The Achilles Heel of Adaptive Learning Technology as it Applies to Education

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

The Stumbling Block of Artificial Intelligence

An article given to teaching staff by my previous administration intonates that adaptive learning technology (programs containing Artificial Intelligence (AI) which on some level utilize a kind of data mining or phishing to attempt to personalize learning) will free up the teacher’s time to work face-to-face with students in a more directly beneficial way. As we all have come to realize in every kind of workplace that uses web-based technologies, our time spent face-to-face has actually decreased (Drago, 2015. and Media Technology Monitor, 2017.). The amount of information we produce has only been increased by our companies’ policies to respond 24/7, and to be basically accessible to our employer at any time. Even though some progressive organisations have begun to value a healthy balance between work and real life and have started to reverse this trend of being connected to work at all times, yet another article (Adaptive Learning Technologies: Preparing Students Through Personalized Content) blog-posted through the non-profit EDUCAUSE adds that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) support the notion that instructing post secondary courses from behind a screen can be more inclusive and individualized. This is a flawed view of what online education is capable of accomplishing. There is a set of skills that cannot be taught very easily by Google or YouTube or any virtual school. Even though much of the early research criticizing the effectiveness of online learning versus offline learning has been debunked, what the newer research is finally doing is asking the deeper questions about how online learning is changing the way the learner understands and uses the content provided online in offline contexts where real-world applications have a changing and lasting effect. What has become more apparent is the extent to which social interaction has changed as a result of online communication and its use.

Moving Beyond the “Soft Skills” of the Curriculum

On the other side of the coin, being a trained and practised professional and choosing to pass on one’s craft as a teacher carries a certain autonomy not found in many of the programmed structures of online learning, and the collective autonomy of student and teacher is even more apparent in the elective courses that teach practical skills involving creative expression. While, as a teacher, I am obliged to pass on the required “Core and Curricular Competencies” (formerly the  “Prescribed Learning Outcomes”) for my courses, I do it without textbooks, “prefabricated” lesson plans, online learning modules, or the myriad of “heat-and-serve” curricula that have been sold to educators for centuries. One of the keys to being a master teacher is to recognize that the student comes first and that the”lesson” follows as a result of the content that the student brings into the class. The craft is the vehicle or catalyst upon which the student learns how be in the world. A master teacher teaches discipline, commitment, integrity, precision, honesty–all beyond the popularized soft skills of communication, socialization, and problem-solving.

If we put students at the centre of their own best interest, then we can offer our expertise to aid the student in their own self-directed learning process through daily contact between master and student. In my experience, the students that go on to thrive are the ones that I have helped to make a connection between what I have had to offer in my area of expertise and the direction they would like take in their own lives. As far as online programs are concerned, data collection and analysis can only show the strength and weakness of the student’s knowledge of the content that is programmed into the software. It is as limited as the programmers’ own knowledge and ability to use that knowledge in new ways. It is not unlike applying a horoscope to one’s personality and that upon reading the advice under all 12 signs of the zodiac, one often comes to the conclusion that all of it could aptly apply to any reader regardless of their sign. It is like creating rubrics specialized enough to illustrate the instructor’s own set of knowledge and skills but generalized enough to be able to apply to any student who takes a seat (virtual or not) in the generalist-teacher’s classroom. This is a tragic flaw in the standardization of education systems that were designed under the societal context of the industrial revolution. The teacher during this time was no longer required to be a master, only a larger cog connected to the smaller cogs of students in a much larger machine.

The Master Teacher as Multi-Specialist

Daily face-to-face contact with a skilled professional has proven to be one the best ways to ensure that a student can be shown the right doors through which she/he/they wants to chart a path to personal success.  More current research is showing the great difficulty that AI has in interpreting the vast expanse of non-verbal cues that lie beneath and betwixt the way that people communicate (Artificial Intelligence emotion recognition may still be far away). Meaning and emotion are as complicated and inseparable as the historical, social, and personal context from which knowledge reveals itself to the learner, especially in an age of fake news and information overload. There is an inherent and irreplaceable value to learning in a real live social environment where the focus is on interactive learning within the student’s schema of intuition, experience, and motivating factors. The master teacher recognizes these as the starting places from which she/he/they can then share a specialized discipline or craft that has taken years to develop through training and practice outside of the classroom in professional settings so it can be applied in the classroom under the best conditions to suit the particular student and class dynamics at play. This is key to the ability of the master teacher to take the skills and knowledge of the discipline or craft beyond its intended application and into the higher realms of learning where ethics, morality, balance, and respect are opened to exploration for conscious internalization and actualization. The key to the future success of education systems may very well lie in the training of teachers who can pass on the values of discipline, commitment, integrity, precision, honesty, ethics, morality, balance, and respect through the subject matter that they teach.

Regaining the Value and Purpose of Education

Traditional assessments and checking for learning with these deeply critical elements and values that hold society together might be the last thing that new technologies aim to emulate in real time. As we all know, more data does not equal more time or necessarily a better sense of direction in which learning should go. As with many jobs, technology has complicated and decreased individual productivity as much as it has intended to make our jobs more efficient or to make humans less productive in the face of technological change and automation (Goldin et al., 2018.)  Our world is soon becoming a data-saturated world where our influence on technology may very well turn it against the intentions we laid out for it to accomplish. We are beginning to know that people who are internet-addicted suffer anxiety, sadness, and depression when they are unable to access the internet (Montag, 2012.) and that compulsive internet use is a determining factor in developing undesirable psycho-social outcomes of depression and loneliness (Mazer & Ledbetter, 2012.). A respect for teacher autonomy allows the master teacher to focus on the most important duty: to teach to the student rather than the subject and to put the tracking and assessment of student-generated content and understanding in its rightful place where the teacher can have full access to all of the subtle nuances that make valued learning possible. The traditional empirical, industrial-aged model of education is facing enormous pressure from both the proliferation of and access to information and also the automation that has come with technological advances. Formal education as we recognize it in its brick and mortar form is bound for change that will reshape the economic model it has been resting upon. Time has perhaps brought the practice of education full-circle, back to its primary functions as a supporting pillar of society, a beacon of democratic free speech, a force of investigation into the core values of knowledge and of life itself, and as an institution to promote and teach those higher values that continue to change humanity for the better.

References

Drago, E. (2015). The effect of technology on face to face communication. The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 6:1, 13-19.  article freely online (no doi available).

Goldin, I., Koutroumpis, P., Lafond, F., Rochowicz, N., & Winkler, J. (2018). Why is productivity slowing down?. Working Paper, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford.

Mazer, J. P. & Ledbetter, A. M. (2012). Online communication attitudes as predictors of problematic internet use and well-being outcomes. Southern Communication Journal, 77:5, 403-419, doi: 10.1080/1041794X.2012.686558

Montag, C. , Kirsch, P. , Sauer, C. , Markett, S. & Reuter, M. (2012). The role of the CHRNA4 gene in internet addiction. Journal of Addiction Medicine, 6:3, 191–195. doi: 10.1097/ADM.0b013e31825ba7e7.