals, and not every learner is sufficiently self-regulated to execute the necessary steps. Those who are so, however, tend to be high performers.

There are two key ways you can achieve a large-scale impact by incorporating a goal-setting feature. If you want to start simple, we recommend introducing such features with an audience that has a stake in the ground and is motivated, and likely well-equipped to work towards these goals. By giving them a platform to clarify what they want to achieve and why, and by providing a framework to keep them on track, this group of learners will inevitably benefit from a well-designed goal-setting feature boosting their sense of agency, and motivation. 

If you are working with an audience that may not have the skills yet to set realistic goals, you can use a more heavily scaffolded goal-setting feature to help teach them. This requires more planning and a more sophisticated design but may have a larger scale impact on your learners. However, even in this case, make sure to consider when it is meaningful to add such a feature. Some degree of engagement and motivating relevance of the subject to learners’ lives is preferable.

Application: Integrate a goal-setting feature that allows learners to set short- and long-term objectives and clarify what it is that they want to gain from their learning. For example, an initial setup process could guide learners in identifying specific skills they want to master or career goals they want to support with their learning. Make sure you incorporate goal tracking and some aids, as necessary.

Considerations: Without regular check-ins or reminders, learners may lose track of their goals. Periodic prompts to review and adjust goals can help maintain motivation, while support options (e.g., sample goals or templates) assist those who struggle with initial goal-setting. Incorporating human touchpoints with a coach, teacher, or peer can further boost motivation and accountability.

2. Allow Learners to Control Some Aspects of their Learning

Empowering learners with control over their learning experience significantly enhances agency. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines were partially developed for this reason. By enabling adjustments to aspects such as pacing, content sequencing, and feedback preferences, learners feel a stronger sense of autonomy and ownership. This customization helps them align the learning process with their personal needs and preferences, fostering a deeper connection to the material and promoting intrinsic motivation.

However, incorporating UDL into a new product or learning program is not easy and it is important to be aware of potential drawbacks. While allowing learners to control some aspects of their experience is key for fostering learner agency, it is also important to note that too much choice can harm learning. So do not fret, incorporating all elements of UDL into your EdTech product is not needed, nor is it necessarily good for your learners to reap the benefits of agency. Instead, we invite you to understand the guidelines and their research basis and use them as crutches for incorporating choices that truly empower your audience without overwhelming them.

Application: In line with your product’s priority areas, gradually add more and more flexibility, such as allowing learners to control the pace of learning, choose between linear or non-linear pathways, and select preferred formats like text or video. Offering options like captions and transcripts can also support diverse learner needs.

Considerations: While we certainly recommend working towards guidelines that support accessibility, less is often more when it comes to providing your learners with choices. Be strategic about where you give control to your learners - for example, picking how they want to submit a major assignment (i.e. video journal, comedy book, standard essay, etc.) will have a much bigger impact than allowing for choice at every single touchpoint. It is also a good idea to consider how much variability your system can handle, any human feedback, teaching, or coaching that is involved. In a nutshell, understand the role and applications of learner agency and create your own balance.

3. Partially Personalize Learning Journeys

Choosing some elements of their learning paths enables learners to navigate content in a way that feels personally relevant and appropriately challenging. However, while in recent years, personalized and adaptive learning have been hot topics, with promises of tailoring instructional content and strategies to every single learner’s unique needs, this is likely not the direction that we would like to or even can go down. 

Adaptive and hyper-personalized learning can harm learner agency by prescribing a path to the learner. It also ignores the social aspects of learning and is currently built on methodologically shaky foundations. Not to mention that these approaches promise to tailor content based on data collected from individual learners. But what happens if that data does not paint a 100% accurate and comprehensive picture of the learner, which it certainly does not? We put individuals on paths based on assumptions that are likely fundamentally flawed.

This means that achieving a desirable level of personalization in your EdTech product may be much simpler than you might think. Building adaptive and personalized learning platforms requires strong methodological planning and a solid grounding in research (which is often ignored when such systems are developed). It also requires strong engineering capabilities and sophisticated algorithms that are hard to dismantle and recalibrate - a costly undertaking even for larger companies, let alone new players in the market. However, you likely do not need to go through all this hustle to create a meaningful impact. Start small, keep it simple, and make sure you carefully consider and evaluate the impact of your personalization initiatives on learner agency and learning outcomes.

Application: Depending on your audience’s needs, work together with educators and/or relevant experts to identify areas where personalization or some degree of adaptability can boost learning. Instead of prescribing ‘personalized’ content or activities, consider empowering learners to make meaningful choices. Start with small steps, and carefully consider how much personalization human stakeholders can keep track of and effectively adapt to.

Considerations: If you incorporate adaptive features, such as assigning courses based on observed mastery levels, be aware that learners can feel tracked and potentially unfairly judged or boxed into categories. Transparency about why certain adjustments are made can increase trust in the system and reduce any potential discomfort. It is also a good idea to include human controls and allow teachers or facilitators to make adjustments based on their expert observations.

Conclusion

Learner agency is a vital factor in promoting engagement, motivation, and self-efficacy in EdTech products. Through practical steps like personalized giving learners control over basic elements of their learning, goal-setting, and semi-personalized learning paths, we can empower learners to take charge of their educational journeys. These research-backed strategies, carefully implemented, offer learners the autonomy and support they need for meaningful, long-term learning outcomes.