Heaving bosoms: the problems with Lingua.ly

Lingua.ly is an Israeli start-up which, in its own words, ‘is an innovative new learning solution that helps you learn a language from the open web’. Its platform ‘uses big-data paired with spaced repetition to help users bootstrap their way to fluency’. You can read more of this kind of adspeak at the Lingua.ly blog  or the Wikipedia entry  which seems to have been written by someone from the company.

How does it work? First of all, state the language you want to study (currently there are 10 available) and the language you already speak (currently there are 18 available). Then, there are three possible starting points: insert a word which you want to study, click on a word in any web text or click on a word in one of the suggested reading texts. This then brings up a bilingual dictionary entry which, depending on the word, will offer a number of parts of speech and a number of translated word senses. Click on the appropriate part of speech and the appropriate word sense, and the item will be added to your personal word list. Once you have a handful of words in your word list, you can begin practising these words. Here there are two options. The first is a spaced repetition flashcard system. It presents the target word and 8 different translations in your own language, and you have to click on the correct option. Like most flashcard apps, spaced repetition software determines when and how often you will be re-presented with the item.

The second option is to read an authentic web text which contains one or more of your target items. The company calls this ‘digital language immersion, a method of employing a virtual learning environment to simulate the language learning environment’. The app ‘relies on a number of applied linguistics principles, including the Natural Approach and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis’, according to the Wikipedia entry. Apparently, the more you use the app, the more it knows about you as a learner, and the better able it is to select texts that are appropriate for you. As you read these texts, of course, you can click on more words and add them to your word list.

I tried out Lingua.ly, logging on as a French speaker wanting to learn English, and clicking on words as the fancy took me. I soon had a selection of texts to read. Users are offered a topic menu which consisted of the following: arts, business, education, entertainment, food, weird, beginners, green, health, living, news, politics, psychology, religion, science, sports, style. The sources are varied and not at all bad – Christian Science Monitor, The Grauniad, Huffington Post, Time, for example –and there are many very recent articles. Some texts were interesting; others seemed very niche. I began clicking on more words that I thought would be interesting to explore and here my problems began.

I quickly discovered that the system could only deal with single words, so phrasal verbs were off limits. One text I looked at had the phrasal verb ‘ripping off’, and although I could get translations for ‘ripping’ and ‘off’, this was obviously not terribly helpful. Learners who don’t know the phrasal verb ‘ripped off’ do not necessarily know that it is a phrasal verb, so the translations offered for the two parts of the verb are worse than unhelpful; they are actually misleading. Proper nouns were also a problem, although some of the more common ones were recognised. But the system failed to recognise many proper nouns for what they were, and offered me translations of homonymous nouns. With some words (e.g. ‘stablemate’), the dictionary offered only one translation (in this case, the literal translation), but not the translation (the much more common idiomatic one) that was needed in the context in which I came across the word. With others (e.g. ‘pertain’), I was offered a list of translations which included the one that was appropriate in the context, but, unfortunately, this is the French word ‘porter’, which has so many possible meanings that, if you genuinely didn’t know the word, you would be none the wiser.

Once you’ve clicked on an appropriate part of speech and translation (if you can find one), the dictionary look-up function offers both photos and example sentences. Here again there were problems. I’d clicked on the verb ‘pan’ which I’d encountered in the context of a critic panning a book they’d read. I was able to select an appropriate translation, but when I got to the photos, I was offered only multiple pictures of frying pans. There were no example sentences for my meaning of ‘pan’: instead, I was offered multiple sentences about cooking pans, and one about Peter Pan. In other cases, the example sentences were either unhelpful (e.g. the example for ‘deal’ was ‘I deal with that’) or bizarre (e.g. the example sentence for ‘deemed’ was ‘The boy deemed that he cheated in the examination’). For some words, there were no example sentences at all.

Primed in this way, I was intrigued to see how the system would deal with the phrase ‘heaving bosoms’ which came up in one text. ‘Heaving bosoms’ is an interesting case. It’s a strong collocation, and, statistically, ‘heaving bosoms’ plural are much more frequent than ‘a heaving bosom’ singular. ‘Heaving’, as an adjective, only really collocates with ‘bosoms’. You don’t find ‘heaving’ collocating with any of the synonyms for ‘bosoms’. The phrase is also heavily connoted, strongly associated with romance novels, and often used with humorous intent. Finally, there is also a problem of usage with ‘bosom’ / ‘bosoms’: men or women, one or two – all in all, it’s a tricky word.

