Monday 17 June 2013

Building Adaptive Learning Systems in USA, that usually supports Personalized Learning



It is a well researched finding that if technology based learning systems is encouraged to reach to an advanced stage; it will enable content and customized strategies. It is also a matter for concern in which way the learning data, collected by this system, be used to enhance the ability of the system and become adoptable to varied numbers of learners and their learning adaptability. 

As far as adaptive instructions are concerned, it is not a new thing, because it has been constantly observed since the days we talk about Socrates. More than three decades ago, i.e. in the start of 1980s, it was the experiences of the education researchers (Corno and Snow 1986), that adapting instructions to students works as the major factor in the domain of successful learning. If researches of those days are referred, (Bloom 1984), it is found that one-to-one tutoring was a great success, in which learning experiences and time provisions are adapted by the tutor, so that individual needs of the students can be addressed to.

Digital learning systems are known as adaptive, because they are capable enough to dynamically get converted to the learner as their responses to the collected information, as and when they are in their learning sessions, rather than basing on the ongoing information; they are learner’s age, gender and test scores. As the learner goes on working, adaptive learning system make use of gathered information, their way of representing the concept, the difficulties there-in, the task or problem related sequencing, along with the nature of feedbacks and hints provided.   

With which adaptive instructions are related?

Adaptive instructions are related to personalized, differentiated and individualized learning. The minimum contribution from adaptive learning systems is individualized pacing, but if it is a bit more sophisticated, it can differentiate the nature of activities that has relations with learning that is based on the responses of the students. For supporting personalized learning, different systems are being developed in these days, in which pacing & method of instructions, varied learning objectives based options and contents are incorporated.

No doubt, sessions like ‘one-on-one’ with a skilled tutor, who has the dynamisms of understanding the needs of the students and responding to their needs, can offer the most personalized experience to the taught. Digital learning system has advanced to such an extent that students can acquire, diagnose and dynamically respond. Any good teacher will continually assess the understanding of the students as well their level of engagement. The extreme purpose of this system is to customize the contents and strategies for different students, of course there is no doubt that doing this individually for all students is very difficult. 

According to (Oakes 2005), there is every possibility that in the class room environment, teachers may vary in their learning approaches, where different types of prior achievements rule the roost. If any teacher wants to differentiate in teaching in the classroom environment, he / she have to rigor to considerable skills and efforts and adapt different types of resources with different types of difficulties. 

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