Professors base these grades on a combination of factors and values, such as 10% participation, 20% homework, 30% final exam, and 40% group project. Digital adaptive learning tools can do this too, and then take the student’s score and match it with the next best skill in the subject’s overall scope and sequence.

Adaptive learning does not fit easily into the status quo. Besides having to use a blended learning model, in which class-time is divvied up between traditional and electronic learning, teachers must be willing to let students progress at their own pace.

This is different to simply providing differentiated content for students. For instance, if a learner was not in class during a period when a particular skill was introduced, and years later was learning a new skill that built on that prior knowledge, that learner would struggle. Adaptive sequencing tools could help that student go back to find this gap and learn this content first, rather than following the same sequence as everyone else

Practice Engine

A fixed-form assessment is one in which the items are preselected, and every student is tested on the same set of questions (e.g. a final exam).

Let’s break these down a little further

How do we use testing – or assessment – not simply to rank students but as meaningful windows into why they struggle to learn? And the big one: Can changes in digital curriculum help close the aching achievement gap?

we define digital adaptive learning tools as education technologies that can respond to a student’s interactions in real-time by automatically providing the student with individual support

Knewton alone has raised nearly $160 million.

The tools, however, are not a panacea. For several reasons, it’s unlikely that a single tool will ever be able to take over a student’s education and direct them to every single thing they should do. Nor is it likely that we would want it to, as a critical part of education is building student agency – helping students own their learning, make decisions, become lifelong learners, and develop their metacognitive skills.

But a critical challenge correctly noted in this report, written by EdSurge and supported by Pearson, is to decipher just what it means for a learning technology to be adaptive.

Adaptive learning is an enormously promising field. Educators worldwide are using adaptive tools to change their practice. The tools are growing and gaining acceptance in classrooms.

The Next Frontier of Adaptive Learning

Adaptive Learning Systems

adaptive courseware approach involves using software to guide students along their own particular learning pathways, with assis-tance often provided by intelligent tutoring software, which uses artificial intelligence to deliver customized responses

The results of data analysis in this study showthat there isthedifferencein the gain score of knowledge on normal distribution application between students wholearn online tutorial content in non-linear learning model and thosewho learn online tutorial content in conventional learning model.

Find courseware to meet your teaching and learning needs

Knewton

At the very least, the tool should allow for robust formative assessment, and should be capable of giving timely, helpful feedback to learners.

The flexibility and social nature of how technology infuses other aspects of our lives is not captured by the model of Personalized Instruction, which focuses on the isolated individual’s personal path to a fixed end-point. To truly harness the power of modern technology, we need a new vision for educational technology (Enyedy, 2014: 16).

recent studies show little evidence for the effectiveness of this model of integrating technology into the learning process. 

Overall, across the ALMAP trials, adding adaptivity to developmental and gateway courses had no effect on course completion rates after controlling for students’ initial achievement levels under any of the three possible use cases.

Based on this experiment, the evidence suggests adaptive learning did not improve grades or rates of course completion. The tech is still too new to make a definitive judgment.

Developing Effective Courses Using Adaptive Learning Begins with Proper Alignment

Assessment tends to be where courses differ the most

adaptive paths available for different learner profiles

the level of effort required to completely reinvent a single online course to be adaptive

Adaptive Learning is data-driven and continually takes data from students and adapts their learning pathway to “change and improve over time for each student”.

Personalized Learning: What It Really Is and Why It Really Matters

E-texts could record how much time is spent in textbook study. All such data could be accessed by the LMS or various other applications for use in analytics for faculty and students.”

Both Udacity and Knewton require the human, the learner, to become a technology, to become a component within their well-architected software system. Sit and click. Sit and click.

There is no single correct way to implement personalized learning

We’ll have an even more humane, ethical, productive, and effective version of the courseware when we come out of the pilot in Spring term.