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Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

Long piece in Information Week by David Carr about Udacity's approach, with more references to adaptive learning, amongst other things.

Definitely worth reading, if only for its excellent diagram.

This Audrey Watters piece putting the boot into learning analytics, predictive modelling, and adaptive learning shows that our project is on quite highly contested ground.

Rather breathless interview with the "brains" behind adaptive learning company Knewton (sic). Jim may well have comments on this.

A big, somewhat breathless, piece in the Scientific American about adaptive learning.

Includes aforementioned Norvig piece, Seth Fletcher on Adaptive Learning; Salman Khan on blended learning; and several others.

Massively Personal - How thousands of online students can get the effect of one-on-one tutoring. Short piece by Norvig, with some recent references that might be worth following up on.

Interesting set of exchanges between Dan Myer and others on the relative merits of direct instructions, worked examples, inquiry learning, and some blend of the three. Towards the end there is an discussion about adaptive software.

Longish not very searching piece in Information Week about Udacity's model, with teasing references to adaptive learning and to the way Udacity is turning its attention to adaptive learning.

Apparently, this is the "first adaptive MOOC", in the area of computational molecular dynamics (CMD). We might have to wait for the second part of the article to understand more about how the adaptivity works.

Yes. I spent a while looking at a talk given by Nish and the kind of adaptivity seemed limited, and not particularly driven by what a learner has been doing.

(This is more to jog my memory of the paper than develop further discussion) Key section of the paper seems to be "Adaptive learning strategy - At the beginning of the course, learners were presented with a diagnostics quiz and were required to answer a few questions about how they learn. This process identified each learner's preferred learning strategy, based upon which each learner then was guided on an adapted learning path throughout the course, by which process designers hoped to accelerate learning and improve score results." I.e. quite different to CogBooks main approach.

108 page US-oriented report by SRI International funded by the Gates Foundation. Describes the different design approaches taken by six providers, with a profile for each provider. Has some interesting concluding comments about instructional approaches, media design, and approaches to assessment/feedback, with a strong push for better (rather than non) use of analytics and adaptive learning approaches.

This looks (at least superficially) to be a company with an interesting, apparently platform-free approach to adaptive learning. Not that a web site is usually a good way to make judgements, on such matters other than instinctively.

The OU's Doug Clow live blogs from today's London University conference.