Blog U ›    • Just Visiting   We Don't Need No Adaptive Learning
April 4, 2013 - 2:36pm  Am I crazy if I want less innovation in
education?  In a Thursday, April 4 column, Peter Stokes, “the
executive director of postsecondary innovation in the College of
Professional Studies at Northeastern University,” argues that
“adaptive learning” is showing significant promise in enabling
higher education to “unshackle” itself from the “Iron Triangle
of cost, quality, and access.”  According to Stokes, adaptive
learning is “an environment where technology and brain science
collaborate with big data to carve out customized pathways
through curriculums for individual learners and free up teachers
to devote their energies in more productive and scalable ways.”
I’ll be honest. I’m not 100% sure what that means. When I read
opinion pieces putatively about education that use words like
“big data,” “productive,” and “scalable,” the hairs on the back
of my neck go up since these are words I associate with business
and marketin