In this BYOD workshop, the presenters will share how the University of Central Florida has conceptualized personalized adaptive learning and is applying it with the Realizeit platform. Participants will engage in a hands-on reorganization activity and will be given Realizeit test accounts to experience personalized adaptive learning firsthand.
In this workshop, the presenters will share how the University of Central Florida has conceptualized personalized adaptive learning and is applying it to impact an increasingly diverse population of students with varying skill sets. Through use of an adaptive platform called Realizeit, instructional designers and faculty at UCF have been working together to rethink and redesign courses for personalized learning. Identifying exactly what it is that students need to know and how those pieces of knowledge are connected is key to designing and developing an adaptive course. In this interactive session, participants will engage in a hands-on reorganization activity and will be given Realizeit test accounts (in the student role) to experience personalized adaptive learning firsthand. Participants are encouraged to bring their own device in order to get the full student experience. Other non-electronic workshop materials will be provided.
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Recognize what personalized adaptive learning is and how UCF is applying it
- Analyze student needs and reorganize content for use in personalized adaptive systems
- Discover the student’s perspective in Realizeit
- Identify various adaptive approaches and potential use cases
- Discuss student perceptions and behaviors in adaptive learning
- Reflect on what was learned and how to apply it to a specific course or institution
The University of Central Florida (UCF) decided to investigate adaptive learning products in spring 2014. There were not quite as many products out there in the market as there are today, but a review of the following, more well-known products of the time was conducted: Knewton, Realizeit, Adaptcourseware, and Knowillage LeaP by Brightspace. Overwhelmingly, faculty chose Realizeit because the platform is content agnostic, meaning that the product only supplies the adaptive software infrastructure and not any content. This gives instructors the freedom to create and edit their own content, including text, videos, graphics, and more. The second reason faculty chose Realizeit is because both the content and the assessments are adaptive. In this type of system, content is presented to the student in small chunks and is followed by several assessment questions. If students excel in a particular content area, the system will continue to move them ahead towards more advanced content and questions. If a student is not doing well in a particular area, the system will recommend they repeat content areas and questions will decrease in severity. Realizeit helps provide each student with a personalized learning experience, adapting the presentation of content and assessment according to differences in student skill sets caused by an increasingly diverse population. The amount of content and types of assessment questions depends on how much is created and entered into the system by the instructor or course builder.
When creating a personalized adaptive course in any course modality (e.g., face-to-face, blended, fully online), the course will have to change in some fundamental ways. While converting some existing courses at UCF into adaptive courses using Realizeit, it was found that courses changed most in regards to content and assessment. One of the two major components of an adaptive course is the content. “Good” content is essential in any course, adaptive or not. However, there are distinctions from traditional courses that need to be addressed for the system to work effectively, such as the amount of content, the granularization of the content, and the overall organization.
In adaptive courses, the granularization deals with how much the content and assessment is broken down into smaller sections or “chunks,” and where one topic (or subtopic) ends and another begins. Then, these “granularized” chunks of content and formative assessment are organized into learning paths, based on a prerequisite structure. For example, in Figure 1, students would move from left to right across the learning map, completing the necessary prerequisites before moving onto the postrequisites. This breakdown and organization is important, as a student who may be struggling on a postrequisite may have to revisit the associated prerequisite(s) to improve and achieve mastery. It allows students to see which concepts are connected, and they can also pinpoint exactly where any knowledge gaps may exist.
Figure 1: Pathophysiology learning map for hematology module
The nonlinear nature of most adaptive content is another change regarding organization. In most traditional, non-adaptive courses, the content is often linear, with little to no branching of topics or student choice. With adaptive learning maps, students can take personalized paths through the content, visiting areas they want or need to, either as they desire or as the adaptive system deems necessary. After exploring a personalized path from the student’s perspective in Realizeit, participants will reorganize content for use in a personalized adaptive system and identify various adaptive approaches and how to apply them within their course(s) or institution.