Discussion around personalized learning typically revolves around the technology being developed to aid teachers in instruction. Tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have been funding efforts to develop the pedagogy through their charitable foundations. Using AI and adaptive algorithms stands as one of the most future-looking–and to some, unrealistic–methods of personalizing. “The real power of artificial intelligence for education is in the way that we can use it to process vast amounts of data about learners, about teachers, about teaching and learning interactions,” said Rose Luckin, a professor of learning-centered design at University College London, according to The Atlantic. “[It can] help teachers understand their students more accurately, more effectively.” That means logging data, tracking student progress, and in some cases, AI delivering educational content to students. But at the Better Together: California Teacher’s Summit this past week, many instructors presented personalized learning strategies that were specifically low-tech.

“One hack that I really like is to take notes in my planner,” said Sarah Kesty, a special education teacher at Castle Park Middle School in Chula Vista, CA. “Just today we were writing in our notebooks and I had the kids number their pages.” (Kesty’s class is currently in session.) “And you’d think for an 8th grader, that’d be pretty easy. But one of my kids got completely lost, had a really hard time organizing his pages, didn’t know where to write, started with content on the table of contents, it was a mess. That prompted me to note, ‘Next time the kids are busy, I’m going to pull this kid and give him a couple of support lessons in terms of how to look at structure and organizing his own space.’ Because something in his brain is clearly not letting him access that part of learning. But if I didn’t write it down in my planner, I’d forget. So it’s just keeping track of those things is really helpful for me.”

Better Together: California Teachers Summit Takes on Personalized Learning

The theme at this years’ conference was “It’s Personal: Meeting the Needs of Every Student.” Other teachers who gathered, presented, and listened at one of 31 sites throughout the state often used similar low-tech solutions to personalize learning. Kesty was impressed with an instructor who asked his learners to do a check in at the beginning of each class with a note on the smart board and discuss how they’re feeling with school and life in general.

“If a student checked in with something that looked negative, then he would say, ‘do you want to talk about it.’ And if the student yes, they would share their problems. And then he would open it up to the other students and ask them how they would solve the problem. And so it really empowers them to be peer coaches and problem solve out loud so it’s not the wah-wah-wah from a teacher, but it was coming from peers.”

Science Meets Art

There’s no doubt that the kind of personalized pedagogy that Kesty implements takes a lot of work. “It is a lot of logistics, I’m not perfect at it. Teachers are data-driven, but instead of data coming from assessments, it comes from my interactions and observations and my assessment. It’s a more of a holistic look for me when I personalize learning.”

That’s the part of the equation that is typically missing from more high-tech personalized solutions. In Kesty’s view, there’s nothing wrong with using new technology to support personalized learning. But instruction can’t be compromised in the process.

“Especially in special ed, I’ve seen a lot of plug and play where the teachers don’t interact with kids, they just monitor compliance. Sometimes that turns students away from learning. Even though it might be acceptable by some standards, we still need to look at the role of the teacher so it’s not an instance technology taking over instruction.”

Nearpod, a lesson creation platform, helped arrange this interview. 

Cover Image: Marion Michele, Unsplash.

The post When Personalized Learning Isn’t High-Tech: Some Solutions from the Better Together: California: Teachers Summit 2018 appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Based on numerous factors, Summit Learning comes off as suspect to many parents around the U.S. Those parents, however, are far in the minority. Over 330 schools currently participate in the Summit Learning Program. Schools that have tried and later rejected the platform would make up about 1-2% of current users. Within that group, most, if not all, of those who have rejected the platform have done so at the behest of parents. Administrators and teachers have never led the charge against it. In fact, most adopters tend to like it.

Aspen Valley Preparatory Academy is a charter school based in Fresno, CA and teaches grades K-8. In the 2015-2016 school year, their 6-8 graders weren’t doing great on California’s Smarter Balanced test, the statewide assessment. Of the group, 33% were proficient in English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA). 19% were proficient in math.

Aspen Valley’s student body is also pretty different from some of the schools discussed in the previous article on Summit Learning (linked above). 82% qualify for free or reduced lunch. 11% are English learners and a further 8% have an individualized education plan (IEP), meaning they have special needs.

