Smart Libraries Will Power the Transition to Personalized Learning

[Commentary] As tomorrow’s libraries gather insights on how materials are used, faculty will, in turn, receive real-time analytics about student engagement with materials and time-on-task. We can correlate students’ grades with use of the library and evaluate the content and usage patterns that lead to student performance.

This is the sort of student-level data that is increasingly being used in course dashboards, to provide aggregated data about student progress. The availability of this data provides powerful levers to personalize learning for students, to support faculty in improving student outcomes, and to enable institutions of higher education to communicate their value.

[David Kim is Founder and CEO of Ace Learning. Jeffrey Pomerantz is the author of a forthcoming book about metadata for MIT Press, and was formerly a tenured Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]