Education Postgraduate Research Seminar 2010 (Edupres ’10), Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 27-28 October 2010 PERSONALIZED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: A NEW TREND IN ONLINE LEARNING Noor Dayana Abd Halim, 1 Mohamad Bilal Ali, Prof Madya Dr. 2 Noraffandy Yahaya, Dr. Department of Multimedia Education, Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Skudai, Johor noordayana@utm.my , 1 mba@utm.my , 2 fandymcl@gmail.com ABSTRACT Online learning has changed the ways in which education has been conducted. Unfortunately, many educational websites do not employ principles of effective learning (Cook and Dupras, 2004). Since learners move online, how can we attend to the basic human attraction for individualized attention? Learners have heterogeneous backgrounds and differ in traits such as skills, aptitude, and preferences for processing information, constructing meaning from information and applying it to real situations. Hence, this paper discusses the concept of Personalized Learning Environment (PLE) and describes how individual differences cater the personalized issue in the website. Keyword : Personalized learning environment, individual differences, learner’s need 1.1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, the learning process has been moving towards the application of online learning (White and Weight, 2000; Alessi and Trollip, 2001; Liaw et al. 2007). What differentiates between online learning and traditional learning is the method used. However, the objectives, materials, books and syllabus are the same. Online learning as defined by Chang and Fisher (2003) is a system and process that connects learners with the materials and information that distributed online. According to Allan and Seaman (2010), online learning occurs when the content is obtained via online. Typically there are no face-to-face meetings in the classroom. Studies conducted by them showed up in 2008 about 4.8 million students are moving towards online learning. One of the popular online applications has been for educational use is web-based learning. Many studies have shown a web-based learning benefits and the potential to enhance teaching and learning process (Mistler-Jackson and Songer, 2000; Linn et al. 2003; Clark, 2004). This is because, the use of the Web as an educational tool has provided learners a new learning experiences and educators an interesting teaching environments (Nam & Smith-Jackson, 2007). The popularity of the web base learning is due to the concept of learning “anywhere” and “anytime” (Neo et al. 2008). As mentioned by Killedar (2008), web can be globally distributed and has a high personalized media for delivery information. So, teaching process is no longer confined to a time and place. By using this medium, the students and teacher become spatially and temporally dispersed learners. The