With Any Change Comes Concern

Despite socio-economic differences, Aspen Valley parents initially reacted as others did. “Absolutely” there was concern over the use of Summit Learning, according to Corrie Sands, Site Director at Aspen Valley.

“People get upset about any kind of change,” Sands said. “With Summit Learning being implemented here, we had several parents who didn’t understand it or were worried their kids weren’t getting adequate teaching from people and were receiving everything independently through the computer, which isn’t accurate. So really it has a lot to do with meeting with parents. Hilary and I have spent hours and hours meeting with parents either in large group organized settings where we create evenings where they can come and learn about things and ask questions and explore the platform.”

In the experience of Sands and Witts, many parents who are suspicious of the platform don’t fully understand or are misinformed about how it works. “There was one parent who was scared of the program who’s child had an IEP,” Witts said. “Thankfully, we had a good relationship with her already. She talked with us and, low and behold, now she’s our biggest proponent. She even came to our orientation and talked to other parents with children with IEPs and just said how wonderful it was that it actually had positively affected her child and he’s excited and his behavior improved.”

Parents Tend to Focus on the Summit Learning Platform, But That’s Just One Aspect

Part of the misunderstanding, according to Nadee Gunasena, a member of Summit Learning’s Communications team, is that the Summit Learning Platform is just one part of their program. “Summit Learning is a comprehensive approach to education,” she wrote via email. “We’ve designed a rich classroom experience centered around building strong relationships between teachers and students—through real world projects, dedicated mentoring time each week where students meet 1:1 with a teacher, and self-direction, where we empower our students to learn how they learn best.”

“It’s easy to focus on the Summit Learning Platform, but the fact of the matter is the Platform is just a tool that teachers and students use in the classroom,” wrote Gunasena. “It’s a support for the personalized teaching that happens in each Summit Learning classroom. Students spend most of their time working on projects where they apply their knowledge to real-world scenarios that help them develop the skills (e.g., writing, analysis, communication) and habits (e.g., planning, persistence) that prepare them for success in college and beyond.  Projects include collaboration “with peers, group discussions, and one-on-one support from teachers.

There’s one thing that tends to stick in critics’ craws—Summit Learning is free. It doesn’t cost the district a dime. And as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product.

But that’s not how Witts sees it. Summit Learning currently operates with a good deal of support from various groups, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with the mandate to improve and effectively implement personalized learning in classrooms.

“It really is a non-profit venture where they have considered us a partner school,” Witts said. “The way we give back is not financially, it’s basically we implement things and they get to crowdsource us. They ask our teachers questions to constantly improve the platform so that it can be shared in a better way over time.”

Images provided courtesy of Aspen Valley Prep

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While their children turned in final assignments and took tests to wrap up another year of school, a group of parents in a Milwaukee suburb were busy working on a different project. They had been drawn together after arriving at the same conclusion: a new personalized learning platform their school had implemented wasn’t a good fit for their child.

Kettle Moraine Middle School, of Dousman, WI, had begun to use the Summit Learning platform the previous fall. Kristina Vourax’s son began the 6th grade at the same time. “In the first couple weeks, he was kind of complaining about what was going on,” Vourax said. “At first I didn’t know whether it was something I should be concerned about or not. All kids complain about doing homework.”

That suspicion lingered. When Vourax started to do some research, she quickly found she was not alone. Parents had rebelled against Summit Learning (with a range of success) in Cheshire, CT; Boone County, KY; Fairview Park City School District outside Cleveland; Indiana Area School District in Indiana, PA; Clearwater County, ID; and elsewhere.

“I was going, ‘Oh my gosh, this is us! We are experiencing the same situation as many other communities. We’re going through the same thing,’” Vourax said. “It gave me inspiration. I knew we had a chance at having our voices heard.”

What Is Personalized Learning?

