Workshop 2: Adaptive Learning: Background, Applications and Lesson Building

In 2006, NSF sponsored a grant to the National Academy of Engineers to “create a list of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering facing those born at the dawn of this new century”. A committee of experts from around the world proposed 14 challenges that were thought to be attainable as well as sustainable. These challenges were reviewed by subject-matter experts, and opinions were sought from the public, including engineers and scientists. One of the grand challenges proposed was in the field of education called “Advance Personalized Learning”. One of the ways to do so is by incorporating adaptive learning where the key question is “Given what we understand about a student’s current knowledge, what should that student be working on right now?” - Knewton. Adaptive platforms do this in one place by “consolidating data science, statistics, psychometrics, content graphing, machine learning, tagging, and infrastructure”- Knewton. In this workshop on adaptive learning, we will discuss the background and terminology, examine costs and benefits, demonstrate its application and effectiveness in a STEM course, and most importantly interactively teach you on how to build your first adaptive lesson on one of the popular platforms. Please bring your laptop to the workshop and have a free account created on smartsparrow.com