Personalized Learning Environment: Accommodating Individual Differences in Online Learning Noor Dayana Abd Halim Department of Educational Multimedia Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor, Malaysia noordayanahalim@gmail.com Mohamad Bilal Ali Department of Educational Multimedia Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor, Malaysia mba@utm.my Noraffandy Yahaya Department of Educational Multimedia Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor, Malaysia fandymcl@gmail.com Abstract—As the online learning in education field is increasing, research must turn to study the focus upon this emerging trend of teaching and learning process. One of the issues is about the development of online course content and also individualized students' learning preferences. As we know, students are differing in learning styles, skills, and aptitude. Thus, this paper describes the concept of Personalized Learning Environment (PLE) and also discusses the issues on individual differences and personalized in online learning. Keywords-online learning; web based learning; personalized learning environment; individual differences I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, education field have moved rapidly towards integrating technology or computer in the process of teaching and learning. This is because computer has a great potential for enhance teaching and learning outcomes [1,2]. To the greater extent, nowadays the learning process has been moving towards the application of online learning [3,4,5] Online learning as defined by Chang and Fisher [6] is a system and process that connects learners with the materials and information that distributed online. One of the popular online applications has been emerged for educational use is web-based learning. This is because, the use of the web as an educational tool had provided learners a new learning experiences and educators an interesting teaching environments [7]. The popularity of the web base learning is due to the concept of learning “anywhere” and “anytime”[8]. As mentioned by Killedar [9], web can be globally distributed and has a high personalized media for delivery information. Through that, the time and the physical boundaries of the traditional classroom are no longer existed [10]. Since online learning has different setting from the conventional classroom, educators need to use some special techniques to make students can learn the best based on their preference. Therefore, educators require an understanding on the characteristics of the learners that might affect how they interact with the learning environment. This also helps educators to design an appropriate learning environment based on student’s preferences or differences [11]. II. PERSONALIZED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT In this day and age, to cater all the individual's differences in online setting, a personal learning environment (PLE) has emerged in educational field around the world. PLE is a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources [12]. PLE is a new concept in designing and developing an online learning. PLE is more focused on individual learning rather than the instructor, facilities, resources and tools. PLE has also played an active role in improving the effectiveness of learning [13]. According to Atwell [14, 15] PLE is an environment that constructed by individual. Individuals are responsible for their own learning process. They also need to manage the process of learning more effectively and takes a larger stake in the ownership of content. In general, personalize learning approach has the potential to meet the educational needs in the future as well as providing a new alternative to encourage students’ learning [16]. Riecken [17] stated that personalization helps teacher to build a meaningful one to one relationship with students, by understanding their needs. The personalized environment also helps students to reach a goal because their individuals’ need is well addresses in a given context. III. PERSONALIZED AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES ISSUES IN ONLINE LEARNING Online learning has changed the ways in which education has been conducted. Unfortunately, many educational websites do not employ principles of effective learning [18]. Since users are moving toward online learning, how to attract them individually? How to give them more motivation, independence and self-directed learning? How to design a website to match the individuals? How to convey 2011 International Conference on Social Science and Humanity (ICSSH 2011) V2-402 C 978-1-4244-9374-6/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE