Everyone in EdTech is screaming about “AI-powered personalization.” It sounds sexy. It sounds inevitable. But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
👉 Most of what’s called adaptive learning today is smoke and mirrors.
The Myth of Easy Personalization
Personalized learning isn’t about throwing a quiz at a student and calling it “adaptive.” True personalization has two dimensions:
Active: the learner chooses, tweaks, or shapes their path (think: selecting topics, focus areas, pace).
Passive: the system quietly adapts in the background, analyzing behavior and making recommendations (think: Netflix nudging you to binge the next series).
The magic happens when both blend together. That’s where most systems fall short, they only cover slivers of what “adaptive” really means.
Where Learners Actually Struggle
In my conversations with students and educators, the struggle isn’t just content overload or lack of tools. It’s this: people confuse “hard learning” with the wrong kind of struggle.
Cognitive struggle? Necessary. That’s where growth happens.
Language barriers, clunky materials, inaccessible content? Absolutely unnecessary.
Professors stretched thin, unable to give personalized feedback? A problem AI can help solve at scale.
But if AI tries to replace professors instead of supporting them, it only adds noise.
How We Think About It at SceneSnap
At SceneSnap, personalization comes from two fronts:
Learners can actively personalize their study paths, shaping the journey in ways that feel natural.
Our system adapts in real-time to behaviors, generating summaries, quizzes, flashcards, and feedback loops that match where the learner actually is.
It’s personalization without pretending that one algorithm “knows” the student better than the student themselves.
The Contrarian Take
The industry loves to market adaptive learning like it’s a solved problem. It’s not. Real personalization is messy, requires both agency and system intelligence, and only works when AI plays the role of amplifier, not substitute.
Until we acknowledge that, we’ll keep selling learners the illusion of personalization and leaving them to struggle with the wrong problems.