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Education’s Awakening: Adaptive Learning

In an earlier post, I talked about how education at Oxford has remained remarkably unchanged over the course of centuries.  As an example of an “evolved” learning style, I provided the “American” higher education system, with its investment in lecture-based pedagogy and social learning.  Really, though, all that represents is a sideways move in learning evolution.  American colleges didn’t advance learning, they just borrowed elements from less advanced learning environments, namely the K-12 classroom.

This is sad because the traditional classroom developed not out of any particularly brilliant insights on how best to teach students.  Instead, it developed from a need to educate as many students in the shortest amount of time and with the fewest consumption of resources.  Kids have required education since the dawn of civilization and parents figured out that it was more efficient for them to throw all the kids together in a classroom and use only one adult to teach all the kids at once.  Efficient in terms of time commitment for parents?  Yes.  But no one can possibly defend this as the optimal path toward academic efficacy.

Adaptive learning, then, marks the dawn of the next stage of education’s evolution.  Guided by the foundational premise that every student learns differently, adaptive learning uses technology to understand something about how a student learns and then provide content differently based on how it qualifies a student’s knowledge level.  A basic example is the GMAT; as you answer questions on the GMAT, it adjusts the difficulty of each successive question it serves up to you.  It helps the GMAT create gradations of knowledge by constantly subdividing test takers into more refined groups of “knowledge isobars,” if you will.

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Learning as a “Choose-Your-Adventure” Experience

I’ve had the privilege of being a student at the University of Oxford, an institution that has been responsible for education for nearly a millennium (classes were taught as far back as 1096 AD).  While I loved the experience for countless reasons, I came away significantly more in love with the “American-style” teaching employed by universities this side of the pond.  At least one purpose of every exchange program is to expose students to different pedagogies, and the Oxford experience did exactly that.

Oxford expects more of its students – not in terms of outcomes, but in terms of self-direction.  American colleges, meanwhile, prefer to meet students halfway and provide more structure around learning.  I think this is a function of age.  Education at Oxford hasn’t evolved very much over the centuries.  The Junior Common Room (JCR, i.e., undergrads) are treated like grad students in the US; in other words, you’re given enough rope to swing freely or hang yourself.

My Classical Economic Thought class, for example, was shockingly hands-off, compared to any economics class at Dartmouth.  The assignments were weekly prompts (like “Reconcile the differing views of comparative advantage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Ricardo’s Principles”) to which you produced a 5 – 10 page paper.  To answer these prompts, you were given, at the start of the term, a reading list of about 20 books and 50 articles and were assured that all the requisite understanding lay somewhere in that recommended reading list.  If not, you could refer to another generic reading list on the Econ department’s website (of about another 30 books).  Your challenge was to figure out how much time and at what intensity you wished to engage with the material.

Also unexpected was how classes weren’t lecture-based, but rather, just a weekly one-hour tutorial with a grad student advisor.  You would submit your paper to the Tutor a day in advance of your tutorial and would then discuss it together for an hour.  Most tutorials were one-on-one so you rarely interacted with other students in a formal academic setting.

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