Hi Jon

Good piece and sums up the possible objections to adaptive learning. However, in the interests of not throwing the bath and the baby out with the bathwater, there are several important reasons for seeing adpative learning as a fruitful path in online learning.

First, I'd like to say that the same arguments can be used against traditional teaching. Where's the evidence that slabs of lectures and occassional essays actually achieve what people assume they achieve? In truth, the majority of those who teach in HE have no underlying learning theory, even rudimentary good practice. It's a crapshoot. In fact, bothe good tehory and proven practice are often studiously ignored.

More importantly, adaptive systems can objectify good theory and practice to good effect. We know that this is true in one effective learning task - search. Google uses an ensemble of algorithms that are constantly tweaked and produce stunning results. Teachers and learners use it every working day. Cookies on websites often do the same thing and most software is algorithmic in the sense that conditional code is used to execute the presentation of content based on the users request/input. Adaptive learning simply takes us further along this obviously fruitful path from simple conditionals to rule-based systems and ensembles of algorithms. This is not an easy path, as basic learning theory is hard to identify (the mistake here, I think is to follow the social constructivist path). However, there is clearly diagnostic data, from user inpute, both individual and aggregated, that is useful here.

I have seen this used to great effect in games and simulations, where the assessment of competence, through the actions of the learner is proven by the very fact that the learner performs, or faisl to perform, the task. Flight simulatirs, for example, have been doing tis for decades.

Adaptive teachniques use algorithms that make a real attempt to capture god practice, teachers, in my experience, simply wing this. Adaptive learning will take time to develop, but at least we have a path out of the  messy practice that currently exists. Algorithms have made a significant contribution to increased productivity in almost every area of human endeavour, to deny its relevance in learning is to give learning a special status it doesn't deserve. Sure, it will take time, but so did most other software tasks that we now take for granted.

Teachers love to think of themselves as unique, irreplacable and practising some sort of black art. History shows us that this is just another problem to be solved. 

Some good stuff on this on www.cogbooks.com

- Donald Clark

Thanks Donald - yes, I entirely agree that it's worth pursuing, to the extent that a good chunk of my research career has been dedicated to the pursuit. But we understand far too little about input, processing and output to do more than the crudest of things with it yet, so I want to throw a bucket of cold water on the idea that the world is about to change for the better as a result.

I disagree with you about teachers: teachers are irreplaceable and they are and should be doing art more than science. But they don't have to be professionals, they don't have to be people that label themselves as teachers, and they certainly don't have to be in classrooms. Nor need they be virtually, temporally, physically or socially  co-present with the learner. Authors, directors, editors, designers, other learners, forum participants, janitors, architects and a host of others that provide or support the content and environment that we learn from are teachers too, as much or more than the people calling themselves teachers in the classrooms. Adaptive systems don't work in a vacuum, they work with the stuff teachers have made, whether they think of themselves as teachers or not. The better AH systems adapt to things that change rather than a fixed set of content in a closed system, but the open-corpus problem remains a huge one and we are not very close to figuring out more than the crudest of solutions to that one.

Following the social constructivist path will indeed not work for most kinds of adaptive systems for the reasons I mention. It does work quite often, though the fact that it is 100% dependent on things that cannot be codified and relies completely on how well people teach and learn (not really addressed by most constructivist models) means it is equally likely not to work: it depends entirely on the people and context. Constructivism provides a set of loosely related theories that include hardly any methods that can be turned into algorithms that machines can use. It's a way of seeing the world, not a way of teaching. A big mistake to think of it as occupying an epistemologically similar position to cognitivist and behaviourist methods. Indeed, those methods remain central in all constructivist teaching, they just get distributed a bit more among the participants. I still like it though because it reminds us that it is not all about method but at least as much about people, learning and building knowledge together.

