maureen greenbaum's List: Adaptive Learning

• nteraction should be frequent
• as in human conversation
• active environment maintains student interest for   a long period of time, even with difficult learning material.
• the computer, keeping detailed records on student performance   and using these records in making decisions about what is next to be presented   to the student.
• In our   traditional learning environments, some students learn and some do not.   It is this second group of students that we want to help.
• tutorial approach   to learning makes it possible for everyone to learn.
• , on a moment-to-moment basis, just what the   student knows and just what learning problems are occurring
• It begins immediately with   a question, with no preceding text.
• experience the joy of   discovery.
• problem of almost all modern learning is the lecture, a noninteractive   way of learning
• critical factor   is that we can react to individual student problems
• key concept for   structuring highly interactive learning experiences is the Benjamin Bloom   concept of mastery learning.
• goal is for everyone to learn everything   to the mastery level, grades will no longer be useful
• A student who has not learned in one   way probably needs a different approach, rather than another go-round   with the material that was not previously successful in assisting learning.
• In such an environment,   learning and evaluation are no longer separate activities but are part   of the same process, intimately blended. So the student is not conscious   of taking tests, and we avoid the problems of cheating.

• highly interactive learning is intrinsically motivating.   Motivation is particularly important in a distance-learning environment,   since none of the "threats" of the classroom, such as low grades, are   available.  
• mastery-based computer   segment could also offer human contact. Small groups could work together,   either locally or remotely via electronic communication.
• existing authoring systems. Since they were, and   still are, mostly directed toward supplying information, these were inadequate   for creating highly interactive software.
• Bertrand Ibrahim at the University   of Geneva,
• omputer stores much of the information as the students   progress through the material.
• Teaching   faculty, in the sense that we know them today, may cease to exist, except   for in smaller, advanced courses. But their skills and experiences will   be important in the design of learning modules.
• High costs of development   can lead to low costs per student, if many students use the material.
• $30,000 per student-hour of high-quality learning   material
• highly   effective highly interactive distance-learning courses would have a large   potential market, making them much cheaper per student than current courses,   and if well developed, they will be much superior for almost all students
• The typical approach is to give some released time to faculty and to give   limited support for programming and media production. It is unlikely,   almost impossible, that good learning material will be developed this   way.
• Universities are   too stuck in their current ways of doing things to be able to compete   with well-developed material from "outside." Most university faculty and   administrators do not appreciate the current problems of learning and   so are not prepared for these future directions.

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• When students complete LearnSmart modules before class, they ask higher-level questions, generating greater interaction with and interest in the subject matter, while instructors are able to spend valuable class time covering more topics in higher levels of the cognitive domain.
  
• The Company noted that LearnSmart is an interactive study tool that adaptively assesses students' skill and knowledge levels to track which topics students have mastered and which require further instruction and practice. Based upon student progress, it then adjusts the learning content based on their knowledge strengths and weaknesses -- and their confidence level around that knowledge

• expensive academic infrastructure that is woefully out of sync with the business environment it is preparing students for.

•  
   
  1. From Information Poor to Information Rich
   
  2. Fierce Competition
   
  3. The Cost to Benefit Ratio is Changing
   
  4. New Times Require New Intelligence
   
  5. Shift from Individual Intelligence to Group Intelligence

• average person in the U.S. has 100,500 words flowing into their heads on a daily basis. And this number is increasing by 2.6% per year.

   
• 41% come from watching television, 27% – computers, 11% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone
• 11.8 hours every day consuming information
• Buried deep within the “other category,” constituting far less than 1% is our formal education. Even for students attending college, their classroom studies constitute a relatively small percentage of the information they are exposed to on a daily basis.
• college tuition and fees have risen roughly 450% compared to increases in median family income of only 150%. Accelerating at three-time the rate of inflation, the cost of college has now reached a breaking point.

• Education systems that produced stellar results 50 years ago are poorly suited for the diverse, rapidly evolving intelligences needed to thrive in today’s world.

   
• many in academia are still stuck in the paradigm that every person needs to know every detail themselves, our fluid communication systems enable us to tap into answers “at the speed of need” and the combined thinking of groups is far superior to the lone individual.

• in-person vs. online, and for the in-person side of the equation, doing the things in-person that cannot be done through online education.

   
• Classroom Shift – From Lectures and Tests to Group Experiences.
• Hyper-Individualized Learning Systems. Learning what we want, when we want it – shifting away from a prescribed course agendas to ones that are hyper-individualized, self-selected, and scheduled at times that sync well with the student will dramatically change levels of motivation and participation. Since each student comes with their own unique mixture of skills, desires, and preferences, the sooner a student can focus in on the traits and talents they excel at, the quicker they will be able to find a meaningful direction for themselves.

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• “If a teacher can be replaced by a machine, they should be.” – Arthur C. Clark

• 100,500 words flowing into their heads on a daily basis. And this number is increasing by 2.6% per year.

   

  So where are all these words coming from?  In rough terms, 41% come from watching television, 27% – computers, 18% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone conversations, 4% – recorded music, and smaller amounts from movies, games, and other information sources.

