In the digital age, adaptive teaching methods are a way to deliver differentiated learning to a diverse audience while ensuring the lessons are valuable, effective and worthwhile for the individual student.

Another way to describe adaptive learning is personalised learning because it centres on the individual’s needs and interests.

Tesseract Learning explains:

‘Adaptive learning utilises technology to deliver personalised learning, which aims to provide effective, efficient and customised learning programs to engage the learners.’

This kind of learning uses technology to gather data while the student works through the lessons. These algorithms work to identify the gaps or where the learner needs more time and adapts the learning to achieve the end result (ie passing the course).

For example, if a learner is scoring low on a certain section of the course, the adaptive learning technology will adjust the modules and serve up more relevant content to get the learner up to speed. So the learning is adapted for both content and pace. This is the ultimate flexible learning experience and epitomises educating for success, as opposed to the traditional one-size-fits-all approach.

In the long run, this method of differentiated learning saves time because students don’t spend hours working through material they have mastered, and can move onto what they don’t already know.

The benefits of this type of learning are not just practical, but also emotional as the students can build up confidence at their own pace without feeling left behind or unmotivated by early test fails.

This picture summarises the importance of adaptive learning in the corporate environment. Source: https://elearningindustry.com

This kind of adaptive learning has been likened to social media feeds, where users get what they are interested in; similarly, for elearning students get what they need and are interested in to reach their goals.

Undoubtedly, this is digital learning at its best, moving away from homogenous teaching to more meaningful and powerful ways of learning for the multi-faceted society we live in.

The elearning industry site agrees:

‘Adaptive learning is here to stay and will be increasingly adopted to foster better learning outcomes and retention of learning, as well as better application to the job.’

References:

1. https://elearningindustry.com/adaptive-learning-in-corporate-training-benefits-know
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB4bm96clTw
3. https://edtechnology.co.uk/Blog/adaptive-learning-in-the-classroom-and-beyond/
4. https://tesseractlearning.com/adaptive-learning.html