![](https://ams.educause.edu/eweb/upload/60158798.jpg)
Tom Cavanagh
Vice Provost for Digital Learning,
University of Central Florida
As the higher education student body becomes more diverse (age, ethnicity, life circumstances, etc.), meeting the needs of each individual learner will be not just important but an imperative for institutional success. This imperative can be described as the "personalization" of the educational experience for each student, enabled across several different dimensions. For example, the maturation of online learning is enabling a growing number of technology-based activities to accomplish this goal of personalization, such as adaptive learning, competency-based education, and learning analytics.