Students have grown up in a system that has taught them to work for grades. Most teachers are still using grades to incentivize students. The university's culture, ranking system, and credentialing depends on grades. This all creates extraordinary pressure on students. Even if they are ones who already know they thrive on their excitement and passion about the material and the skill and enthusiasm of a good teacher, when the time crunch comes, the pressure to put the time into the graded class is difficult to resist.

should more challenging tasks be “worth more” in terms of marking and grades?

If you take a peek at the Mind Blowing Matrix of Connections, you will see that the content on the grid is more challenging as the numbers increase (in other words, it is easier to connect a level 1 than it is to connect a level 7). There is no incentive for a student to try and connect a level 7 artifact to The Book Thief. Should I have created a gradient with this grid, so that if you looked at artifacts from the 1-3 range, the most you could score is a 2/4, if you went to artifacts from the 4-6 range you could at most score a 3/4, and if you challenged yourself to connect artifacts from the 7-9 range, you could achieve a 4/4?

I’m not overly worried about my students not challenging themselves to their appropriate “zone of proximal development”, but rather I’m hoping to consider some of these mini-pitfalls and use my realizations to help me build better, more mind-blowing personalized experiences for my students in the future.

What about gamifying the experience and providing more options? For instance providing digital trophies for different levels of achievement.

At certain ages and stages, the term “at their own pace” is quite relative. Setting up deadlines, and guiding students to work towards and ultimately meet these deadlines is key.

Contract learning: personalized learning can integrate the use of contracts in a really positive and motivating way. I’ve employed these with great success in the high school panel with students that are exceeding the pace, where we set up a contract so that they can take safe academic risks with their learning. What I mean by this is, instead of having a student write an essay that they are going to get a Level 4+ on (because they have the skill, talent and motivation to do so), I create a contract with a minimum mark that makes it safe to take a risk and try something different.

As a general rule of thumb, courses in which fewer than 20% of the learning activities occur online are more likely to be labeled Web enhanced than hybrid.

he instructor of a hybrid course typically determines what instructional activities should be online or face-to-face depending on the learning goals, course objectives, content, and available resources. Similarly, the timetable for face-to-face versus online work can be organized in quite different ways that may reflect not only pedagogical criteria but also the particular circumstances of the instructor and students.

Here are a few examples of hybrid courses that illustrate different structures for the deployment of face-to-face and online learning activities: the instructor lectures and facilitates class discussion in the face-to-face classes, students complete online assignments based on these classroom activities, then these online assignments are posted to asynchronous discussion forums for online discussion; an instructor places lectures online using voiceover PowerPoint or streaming media for students to review, then subsequently in class students use these preliminary online materials to engage in face-to-face small group activities and discussions; students prepare small group projects online, post them to discussion forums for debate and revision, then present them in the face-to-face class for final discussion and assessment.