Alta boasts higher student mastery because it ties all assignments to the learning objectives in a course as designed by the instructor. When a student struggles, Alta’s technology diagnoses the issues and delivers instructional content to bridge the student’s knowledge gap.

Knewton

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.

A look at the Hype Cycle (see here for Wikipedia’s entry on the topic and for criticism of the hype of Hype Cycles) of the IT research and advisory firm, Gartner, indicates that both big data and adaptive learning have now slid into the ‘trough of disillusionment’, which means that the market has started to mature, becoming more realistic about how useful the technologies can be for organizations.

“Knewton is a Ferrari, but we’re in a Kia market. Ferraris require more maintenance. It’s more complicated to use Knewton.”

Pearson is “investing heavily in product development and is developing its own in-house adaptive learning capability,”

we think of it as like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out where your strengths and weaknesses are down to the percentile.

you

you

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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

Knewton, for example, claims that their system can track students across courses and semesters and test hypotheses about them over time.

taking a swipe at Knewton

If Knewton were doing more of this, I wouldn’t be as critical.