Activity

At the University of Central Florida, the Personalized Adaptive Learning instructional designers collaborate with teaching faculty to design and develop courses using adaptive learning platforms. These adaptive learning courses provide students with individualized learning experiences by allowing them to progress along their unique learning path through the course content based on learners’ needs. We summarized our design principles and best teaching practices in our upcoming paper:

Abstract
While adaptive learning is emerging as a promising technology to promote access and quality at a large scale in higher education (Becker et al., 2018), the implementation of adaptive learning in teaching and learning is still sporadic, and it is unclear how to best design and teach an adaptive learning course in a higher education context. As early adopters, a team of instructors, instructional designers, and administrators at the University of Central Florida (UCF) identified five key design features as an adaptive learning design framework to guide the unique course design process. These five features involve deliberate design and development efforts that could bring significant benefits to student learning. The purpose of this field note then is to present a design framework and best practices for teaching from both a systems and a pedagogical approach in the context of implementation at UCF. We also share the rationale and classification framework UCF has adopted to ensure the term “adaptive learning” is universally understood across campus. This paper, therefore, offers insights into the design, delivery, and implications of utilizing adaptive learning systems in higher education courses at a public R1 university (UCF) and attempts to capture the intimacy of lessons learned and best practices gathered since the project’s inception in 2014.

Cavanagh, T., Chen, B., Lahcen, R. A., & Paradiso, J. (2020). Constructing a design framework and pedagogical approach for adaptive learning in higher education: A practitioner’s perspective. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. 21(1)