I totally agree about Google which is perhaps the most successful learning technology in the world today, along with Wikipedia and an assortment of ever-changing social media systems. These and others (including the adaptive systems I've built and indeed this very site), work because they make it easier for people to share, connect and communicate in more interesting ways, to find people and the stuff people make more easily and efficiently. They are not completely neutral to method and pedagogy, but they are not far off. They create conditions that help people to get together and share what they know. This is much like social constructivism, not a set of methods but a set of conditions. Google's PageRank is a great idea to help people help one another - crowd wisdom enacted elegantly and effectively. However, I have extremely mixed feelings about Google's relatively recent efforts to personalize the search results that it has been pushing more and more over the past few years. The filter bubbles that result are in many ways very dangerous indeed. Increasingly, I see what I want and expect to see, with an ever-decreasing diversity and ever-decreasing chance for serendipity and mind-jarring discoveries. This might work for some people undertaking some kinds of learning, but it's a rabbit hole factory of gargantuan proportions that makes expansive learning less likely. It's exactly the kind of danger that I am trying to highlight here, where a poorly thought-through model of what people need to see becomes ubiquitous and, almost invisibly, changes how we learn without any clear idea of how best to do that.

Part of the new reality is that the "phone ... has developed into the real social platform."

@Jon - Very bold thing to say, especially in present day's imposed societal aspirations to equalize every segment of our lives across the entire population - throughout the history we have witnessed people being burned on a stake for less. The truth is, we are definitely not the same on so many levels that any generalized one-size-fits-all knowledge transfer method is out of the question. In the recent years the term "visual learner" has become very popular, indirectly criticizing the traditional book-based educational system, inducing pressure, and finally resulting in overemphasized visual learning. But the visual learning is just one example - presently with a loudest echo.

In 1999 as a part of my job in education, I came in contact with (arguably) visual approaches of Tony Buzan, Edward de Bono, Art Semorie, etc., and that pushed me into a completely new belief that visual learning IS the answer. A truckload of books and 6 years later I held speeches at the local universities and colleges, successfully promoting that "learning style". I was deeply convinced that this provided the ultimate answer to all of the learning problems. Anatomy? No problem, just close your eyes, reduce your size to a blood cell and start climbing those bones, from the toe up (whoops, I just slid down the soleal line of tibia). Economy or business management? Just think of it as a prostitution and it will provide countless hours of laughter making it fun to learn - works like a charm. But couple of thousand students later, I started to realize that quite frequently it is simply easier to sit down and read a book than to map its content, or that one cannot close eyes and visualize polymorphism or a differential equation. In most of the mathematics-based sciences (physics, chemistry, statistics, etc.) the outcomes are achieved through practice, such as solving the equations, thus effectively disabling visual learning for the purpose. Therefore, does that imply that a visually oriented student has no or less chance of reaching the preset learning outcomes in those areas? Absolutely not! I had some students coming back to me saying that the suggested method/technique itself is too cumbersome when applied to a variety of content. I finally realized that there is no Gordian Knot solution to learning - assuming that there is acknowledges exclusivity to learning styles and this is VERY harmful.

The suggestion of catering to different "learning styles" is analogous to carrying a Swiss knife in a toolbox for all repair types: the results will not be very good, to say the least. I agree that learning styles should be treated as a "suitable tool for the purpose". One can't learn to manufacture a mechanical part solely from the book, the same way programming cannot be learned solely from observing the code. The main problem that needs to be tackled is the motivation; the biggest danger is to externalize the learning process as it impedes the motivation. One good example is a typical sports fan - visiting live games, watching broadcasts and recordings, subscribing to magazines, buying various tokens, etc., all at once, if possible. However, similar occurrences are rare in education. If modern students are successfully convinced that multidisciplinary approach to learning is the way to go, then the same should be done with the learning styles, as different techniques and sources also help develop a critical mind, which is essential to the process.

How does it make sense to create redundant knowledge at the expense of versatility, since there is no time and/or money for both?

@Richard - you said exactly what I was thinking, it is the (Y)outube generation that is driving this change/alternative. I see two main problems with these younger students: the inability to retain the knowledge due to the strong reliance on the online sources, and the time utilization to visual learning - we can read 4-5 times more in the same amount of time, therefore offering more perspectives through different reads. It is a societal issue that most of the students nowadays are encouraged to learn passively, on the go, along with listening to the music and texting. But then again, universities can't possibly compete with joint budgets of Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, etc. in advertizing what is "cool".

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