Whether it is physically in classrooms or virtually through online courses, college students expect to learn from their instructors. That said however, most are successful when given the ability to be taught the way they individually learn with an emphasis on personal learning.
Higher education institutions are realizing that students learn differently. As a result, the future of learning is no longer the “future”, it is within reach, according to a recent NPR article.
Students do not come in one-size-fits-all learning silos. Whether you look at the VAK or VARK learning styles, everyone learns differently. Some are more Visual, others understand better when it is more Auditory, some master Reading/Writing concepts more quickly, and then there are those who are more hands-on, participatory learners who need to take a physically active role in the learning process to achieve their best educational outcomes.
Studies estimate that somewhere between 50 percent and 70 percent of the population have affinities to several different styles of learning. These people are called “multimodal learners” and tend to succeed in classroom settings that engage them with multiple learning styles alternately or in concert with one another.
Enter Artificial intelligence (AI) as an important area of opportunity to personalize learning in higher education. AI makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. AI does not replace educators. Those that embrace the technology can benefit from making them better and more efficient teachers.
Last fall, ElevateU performed a pilot with a professor at Arizona State University to prove the thesis that leveraging data, technology, and open-access material can greatly increase the quality and delivery of education. Among the results, by offering students their preferred learning modalities to consume content including concepts delivered via microlearning (bite-sized), student retention and engagement increased from 30% to 100%.
AI is able to capture, aggregate, and analyze data from several different sources to build a student learning profile. ElevateU uses this information as well as a student analysis at the beginning of the course to automate how the concepts of lessons are presented to each individual student. The professors are leading the class, and with the real-time feedback they are given, can manually suggest alternative resources and material to students that are falling behind or are having less successful outcomes.
Personalized learning isn’t the future, it needs to be the present and companies like ElevateU and other Educational Technology startups are part of the solution.
Elliot Grossbard is Vice President of growth at ElevateU, a publisher of AI Textbooks and E-Learning Sandbox that helps personalize learning for higher education.