Hello and welcome back to the blog. I hope you enjoyed last weeks post about online education and its pros and cons. Today I thought I would give you more information about Knewton adaptive learning and how it helps me know all my students.
Knewton adaptive learning is essentially an online system that gives individual tutoring, predictive grades and analyses student progress (Wilson & Nichols 2015). Knewton takes all this information and gives students extra help on areas they struggle in or sets higher grade work if they excel. The individual tutoring is successfully done through intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), more commonly known as robots that help the students. Now, I know what you must be thinking, robots teaching children isn’t that a little odd? Well, actually it isn’t, robots today do some many different jobs, watch this video for more information: https://youtu.be/3bX57-OsvqY?t=60
From that video, it is clear to see that robots are empathetic, can understand and feel human emotion, communicate well and understand and create human facial expressions. I have no problem with working with robots, they are hard workers and no they have not taken over the world, which was a fear many people had years ago!
The reasons why I trust Knewton and the ITS, the research that surrounds this is positive; the learning systems used measures student outcomes and these are positive and accurate (Wilson & Nichols 2015). Therefore, I know what my students achieve and what they are predicted to achieve, and this is never wrong.
The ITS uses scaffolded conversations and help to create more complex content that challenges and helps the students (Wilson & Nichols 2015). I know that is can be quite controversial as technically it doesn’t seem like I do much, I upload videos and lectures and I get a robot to help and assess the students. However, using this system helps me understand my students in a much more effective and efficient way. I log on and I can see who is on target, who needs help and what they have done in the ITS. I do often hold VR tutorials myself with students if I feel that they need me. Also, I said previously that we all interact in online collaborative chat rooms or discussion forums so I
am aware of what they think and their ideas. As the ITS does sometimes make mistakes (Wilson & Nichols 2015), like anything in life, and I am aware of that.
However, combining both the flipped classroom approach and the Knewton adaptive learning model I get to control what my students are learning and get to monitor their grades and abilities. I do know my students and they know me.
That’s all, for now, folks, I hope you enjoyed this blog. Any questions leave them in the comments.
Next week, we will look at teachers and robots – very exciting!
cya,
thefutureofeducation.