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The trick, she said, is individualization.

The most successful commercial websites are already moving in this direction, and higher education — which itself is growing increasingly Web-based — needs to catch up, McQuaig said. “What we really need to do now is deeply understand our learners,” she said.

This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the "Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning interface that gets to know each of its 400,000 students personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”

“[Each student] comes to us with a set of learning modality preferences,” McQuaig said. The online learning platform Phoenix wants to build, she said, “reject[s] the one-size-fits-all model of presenting content online.” In the age of online education and the personal Web, the standardized curriculum is marked for extinction, McQuaig said; data analytics are going to kill it.

Phoenix is certainly not the only institution focusing on how data logged by learning management systems can be used to improve learning.

envoys from the South Orange Community College District had unveiled a project called Sherpa, which uses information about students to recommend courses and services. McQuaig said Phoenix has been in conversations with a number of universities that are working toward similar learner-centered online platforms.

In any case, she said, it will be expensive to make.

But that is where online education, and the Internet as a whole, is headed, McQuaig said.