Personalisation has emerged as a central feature of recent educational strategies in the UK and abroad. At the heart of this is a vision to empower learners to take more ownership of their learning and develop autonomy. While the introduction of digital technologies is not enough to effect this change, embedding the affordances of new technologies is expected to offer new routes for creating personalised learning environments. The approach is not unique to education, with consumer technologies offering a 'personalised' relationship which is both engaging and dynamic, however the challenge remains for learning providers to capture and transpose this to educational contexts. As learners begin to utilise a range of tools to pursue communicative and collaborative actions, the first part of this paper will use analysis of activity logs to uncover interesting trends for maturing e-learning platforms across over 100 UK learning providers. While personalisation appeals to marketing theories this paper will argue that if learning is to become personalised one must ask what the optimal instruction for any particular learner is? For Vygotsky this is based in the zone of proximal development, a way of understanding the causal-dynamics of development that allow appropriate pedagogical interventions. The second part of this paper will interpret personalised learning as the organising principle for a sensemaking framework for e-learning. In this approach personalised learning provides the context for assessing the capabilities of e-learning using Vygotsky's zone of proximal development as the framework for assessing learner potential and development.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of engagement, appropriated from social media marketing, as a sense-making framework to understand engagement as a measurable process through the development of engagement profiles. To explore its potential application to education the paper follows previous work with Personalised Learning strategies to place emphasis on the promotion of the learner voice – their ability to influence decisions affecting them and their community. Design/methodology/approach – This paper will position engagement as a sociocultural process and adopt an Activity Theory based methodology demonstrated through a desk analysis of VLE data from a further education college. Findings – The analysis suggests that the approach can yield insights that may be elusive in traditional measures reinforcing the overall conceptual proposal for a multi-method approach to profiling learner engagement. Research limitations/implications – The paper has focused on presentation and exploration of the conceptual approach, which has limited the scope to broaden the discussion of the desk analysis and wider findings that this approach reveals. Practical implications – It is intended that the approach offers a generalizable model that can be adopted by institutions planning to measure engagement or develop learner activity profiles. Several areas of immediate potential are identified throughout the paper. Originality/value – This paper contributes a multi-method approach to engagement as argued for in recent engagement literature. This should offer institutions a way to realise value from emerging ideas within related domains of Learning Design and Learning Analytics.