Realizeit Blog

Imagine if students walked into class each day and you could see a digital box hovering over their heads that told you exactly how much they understood about the topic you planned to discuss. Wow! How would that change your approach to teaching?

You’ve decided to adopt a digital learning solution to solve a specific problem in your classes. Now an equally important choice quickly follows: should you build a custom course, buy off-the-shelf-courseware, or start somewhere between the two?

As higher education continues to evolve, technology integration into courses is becoming not just more common but expected, particularly by new generations of students. This shift is about more than providing the learning experiences students are looking for—it’s also about integrating digital learning tools to increase student success (the work the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing around adaptive courseware is just one example).

Given this shift, instructors are seeing, hearing about, and encouraged to embrace technology in their courses.

Adaptive learning and open educational resources (OER) are both drawing attention in higher education for their ability to help address some of the cost, quality, and access challenges that most institutions are facing (EDUCAUSE, 2018). Still, each is typically viewed as a separate innovation, as most conceive of adaptive largely as the “how” of teaching and learning and OER as the “what.”

Let’s be clear: Educators in search of new digital learning tools and platforms have no shortage of questions.

With the latest wave of digital education initiatives from Every Learner Everywhere to the APLU’s guidelines for implementing adaptive courseware, 2019 is likely to find even more institutions seeking to increase student success through adaptive learning. What better way to forge a path forward than to follow in the footsteps of those who’ve paved the way?

Four of the 13 institutions recently honored with the Online Learning Consortium’s 2018 Digital Learning Innovation Awards used Realizeit’s intelligent adaptive learning platform to power their winning projects.

Adult learners who’ve been away from academics for many years often struggle with the foundational concepts they need to successfully complete required math courses. Some of these students have historically performed poorly in this subject, while for others, lack of use over the years has deteriorated their muscle memory on those skills.

On the first day of a typical class, students are like a room full of black boxes for faculty: what’s inside is a mystery. There’s no way to know how much or little each one knows about the course subject.

Research and data are two of the primary vehicles that propel Realizeit, and Dr. Colm Howlin is the driver. In his role as Realizeit’s principal researcher, Colm’s work helps drive the evolution and direction of Realizeit’s intelligent learning engine and system. He also spearheads the collaborative research partnerships that help provide a broader understanding of the impact and opportunities of digital learning with Realizeit.