Last spring, I had the opportunity to interview some of the top folks on McGraw-Hill Education’s (MHE’s) digital team to get their view on adaptive learning. Between ALEKS, LearnSmart, and SmartBooks, they have the developed the most well articulated adaptive strategy of any of the big publishers, under the leadership of Chief Digital Officer Stephen Laster. And on a personal note, Al Essa, their Vice President of Research and Data Science, has been a friend since the days when he was CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and he and both were working on an open source LMS project. (Al also helped with analysis of the Blackboard patent back when he was at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and ran a simulation giving some matheatical rigour to Mike Caulfield’s intuition that some of Purdue University’s Course Signals research was off.) So I was interested to hear what MHE’s digital team had to say about the role of adaptive learning in the classroom, what learning science does and doesn’t tell us, and other related topics.
For reasons that aren’t worth going into, this video sat in the can waiting to go into post-production for about six months. Here, finally, is the first segment in what will be a series produced from the interview:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aYR0uCe9o)
More of the interview will be coming soon.
Full disclosure: In the intervening months between when this video was shot and now, MHE became a client of MindWires.
