Adaptive Learning

Last week in IT594 we had the privilege of viewing a presentation from Kiran Budhrani, who was at the time an Adaptive Learning Project Manager and Instructional Designer at the Center for Teaching and Learning for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Kiran has since completed her Doctor of Education degree and currently Dr. Budhrani is the Director of Personalized & Adaptive Learning at UNC Charlotte. Dr. Budhrani spoke about her experiences and how she had made it to the point she was currently at in her career and then turned her focus to adaptive learning.

She explained that adaptive learning is the personalization of learning. The system with the use of AI learns from each student and will adapt to the level that each student is at. It is designed to help students along the way if they encounter problems with the class material. It's primarily used for large class sizes where you may only have one instructor and a few graduate assistants for several hundred students. It helps to accommodate the answering of questions and it gives the students the feeling of a one-on-one course. It also allows the teacher to focus on the course as a whole and not just one specific student that may need help in a particular area. She said that it was particularly helpful in classes with high failure and withdrawal rates. Adaptive learning helps empower students and keeps them on course for graduation, while personalization allows for more practice in areas where it's needed. Dr. Budhrani said that it was more helpful in engineering-type courses or courses where the students need more practice and more help.

Instead of replacing something that already exists like LMS, and individual courses adaptive learning looks to add a layer of personalization to more traditional courses that are already in place. It also allows the instructor to spend more time focusing on content instead of evaluations. She said that you can write as little as three questions for evaluations and the program can use those three questions to create hundreds of different questions from it. These types of assessments she called dynamic assessments because no two students may ever see the same question. Since you are using AI, it also allows for students to immediately see their grades instead of having to wait days or weeks to know where they stand. Adaptive Learning takes a standard course and instead of just being what you see is what you get it has the ability to individualize and tailor the course to each individual student in the class giving them a more personalized learning experience.

In addition to Adaptive learning Dr. Budhrani also gave some advice about furthering your career as both a project manager and an instructional designer. She spoke about how you need to be able to step outside your role somewhat in that sometimes you have to be more than just an ID or PM. If you are wanting to further your career and grow, you need to always be learning and searching for new ideas to expand your skills. While not necessary, Dr. Budhrani did say that obtaining different certifications is one way to expand your knowledge and also allows you to specialize in different areas that may interest you or that you feel you need to grow in. Just a few of the things that she did mention were: Certified Learning Environment Architect, Project Management through OLC, Quality Matters (QM), Gamification through a MOOC and Learning Experience Design. Keeping up to date with certifications and obtaining new certifications will surely give you an edge in the field.

I was not familiar with QM, but what I was able to learn from their website is that Quality Matters began as a small group at Maryland Online. They were trying to solve an issue among institutions, and that issue was how to guarantee a quality course. They wanted to develop a way to standardize course quality and ensure that a course from one institution was equivalent in quality to a course from another institution. While they may have started out small QM grew very fast and currently operates as a self-sustaining program within Maryland Online and was used to impact the quality of teaching and learning at a state, national, and international level. Since their beginning more than 1500 colleges and universities from around the world have joined the QM community in order to ensure they are providing quality courses for their students. They also have more than 60,000 education professionals that have been trained in online course design standards, and thousands of online and blended courses have been certified. ([Quality Matters About Us], n.d.)

There is also a Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association whose mission is “to promote and improve the quality of online education and student learning through instructional design practice by providing professional development opportunities to strengthen instructional design practice, building community, networking, and fostering mentoring opportunities, promoting quality standards-based practice informed by research and sharing best practices.” ([Quality Matters About Us], n.d.) The association helps to develop professionals in the field as well as provides a place for networking, collaboration, mentorship, and provides a place to share ideas as well as issues in the field.

While I was not able to locate the Gamification Certification that Dr. Budhrani spoke about I was able to find a MOOC course on Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies offered by the University of Illinois on Coursera as well as a free course on MOOC and Blended Learning offered by Tsinghua University in Asia which I plan to try and incorporate into my presentation I will be giving next week.([Coursera MOOCs], n.d.)

Finally, I was able to also check out the Realizeit website which is the software that Dr. Budhrani stated they were using. There is a wealth of knowledge available on the website, but I will close with a quote from the website that sums up what Realizeit does. “Create 1:1 individualized learning path powered by the Realizeit Adaptive Intelligent Engine. This self-learning engine continuously adapts to each learner’s changing ability and manages its own accuracy and performance. The platform continuously measures each learner’ knowledge and ability so that it can map, shape, and drive a personalized learning experience allowing teachers and trainers to adjust and tailor their approach as necessary, and to measurably achieve the learning goals.” ([Realizeit What We Do], n.d.)

References:

[Quality Matters About Us]. (n.d.)

https://www.qualitymatters.org

[Coursera MOOCs]. (n.d.)

https://www.coursera.org

[Realizeit What We Do]. (n.d.)

https://www.realizeitlearning.com