Adaptive learning: the 25-year-old promise that AI is finally being asked to deliver
Software that adapts to individual learners has been a goal of educational technologists since the 1990s. A history of what the UK has tried, what has not worked, and why this generation of tools may be different.
By Wistl Editorial · · Labs
The idea that educational software could adapt in real time to the needs of an individual learner has been present in the EdTech literature since at least the 1990s. Intelligent tutoring systems, a research area that drew on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, produced sophisticated prototypes in laboratory settings. Moving those prototypes into classrooms, at scale, proved consistently harder than anticipated. The obstacles were partly technical and partly structural. The computational resources needed to run adaptive algorithms in real time were, until recently, expensive. The dat