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Giant travel search engines such as TripAdvisor, Expedia and Google Flights have all but replaced travel agents as most consumers' travel advisors. In other areas of retail, increasingly sophisticated 'suggestion engines' employ a combination of user reviews and learning algorithms to develop personalised recommendations for appliances, whitegoods and clothing.

As retailers unlock the potential of technology to personalise the consumer experience, it is worth considering the ways in which education can adapt these technologies to achieve a level of personalisation that supports teachers and learners to deliver greater engagement and improved outcomes for all students.

The first stage of the digital shopping revolution saved consumers time and money by letting them buy things they already wanted without having to go to a traditional retail store. The second stage, already underway, is the dramatic refinement of technologies that tailor recommendations and then scour the internet for the best deal.

In education, the combination of teacher feedback and independent curating engines like those used by retail could trigger a new wave of disruption in education. Since the early 2000s, resource repositories and search engines have been saving teachers' time by allowing them easy access to quality assured, curriculum linked digital resources.

Australian education was a pioneer in the development of digital resource repositories. When the federation came together in 2001 to establish The Learning Federation, a freely available repository of some 20,000 digital resources that is still widely used by teachers across the country, the newly released Australian Curriculum came to life for teachers and students in classrooms across the country.

Building on this legacy, the next stage of education technology development is focused on personalising and tailoring the resource discovery process to match a teacher's specific context. Not only will a teacher be able to access resources that are linked to specific curriculum objectives, but adaptive technology will ensure that recommended resources are aligned to the immediate learning needs of their students.

An adaptive system will use inputs from the teacher such as the students' learning progress, whether they are learning in a co-education or single sex environment, whether they are learning in a rural, regional or remote location, or whether they will be working on the task as a group or as individuals, and curate resource suggestions based on teacher feedback and impact on student learning.

Ultimately, teachers will use their professional judgement to select the resources that best meet the needs of their students and it is this professional judgement that will refine the 'suggestion engine' in the same way that our online retailers are constantly refining their recommendations based on our interests.

With the capacity to connect teachers to resources from a wide range of sources, we expect that resource developers will be able to gain first-hand feedback from teachers on effective digital learning design and better match resource development to teacher's needs. As a result, the pool of quality assured resources that provide effective support for the learning process will be expanded over time.

Similar opportunities lie in the area of professional learning. Teachers are either bombarded with a plethora of opportunities for professional learning with little or no information to help them choose the best option for them, or their options are severely limited by distance, cost or lack of back-up in the case of regional and remote schools.

Technology can help transform professional learning for teachers in the same way that it can help transform the classroom environment for students. Online professional learning is a big part of the landscape already. An adaptive system that makes personalised recommendations for professional learning based on the teacher's individual circumstances and the experiences of others will support more effective use of limited professional learning budgets. For regional and remote teachers, access to quality professional learning will be enhanced by a system that connects teachers with similar interests and challenges, and presents good quality professional learning opportunities.

To be fair, technology advances and differences between travel, retail and education resource curators make direct comparisons difficult but the principles of providing personalised recommendations that meet the needs of consumers are similar. The approach will significantly reduce the amount of time that teachers spend searching for digital resources to support their students' learning.

The key technology is learning algorithms, which acquire knowledge about a teacher's preferences and past behaviour in order to predict what they will want, and then develops tailored recommendations. Pioneered by Netflix, among others, these types of algorithms get better at their predictions as the teacher uses or ignores successive recommendations.

Of course, developing these engines for education will probably be harder than it has been for travel. Flights are already displayed in a standardised way on airline websites, making it relatively straightforward to trawl offers, make comparisons, and assemble packages. Resource repositories like Scootle provide similar standardisation, however, in the world of professional learning, prices and specifications will vary from provider to provider. Retailers are already beginning to pioneer shopping models that show these types of curating engines are attractive to shoppers. As momentum gathers in education, the model could scale well nationally.

Once that happens, resource developers and professional learning providers will supply a ready catalogue of differentiated programs, described against a similar standard to allow digital comparison. Digital platforms could suggest resources and professional learning to support teachers and learners in achieving their education goals. Ultimately, our teachers will have more time to spend on the core business of inspiring and educating young Australians and we will all benefit as a result.

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