   

  As it turns out, the average American spends 11.8 hours every day consuming information.

• On the extreme high end of society, if someone spends $10 per day ($300/month) to be connected to media – cable TV, radio, newspaper and more – they are spending, a total of $99.50 per million words.

   

  Most people speak at a rate of 125 words per minute. So 125 words per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 1,706 hours of classroom time equals 12,795,000. For people who spend $200,000 attending an Ivy League University, this works out to $15,600 per million words.

   

  At this rate, the word-cost for a person attending an Ivy League School is 157 times as expensive as the words being consumed by an extremely well-connected person.

   

  While this may be considered by many to be pretty fuzzy math, the value of a university education is now totally out of sync with the rest of the information world.
• , other organizations are doing a far better job of matching the curiosity of the learner with the subjects and experts they are interested in.
• Newspapers did a poor job of meeting the demands of the emerging hyper-individualized curiosity-driven consumer. Our education systems are doing an equally poor job
• Communication technology today is designed around the two-way flow of information. People are no longer satisfied, or trusting, of one-way information systems like that employed by colleges and traditional education systems. They want to participate, contribute, and take ownership of content.

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• Google search of the term “situated cognition”. Situated cognition, and related research threads, seems to me a useful concept for beginning to understand the tendencies of information technology for teaching and learning.
• And this is after decades of the movement called “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (see http://www.issotl.org/--and note, the next ISSOTL conference is in Milwaukee October 20-22, 2011). The Association of American Colleges and Universities as well offers sessions and conversations related to the turn to learning--the next AAC&U conference is in Washington, DC, January 25-28, 2012.
• With this issue of Web 2.0, we end the run of this newsletter.

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• earson is supplying all remediation materials via MyFoundationsLab, an online service that delivers personalized lessons in reading, writing, and math. Once the student has been appraised for areas of strengths and weaknesses, the program will build a unique learning path to link the student to appropriate tutorials, interactive instruction, and practice exercises with instant feedback. The service is designed for use in both high school and college programs.

     

  The combined offering will be available for pilots at the end of August 2011 and will be fully available in December

• • This links to the Knewton article
• Candace Thille, project director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University

• Passionate about the use of computers in education
• Alfred was a pioneer in the field of educational computing in which computational technology is harnessed to improve education. He specialized in highly interactive techniques for learning and the application of graphics and multi-media to learning. He created systems for interactive instruction of concepts that incorporate appropriate pedagogical, social and motivational components. He was also influential in educational policy in which he maintained that technological approaches to teaching and learning would be come inevitably more cost-effective than traditional practices.
• He served four years as chair of the Special Interest Group on Computer Uses in Education of the Association for Computing Machinery.

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• “Standardized tests combine the diagnostic efficiency of a banana republic health care system with the personal touch of the airport immigration line.” It helps to throw in a reference to the Nazis for good measure.

• ALEKS avoids multiple-choice questions. All questions are algorithmically generated and require a "free response."

• Tom Vander Ark 
• but we don’t need to create everything from scratch. We are partnering with Knewton because they have the best platform for adaptive learning 2.0. T
• What we found was that not much of it is actually directed at teaching and learning. It is more focused on textbook purchasing; easy ways access materials and not focusing on actual classroom experience

• ALEKS is an adaptive product that has been used over the last 3 years and has been used for math placement. Every freshman has to take an ALEKS test and is put into one of three buckets: 1) ready for advanced math, 2) ready for college math, and 3)

   

  admitted but not ready for college level math.  The first generation of adaptive learning is useful but still flat and sequential.
• Many of the online students are reentry students, they are older with 20-40 hours of credits and many have not taken math in 5-10 years.  My interest was with the online class but there has been such an improvement in math delivery that we wanted to overhaul for face to face as well.
• About 6,500 students, or two thirds of the freshman class, will take one or both of the developmental math courses.

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• If a student struggles to learn a skill when it is presented one way, the software will detect her confusion and present it another way. The model is highly individualized instruction, without the many instructors that would be needed to adapt to each student’s needs the old-fashioned way.
• Past attempts to teach basic skills through software “failed because the technologies weren’t able to deal with differential learning styles well,”
• Knewton can data-mine a student’s learning issues, says David Liu, Knewton’s chief operating officer.
• As the student takes tutorials and quizzes in an attempt to improve his mastery of the concepts, the program logs how much time he is spending on various ideas and questions, as well as which questions he is answering wrong and how he is likely to have arrived at those wrong answers. In doing so, the program can allegedly pinpoint that student’s specific level of understanding of each concept and let him — and his instructor — know what he needs to work on in order to pass.
• E-tutoring companies say their technology supplements teaching by live professors. It’s not intended to replace human interaction.

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• “Adaptive learning” is more or less what it sounds like: a method of e-learning in which data-mining is used to identify a student’s strengths and weakness, and the course material thus adapts to the students’ needs as they concern content and learning style.
• Because our teaching materials and practice questions are tagged and organized so finely, we can adapt each student's learning experience to their specific needs more easily than a traditional classroom teacher can. We think that the interactivity and convenience of online learning more than outweigh the lack of a brick-and-mortar environment."