About us

Adaptive learning focuses on environments that are responsive to learners as individuals. The National Research Council's How People Learn (HPL) framework refers to this quality as being learner centered, one of four fundamental aspects of effective learning environments it emphasizes.  Adaptivity relies on recognizing individual learner differences and understanding how different learner situations can influence progress towards successful outcomes.  Adaptations encode this understanding, altering flow or materials to better scaffold each learner.

Over 35 years of research have been dedicated to applying intelligent systems techniques to creating technology-supported adaptive learning environments, represented today by intelligent tutoring systems and adaptive hypermedia.  These technologies focus on adaptation principally as a means of guiding learners through a corpus of instruction, typically based on an individual learner's differences from domain experts.  While our work is related to this inquiry, we focus on fine-grained, lightweight adaptations situated within learning activities and materials.  Our motivation is to enable educators to incrementally introduce adaptive features into their learning designs by making simpler capabilities for representation, interaction, and reasoning more accessible.

Our work is also related to the current generation of e-learning technologies and standards, although there are significant differences in context and focus.  Addressing use in the context of schools, we focus on blended learning more than distance learning, as evidenced by technology features for coordinating classroom-based and outside-class learning.  As a particular emphasis, we promote a reflective practice of design by educators through the use of embedded formative assessment, together with unobtrusive observations of learners, as vehicles for improving the responsiveness and efficacy of learning designs over time. Such improvements can be pursued individually by educators or cooperatively for designs shared within a community.

This site provides information about the technologies we have developed to support adaptive online learning and their use in blended learning environments.  It provides descriptions of our visual authoring technology, called CAPE, and our adaptive web-based learning platform eLMS.  Together these technologies comprise an infrastructure with novel capabilities for creating, enacting, and evolving learner-centered designs.