Adaptive learning isn't easy to implement, but it can create new opportunities for instructors to reshape their approach to student success.
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Gerry Bayne
Multimedia Producer
EDUCAUSE
Chuck Dziuban
Director, RITE
University of Central Florida
Connie Johnson
Provost and Chief Academic Officer
Colorado Technical University
Gerry Bayne: What are the pain points for faculty and these adaptive courses? We talked about that it is, it can be a little clunky, but it also gives you a lot of insight into where your students are. You say sometimes faculty have trouble adapting to teaching these kind of classes. What are the pain points? And how do you think these can be addressed in the next five years? You said we're, we've gotten a lot better in the last five years. What do you see the next five years being in terms of addressing some of those pain points?
Chuck Dziuban: Go ahead, Connie, then I'll...
Connie Johnson: How to engage with the technology effectively I think is the biggest challenge. Some faculty look at it and they create their own messages and they know how to read dashboards and they know how to engage. Other faculty look at the dashboard and say, "That's nice." But I don't really know how to instruct. And so, part of what we had to do moving forward is create different trainings and tutorials for faculty at the beginning stages, and then, okay, I'm in here and using it. Because we found that I can understand how to use a technology, but how do I effectively facilitate is actually a different conversation. So, in a total online environment, the last thing I'll say too is that sometimes faculty don't have visibility into the entire math. They understand the content that's happening but if a student is hung up on a particular question, if the student doesn't bring that question to the faculty, then it's a harder conversation. So I think while it gives insight, faculty do potentially have to adjust and not know, you know, every little experience a student is having with the content which for some faculty, they can roll and work with it and other faculty may need a little bit more work in dealing with content that way, Chuck.
Chuck: Do you know the Bob Dylan song, "A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall"? There are a lot of pain points, you know, and Connie has done some very specific ones with faculty student interaction, the transformation of faculty roles, the transformation of student roles. That kind of change is difficult. Adaptive learning is a lot of work. Preparing a course and realize that there's a great deal of work. Both of our institutions support our faculty beautifully. Connie does it, we do it. It's required. If you just throw faculty to the wolves, it's not going to work. Trust me, it won't want to work. Students are now asking questions like, let me preface this. Adaptive learning puts a great deal of pressure on universities as we've come to know them, really does. Students are asking questions like, "Why do we need semesters?" Which frankly is a hell of a question. And the answer we have is because we have semesters. Adaptive learning puts a pressure on everything we've known about education. And it sort of blows up all the things we've held sacred about higher education for all of these years. That's what it does. That's the pain point in this. Car, you know, we said last night, what are universities dealing with? Some of the stuff that's coming down in terms of funding, and you're going to, as we go to the COVID crisis, is devastating to universities. You're looking at what the president of the University of Michigan just wrote. It's just devastating, what's happening to our flagship institutions. You know, this is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us as we go further, but those are the kind of pain points. It kind of takes a university and the class just turns it on its head.
Connie: We've learned that adaptive content alone is not enough. And so, I have to plug curriculum design here and our instructional designers and there has to be other kinds of content in the class. So, problems, for example, you know, if you have adaptive for math problem practice, critical thinking exercises, case studies, and that's something that we've learned. I think that the other piece is that this is a preview to our next research is that we're looking at how adaptive predicts, and I'll give you a spoiler. There is a certain point in time students cannot pass a course. They hit a wall at a certain point in the course, and that's what our next bit of research is, which for CTU has been so insightful. If you think in a five-and-a-half-week model at a certain point in time in the course, it doesn't matter if a student's not passing, they're not going to pass. That's a tough one to swallow for an educator, but it makes sense. And so, I think our research is continuing and we're looking at how this can also continue to effectively inform faculty about how to engage with students for improved up.