Why everything about personalized learning is about to change
By Peter West
Read more by peterwest
June 18th, 2014
Just as ‘gaming engines’ revolutionized game making, adaptive learning engines are about to revolutionize education
Be
prepared to be amazed…very amazed. A quantum leap in the way online
learning materials are organized and presented to students is happening
as you read this.
It will change forever the way that learning occurs…and it is becoming easier for teachers to implement.
Personalized learning made easy
Adaptive
learning/personalized learning is the future. The days of presenting the
same material to all students at the same time, in the same sequence
and in the same way will be seen as an ancient and ineffective concept
in a few years.
The problem to date has been the difficulty creating individual learning paths.
However, that is changing rapidly. In some ways, this replicates the development of the computer game industry.
Stage 1 – the “handmade” stage
Thirty years ago, each computer game was created individually “by
hand.” Programmers would build every component of a game from scratch.
Each game had to be built again for each type of computer. A game
designed for an Atari computer had to be rebuilt for an Apple computer.
In education in the past, each school had to develop and find
resources for the online component of their courses. This was often done
by individual teachers, and the materials were often placed in an
online repository for access by students. In the early days, these
materials were on a shared network drive. This then evolved into a
shared online area, such as a file repository or a web page. However,
each teacher or organization had to build their own web pages and the
navigational links between them.
Stage 2 – a more systematic approach
In the 1980s “gaming engines” started to appear. These were programs
such as Gamemaker, Pinball Construction Set and Adventure Construction
Set. These provided core components of a game and the “intelligence”
behind the game. Thus, a user could focus on the design, implementation
and marketing of a game rather than the “nuts and bolts” – the time
consuming computer coding.
In education, the equivalent is the development of Online Learning Environments (such as
Learning Management Systems)
that take care of many aspects of delivering learning materials in an
online environment. These environments provide structure and navigation
to online courses, and provide a range of other useful tools such as
quizzes, chat and discussion areas, “dropboxes” for students to submit
files (assignments), etc.
This stage also opened access to a wealth of online resources from
commercial and free providers. Teachers no longer had to make most of
the resources for their courses. YouTube alone has become a wonderful
resource for educators (and there are many, many more sources of
resources).
For many educators this is their current location.
Personalization at this stage takes time and effort. Many online
learning environments allow personalization through features such as the
easy creation of quizzes and other assessment/feedback activities,
conditional release, creation of groups of students who share common
levels of understanding, multiple paths for learning resources, etc.
For example, all students might study a small part of a topic and
then take a quiz. Those who score above a “pass” grade (60 percent?)
could continue to the next learning resource; those who score less than
60 percent could be diverted to some alternative learning materials that
provide the information in an alternative format.
If the teacher is particularly keen (and has a lot of time), feedback
and navigation to an alternative learning resource could be provided
for each question that was answered incorrectly.
This is obviously a time consuming process, and is not the ideal
solution…yet this is where many people currently find themselves.
Stage 3 – Adaptive engines
In the late 1990s some game manufacturers started to build “
game engines.” These
provided all of the key programming components of the game – the way
the characters and objects interact, the “physics” of the world, and so
on.
Game designers could create a “world” that characters could wander
through at will, and could then devote most of their effort to plot,
characters, artistic features of their “world,” etc. The underlying
“magic” was done by the game engine. The days of having lots of
programmers and few artists and storytellers had passed. The amount of
time needed to create a game reduced considerably.
Finally, the storytelling was the focus rather than the computer coding.
Education is about to discover this “magic” phase. Just as “gaming
engines” revolutionized game making, adaptive learning engines are about
to revolutionize education.
Adaptive learning engines will do the hard work, such as
- discovering what students know and don’t know
- providing paths to learning resources that are needed by a students at a particular time, and guiding him/her to those resources
- suggesting alternative learning resources when the initial ones provided in the course need supplementing
- evaluating the effectiveness of learning resources and moving
students to the more effective ones while moving them away from less
effective ones.
Teachers will have to compile the appropriate resources, but the system will individualize the learning pathways.
Just as gamers now take for granted that they can wander anywhere and
interact with any object in a gaming world, students will take for
granted that they can access many paths and many objects in a way that
suits their individual needs…and the time when this can happen is
getting much closer.
Stage 4 – Walled gardens Vs Open systems
Walled gardens
Adaptive learning is already available for some disciplines. The
areas that are almost universal, with a common core of knowledge, and
that are similar around the world have a number of providers of web
based resources for personalized learning…and the number is growing. (
Mathematics e.g. Dreambox, Science and basic Literacy e.g.
SuccessMaker).
Some text book providers, particularly in higher education, provide
adaptive learning capabilities for courses that use their text books.
However, these are self-contained systems. They usually do not share data with others easily through open standards such as
LTI.
Thus, an organization with a heavy online presence through its own
Online Learning Environment (such as a LMS) has difficulty integrating
the data from multiple systems, and has difficulty integrating its own
learning materials.
Open systems
Schools typically have a number of courses that fall outside the
range of these “centrally controlled content” programs. For example,
what is the teacher of a subject based on local Geography to do? There
are many courses that are “personalized” to a particular school or
district that will fall outside the range of products provided by the
large developers.
The answer is to use an adaptive learning engine that integrates with their Online Learning Environment, such as LeaP from
Desire2Learn.
This engine will use their current resources and build personalized
pathways for students. Data from quizzes, etc. will feed into the
Gradebook and intelligent analytics of the central Online Learning
Environment. These integrated systems will do the “heavy lifting” in the
background so that the teacher can focus what is important – the
student and his/her learning.
Summary
While these adaptive learning engines are still being fine-tuned,
their impact will be dramatic. Just as gaming engines revolutionized the
computer game industry, adaptive learning engines will revolutionize
education. It will enter a new phase…a phase where individualized
learning is much more easily attained by organizations of any size and
where teachers can focus even more on the core of their profession.
Peter West is Director of eLearning at Saint Stephen’s College in
Australia. He has over 15 years’ experience leading K12 schools in
technology enhanced education, particularly blended learning using
online learning environments. He can be contacted at pwest@ssc.qld.edu.au.
With
the possible exception of fractions, no elementary math topic or skill
stresses students out more than long division does. And it's so
unnecessary--not just the stress, but the skill. Think about it. How
often do you use long division? For that matter, how often do
mathematicians use it?