Personalized learning–in its high-est tech form–has crested and broken as a new trend in K-12+ pedagogy. At it’s core, it marks an engineer’s solution to an inefficient system. The logic goes like this: a student learns best when they can benefit from a teacher’s near-exclusive attention. But in public school, a 1:1 teacher-student ratio is impossible with the current resources. Worse still, during a good chunk of a teacher’s time, they’ll need to give students who struggle the most individual attention. That means less attention is given to the students who manage to keep at or above proficient levels without the help of a teacher.

The tech industry believes they have a solution. Using AI algorithms, various startups have developed software that tracks student performance. Once a student has mastered a certain subject, they are directed on to a new module.

As Amplify CEO Larry Berger described it, “You start with a map of all the things that kids need to learn. Then you measure the kids so that you can place each kid on the map in just the spot where they know everything behind them, and in front of them is what they should learn next. Then you assemble a vast library of learning objects and ask an algorithm to sort through it to find the optimal learning object for each kid at that particular moment. Then you make each kid use the learning object. [The more kids use it, the smarter and better it gets.]”

That sounds great on paper, especially to big tech.

Summit Learning, however, doesn’t actually use adaptive algorithms of any kind. In Summit classrooms, teachers determine a learner’s path throughout the year while an application tracks student progress. Before Summit created a personalized learning platform, it operated (and still does today) as a network of charter schools that had implemented personalized learning to great effect. In 2015, Facebook identified their good work in a blog post and announced they had spent the last year working to rebuild their personalized framework and make it available for public use. The Summit Learning Platform used at Kettle Moraine Middle School was the product of their work.

In 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered to donate $12 million to advance personalized learning in U.S. classrooms.

The pedagogy is also popular in state education. Personalized learning has become a topic of focus in 17 state ESSA plans, and a majority of legislatures have included some aspects of the pedagogy.

Concerns With Summit Learning

So—why have so many groups of parents sought to opt out of the program? For Vourax, it was a lot of little things. When students take assessments, they don’t see which questions they get wrong. With the schedule of personalized learning, the kids who master material faster still have a good deal of down time at the end of the year.

And some of the content is inappropriate. Kettle Moraine parents took issue with sentences like, “Opinionated women are given disadvantages in society that privilege male accomplishments” in Summit Learning exercises. Another questioned a lesson that sent students to a third-party site that displayed explicit ancient Greek sculpture.

In addition to inappropriate content, parents tend to dislike the screen time Summit Learning requires of their children. And they also don’t want their kids to be the subjects in an experiment. Given Facebook’s involvement, many parents are also concerned that their child’s data will be collected. But the company no longer has any involvement in the social media platform.

For some reason, however, it’s rare that parents question personalized learning’s efficacy. While many smaller studies have found the pedagogy to benefit a classroom, there has yet to be a large scale independent investigation to find that it meets or exceeds traditional methods.

Going back to Larry Berger, who described personalized learning with his map-measurement-library metaphor, “The map doesn’t exist, the measurement is impossible, and we have, collectively, built only 5% of the library.”

To be clear, Kettle Moraine parents simply want to be able to opt out of the platform. Their group believes that it can be the right fit for certain students, but they’d prefer their own child not to use it. That’s not exactly the easiest fix for teachers and administrators, especially since this story has in a sense buried the lead.

One reason why parents maybe haven’t called out Summit Learning’s efficacy outright might be that they’re one of the most promising platforms using the pedagogy. Many schools have found that using it leads to empirical and anecdotal improvement beyond student test scores, and the majority of adopters tend to like it. In our follow up article, we talk with folks from Summit Learning along with educators who have used it with great success.

Cover Image: Parents at an unrelated protest of Milwaukee public schools. Charles Edward Miller, Flickr.

The post Why Do So Many Parents Opt Out of Summit Learning? appeared first on eLearningInside News.

K-12 classrooms are no strangers to personalized learning. AI algorithms, furthermore, have been applied to several elearning initiatives in the effort to more effectively match learners with the knowledge they seek. On Thursday, however, a new machine learning-powered platform emerged that goes above and beyond what has previously been made available for professional re-skilling. SelfStudy is a platform that uses machine learning algorithms to keep professionals up-to-date and in the know in their respective fields with personalized learning. On Saturday, they will make their first public demonstration at the annual International Anesthesiology Research Society (IARS) meeting.

