Maureen Greenbaum's List: Adaptive Learning

• online homework and tutorial programs personalize learning for students
• more robust administrative and reporting tools
• instructors can review and analyze students’ strengths and weaknesses by tracking their performance on tests, assignments and tutorials, while the customizable gradebook helps instructors manage results, calculate grades and plan remediation strategies.
• MyMathLab in conjunction with instructor support
• range of learning tools, students with different learning styles can find the tool that works best for them

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• All OLI courses include frequent opportunities for students to assess their own learning and receive immediate context specific feedback.
• Cognitive Tutors and “mini-tutors” provide context specific assistance during the problem solving process.
• opportunities for assessment and evaluation that are built into all courses. Frequent formative evaluation gives students the type of constructive and timely feedback on progress that is available from individual tutoring sessions but almost always absent from digital learning environments. Continuous evaluation of class performance gives faculty the information they need to effectively modify or supplement instruction to meet learning objectives.

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• Even a simple analysis of existing institutional data could raise the profile of potential at-risk students or reveal attendance or assignment submission patterns that indicate the need for additional support.
• materials as well as the social networks they form in the
• On the one hand, analytics can provide valuable insight into the factors that influence learners' success (time on task, attendance, frequency of logins, position within a social network, frequency of contact with faculty members or teachers). Peripheral data analysis could include the use of physical services in a school or university: access to library resources and learning help services.
• becomes the object of learning, rather than the assessment of learning.
• learning analytics can provide dramatic, structural change in education. For example, today, our learning content is created in advance of the learners taking a course in the form of curriculum like textbooks. This process is terribly inefficient. Each learner has differing levels of knowledge when they start a course. An intelligent curriculum should adjust and adapt to the needs of each learner. We don't need one course for 30 learners; each learner should have her own course based on her life experiences, learning pace, and familiarity with the topic. The content in the courses that we take should be as adaptive, flexible, and continually updated. The black box of education needs to be opened and adapted to the requirements of each individual learner.
• assessment should be in-process, not at the conclusion
• We are at an exciting cross-over point between innovations in the technology space and research in university research labs. Language recognition, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and related concepts are being combined with the growth of social network services, collaborative learning, and participatory pedagogy.
• Companies like Grockit and Knewton are creating personalized adaptive learning platforms. Not to be outdone, traditional publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill are investing heavily in adaptive learning content and are starting to partner with universities and schools to deliver the content and even evaluate learner performance. Learning management system providers (such as Desire2Learn and Blackboard) are actively building analytics options into their offerings.
• The profile of the learner, not pre-planned content, needs to drives curriculum and learning opportunities.

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• Like Grockit, Knewton has hopes of making a broad impact on education by opening up its learning platform to schools, teachers and education companies. Though the two specialize in different aspects — Knewton is purely adaptive learning while Grockit is also a social learning platform — their prospective customers aren’t likely to license both of them.
• “Rusty has already introduced Grockit to potential partners in mobile consumer services, virtual learning environments like online universities, post-secondary institutions, community colleges, major metropolitan school districts, e-learning companies, work-force training companies, home-schooling and community-based organizations,” Gilbert says.  “Some of these partnerships are already active and will soon be announced.”

• “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring.”  In short, 3 learning environments were compared:

   
   
  1. Conventional – roughly 30 students per teacher, periodic tests given.
   
  2. Mastery Learning – roughly 30 students per teacher learn the material in a classroom setting (like above) .  However, the tests (like those in the Conventional class) are used to give feedback which is immediately followed by corrective procedures and ‘parallel formative tests’.
   
  3. Tutoring – Usually one (sometimes 2-3) student(s) learned the material from a good tutor.  Tutoring instruction was “followed periodically by formative tests, feedback corrective procedures, and parallel formative tests”.

• n 1984, Benjamin Bloom identified a learning dilemma he dubbed the “2 Sigma Problem”–tutored students perform two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional methods. Noting that one-to-one tutoring is “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale,” Bloom challenged researchers and teachers to “devise teaching-learning conditions that will enable the majority of students under group instruction to attain levels of achievement that can at present be reached only under good tutoring conditions.” The purpose of this seminar will be to reexamine Bloom’s dilemma and challenge after a quarter Century of intervening innovation and research. Beginning with Bloom’s 1984 article, the class will conduct a meta-analysis of the student performance literature. The class product will be a multi-authored article aimed at answering these questions: (1) Are we any closer to closing the 2 sigma gap? (2) If not why? (3) How cam researchers and teachers facilitate broadly realized levels of achievement on par with those realized via one-to-one instruction?

• By: Clayton Christensen
• those regulations will make them stronger, more focused on helping students to learn and graduate with valuable capabilities.

• Soon the choice facing new students will be between prestigious-but-dated traditions and generic-but-demonstrated results.
• he most successful innovators will be able to promise prospective students
• Higher education is facing its first truly disruptive technology
• even students who chose to pay the costs of coming to campus will be unwilling to submit to the traditional schedule of day-time classes and long nights of hitting the books.
• We don’t lecture, and you don’t carry textbooks.
• Now new technologies, including online discussion forums and

  computer-adaptive tutorials, allow an inexpensive but potentially effective return to the group dialogues of Socrates and the one-on-one discussions

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• Knewton’s Adaptive Learning Platform can dynamically and automatically remix a school’s online educational materials to match every student’s strengths, weaknesses and unique learning style. It is part of a larger trend of “big data,” or using a large amount of feedback to analyze and then adjust to a user’s individual needs. And it is believed to be the largest funding round ever for an education technology startup.
• next bite-sized bit
• algorithm-driven, generating unique lessons dynamically and automatically for the student.
• students to skip boring lessons they have already mastered and allows them to move on to targeted lessons.
• Knewton launched two first-year college math courses – College Mathematics and College Algebra – and a self-paced Math Readiness for College course
• , Knewton has been adopted by Penn State University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Mount St. Mary’s University, Washington State University, and Education Management Corporation.

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• Pearson will begin to use Knewton’s adaptive learning algorithms to power its digital textbooks and online course materials. Knewton will begin with Pearson’s MyLab and Mastering digital courseware, and become the adaptive learning engine behind all of Pearson’s titles. Adaptive learning uses software to present questions and educational content personalized to each student’s learning pace and abilities.