Modern higher education has great potential for the use of various strategies for personalized and adaptive learning to improve the university teaching system (Rodríguez-Triana et al., 2015). Strategy is a term that is used in various spheres of human activity and does not have a common and comprehensive interpretation. Strategy is an action that managers take to achieve the goals of the organization. Strategy can also be defined as the general direction set for the achievement of the desired state in the future. Strategy is the result of careful strategic planning (Felder & Silverman, 1988). Most importantly, strategy is a determining factor in the success of any human activity.
Learning Strategies Dissemination And Differentiation
Learning strategies were singled out as a separate research direction in the mid-1980s, which showed the importance of a conscious attitude to the learning process and learning actions. J. Rubin was one of the first to introduce the concept of strategy in the context of learning. J. Rubin defines learning strategies as techniques that students can use to master knowledge (Witkin et al., 1962). Learning strategies are considered as actions and mental effort that the learner takes in order to expand the perception of the instructional material (Cohen, 2011); there are three categories of learning strategies (Witkin et al., 1962):
• metacognitive strategies that are used by the learner to plan, organize and control their learning activities, as well as to analyze achievements;
• cognitive strategies are conscious techniques for organizing the learning process; for example, taking notes, selecting scientific sources (using dictionaries and other resources), repetition for better memorization, drawing analogies, memorizing terms, key concepts;
• socially affective strategies involve learning through interaction, exchange of information; for example, working with other students, solving a common problem, consulting a teacher.
Learning strategies are individual approaches that students use to complete educational tasks and improve their skills. Strategic learning contributes to the fact that students become more independent participants in the educational process who can also apply certain strategies in future professional activities (Malykhin & Galla, 2016). A personalized learning approach increases student motivation and engagement, which improves academic performance. Personalized learning is a solution for adapting education to the needs of people and their previous experience (Lee et al., 2018; Miliband, 2006) that allows everyone to reach their fullest potential through personalized learning (Hsieh & Chen, 2016; Lin et al., 2013). In turn, personalized learning strategies have several synonyms, namely personalized learning, individual developmental trajectory, individual learning pathway.
The term adaptive learning is often used synonymously with the concept of personalized learning. Today, adaptive learning is a developed system (Lu et al., 2014) that allows taking into account a number of individual differences (Scheiter et al., 2019; Wang & Liao, 2011), such as gender, learning motivation, cognitive type and learning style, in order to determine the most suitable adaptive learning experience with due regard to various individual differences (Afini Normadhi et al., 2019), as well as to remove time and geographic barriers.
Individual learning pathway is one of the terms that are often used to refer to the specific needs and goals of people that need to be addressed in the learning process. It is like a portal that offers customized educational content based on the cognitive knowledge of a learner (Bahçeci & Gürol, 2016). The learning process should take into account the individual differences of learners, such as student learning styles and characteristics (Bahçeci & Gürol, 2016; Shemshack & Spector, 2020). So far, more than 70 models of learning styles have been documented (Coffield et al., 2004). The concept of learning style is used to refer to the preferred individual way of collecting, organizing, and processing information (Hernández-Torrano et al., 2017). This term has been especially popular over the past decades; it is based on the belief that the knowledge of the preferred learning style as well as the preferred learning approach can be useful in informing the student about how they can adapt and improve to enhance learning (Chan et al., 2011; Samarakoon et al., 2013). In the field of medical education, one of the most common learning style models is the Felder-Silverman model (Felder & Silverman, 1988). The model highlights four learning style dimentions: sensing and intuitive Learners; visual and verbal learners; active and reflective learners; sequential and global learners (Hernández-Torrano et al., 2017).