What Adaptive learning is and how it can impact on classroom experience
As every teacher knows, there’s no student equal to another. Each of them has his own characteristics, peculiarities, abilities and weaknesses, and broad-based learning approaches could be ineffective to embrace this vibrant complexity over the long term.
Here is where Adaptive learning intervenes: employing particular teaching devices or instruments to manage the interaction with learners, this method delivers customized solutions to meet specific learning needs of individuals.
Adaptive learning is above all an educational approach
As just mentioned, Adaptive learning is an educational system based on technology and data analysis, which allows teachers to track students’ performance and adjust methods and programs to each learner’s needs.
Adaptive learning expands traditional pedagogic boarders, which can hardly address the myriad of unique characteristics held by students, and it definitely brings major advantages to students’ experience.
At first glance, Adaptive learning could sound complicated or hard to implement; actually, turning a class to adaptive learning can be a gradual process far from abrupt, unmanageable changes, and it will likely become the established approach in education by filling the existing gaps in knowledge procurement.
How Adaptive Learning allows to overcome conventional learning methods
Adaptive learning doesn’t demand more effort to be developed and implemented than conventional methods. Once the system is designed and created, it can be easily adapted from a learner to another.
Educational softwares – which use artificial intelligence to tailor programs to the needs of both teachers and students – help learners to experience a content path consistent with their mastery of the subject. This is crucial to pursue a higher average level of results in the classroom.
As a matter of fact, conventional learning methods, which combine front-lessons and individual studying at home, generally result in a few learners excelling but the majority of them just passing, without having mastered important concepts.
It must be considered that classes are increasingly filled with students with diverse learning and knowledge background. It comes naturally to think that progression in school should not only consider scholars’ age and time spent in class but should be more focused on proficiency. This learner-centric approach supports students in spending however long they need to master concepts, rather than accepting failure based on other students’ performances and time-limits.
In addition to give learners the right time to maximize their efficiency and engagement, there are other major advantages in implementing Adaptive learning: think about how useful it would be for teachers to get real-time analytics about their class’ performance, emerging struggles and successful activities; thanks to automated data analysis, they could promptly intervene on critical issues and adjust their method to solve them.
As a consequence, also those in charge to produce content for school will benefit from an increasingly wide use of Adaptive learning, by receiving more objective and detailed feedbacks about the efficiency of their work and emerging areas to be covered by educational programs.