The platform was funded by the IARS and, so far, it has been used and tested primarily in medical fields. But according to CEO Brenda McLaughlin, SelfStudy can be put to use in virtually any professional sector.

“We started in [medicine] where people are managing their own education while they’re also managing their family and jobs,” McLaughlin said. “And really–who isn’t? This is something we’re all dealing with. It used to be only some professionals who had to deal with continuous upskilling. But today, technological advances are changing all of our work. Not only do we sometimes just want to learn something—like a new language—but we all need to be continuously upskilling. We need the tools to be able to do that effectively, efficiently, and accessibly.”

How SelfStudy Works

The platform populates a learner’s ‘course work’ with educational content from any entity willing to partner. It might be from academic journals, universities, media publications, special interest groups, government bodies—anyone who provides rigorous, vetted, up-to-date material. On the learner’s end, professionals begin with a basic, more traditional assessment to determine where they’re at in their respective fields and where they want to go. SelfStudy’s algorithm then determines what educational content is most relevant and matches them accordingly.

“Taking the algorithms and machine learning we’ve developed that focuses on education mastery, continuous assessment, (which also opens badging for certifications for those who want to offer them), we’ve applied those to discovery,” McLaughlin said.

In a basic sense, the goal of SelfStudy is to make the most relevant educational material as easily accessible as possible. In other words, they’re a personalized learning platform for professionals.

“We think the tools we’re offering continues the revolution of MOOCs. MOOCs made education accessible and distributed (mostly) traditional educational opportunities to anybody who had a computer,” McLaughlin said. “Now we want to take the power of computers and create personalized experiences. Because we all know from face-to-face interactions with teachers that personalized learning yields results.”

The Merits of Constant, Real-Time Reassessment in Personalized Learning

Personalized learning—by and large a widely popular pedagogy—has taken a few hits in 2018, even from within its own ranks. SelfStudy describes itself as a kind of GPS for learners showing them which way to travel on their educational journey. The criticism of personalized learning, however generally states that 1) it’s incredibly difficult to assess where learners are on their ‘map’ and 2) it’s very difficult to know what direction to point them in. Cart Reed, CTO of SelfStudy believes his team has overcome these obstacles.

“You could argue that if you don’t do assessment right, it doesn’t matter what else you do,” Reed said. “The assessment we use is not a mechanical system. I think most [personalized learning] efforts you see are rule-based. They’re basically like ‘if you see this, do this.’ The concept is that content is structured and you can figure out what the structure is. You can also figure out the structure of what a person’s understanding is. And if you put those two together, it works.”

“To me, that’s like making an argument that the human brain is like a steam engine. It’s far more complex than that. People’s behavior changes minute to minute. Their capabilities are higher and lower on a daily basis, on an hourly basis.”

SelfStudy, however, continually reassesses both the relevance of the educational material and the capabilities of its learners in real time.

“The issue with all systems that I’m aware of on the commercial market is that they don’t reassess,” Reed said. “Because if you know the behavior of a learner changes rapidly, and you don’t change with it, you’re bound to get it wrong. Your assessment of where they were 30 minutes ago isn’t going to match anymore. Maybe they just were on a phone call and got some bad news. Maybe they were asleep. The assessment model you provide can’t keep a trail of data behind it. We don’t care about anything that happened a week ago. Even week-old data—if the learner is using the platform on a daily basis—isn’t really useable. When it comes to assessment you can’t make assumptions without testing them constantly.”

Reed and McLaughlin also believe that this constant reassessment safeguards against any issues with algorithmic bias that might crop up.

“Our data is based on people engaging in a series of staged presentations based on an assessment of where people are,” Reed said. “It’s based on their own data. We’re not testing them based on a community or against other individuals. The goal is for the system to be self-correcting. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all model.”

According to McLaughlin, the constant reassessment kills many birds with one stone. “There are tests that show that giving people results changes and improves performance,” McLaughlin said. “So we’re helping people improve but we’re also watching their performance because we can see, from that data, if there’s something wrong. If somehow our assessment does have some kind of bias in it and someone’s not progressing, we will notice.”

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