Lingua.ly was no help at all. There was no dictionary entry for an adjectival ‘heaving’, and the translations for the verb ‘heave’ were amusing, but less than appropriate. As for ‘bosom’, there were appropriate translations (‘sein’ and ‘poitrine’), but absolutely no help with how the word is actually used. Example sentences, which are clearly not tagged to the translation which has been chosen, included ‘Or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land’ and ‘Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?’

Lingua.ly has a number of problems. First off, its software hinges on a dictionary (it’s a Babylon dictionary) which can only deal with single words, is incomplete, and does not deal with collocation, connotation, style or register. As such, it can only be of limited value for receptive use, and of no value whatsoever for productive use. Secondly, the web corpus that it is using simply isn’t big enough. Thirdly, it doesn’t seem to have any Natural Language Processing tool which could enable it to deal with meanings in context. It can’t disambiguate words automatically. Such software does now exist, and Lingua.ly desperately needs it.

Unfortunately, there are other problems, too. The flashcard practice is very repetitive and soon becomes boring. With eight translations to choose from, you have to scroll down the page to see them all. But there’s a timer mechanism, and I frequently timed out before being able to select the correct translation (partly because words are presented with no context, so you have to remember the meaning which you clicked in an earlier study session). The texts do not seem to be graded for level. There is no indication of word frequency or word sense frequency. There is just one gamification element (a score card), but there is no indication of how scores are achieved. Last, but certainly not least, the system is buggy. My word list disappeared into the cloud earlier today, and has not been seen since.

I think it’s a pity that Lingua.ly is not better. The idea behind it is good – even if the references to Krashen are a little unfortunate. The company says that they have raised $800,000 in funding, but with their freemium model they’ll be desperately needing more, and they’ve gone to market too soon. One reviewer, Language Surfer,  wrote a withering review of Lingua.ly’s Arabic program (‘it will do more harm than good to the Arabic student’), and Brendan Wightman, commenting at eltjam,  called it ‘dull as dish water, […] still very crude, limited and replete with multiple flaws’. But, at least, it’s free.

Personalization for all

Personalization is one of the key leitmotifs in current educational discourse. The message is clear: personalization is good, one-size-fits-all is bad. ‘How to personalize learning and how to differentiate instruction for diverse classrooms are two of the great educational challenges of the 21^st century,’ write Trilling and Fadel, leading lights in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21)[1]. Barack Obama has repeatedly sung the praises of, and the need for, personalized learning and his policies are fleshed out by his Secretary of State, Arne Duncan, in speeches and on the White House blog: ‘President Obama described the promise of personalized learning when he launched the ConnectED initiative last June. Technology is a powerful tool that helps create robust personalized learning environments.’ In the UK, personalized learning has been government mantra for over 10 years. The EU, UNESCO, OECD, the Gates Foundation – everyone, it seems, is singing the same tune.

Personalization, we might all agree, is a good thing. How could it be otherwise? No one these days is going to promote depersonalization or impersonalization in education. What exactly it means, however, is less clear. According to a UNESCO Policy Brief[2], the term was first used in the context of education in the 1970s by Victor Garcìa Hoz, a senior Spanish educationalist and member of Opus Dei at the University of Madrid. This UNESCO document then points out that ‘unfortunately, up to this date there is no single definition of this concept’.

In ELT, the term has been used in a very wide variety of ways. These range from the far-reaching ideas of people like Gertrude Moskowitz, who advocated a fundamentally learner-centred form of instruction, to the much more banal practice of getting students to produce a few personalized examples of an item of grammar they have just studied. See Scott Thornbury’s A-Z blog for an interesting discussion of personalization in ELT.

As with education in general, and ELT in particular, ‘personalization’ is also bandied around the adaptive learning table. Duolingo advertises itself as the opposite of one-size-fits-all, and as an online equivalent of the ‘personalized education you can get from a small classroom teacher or private tutor’. Babbel offers a ‘personalized review manager’ and Rosetta Stone’s Classroom online solution allows educational institutions ‘to shift their language program away from a ‘one-size-fits-all-curriculum’ to a more individualized approach’. As far as I can tell, the personalization in these examples is extremely restricted. The language syllabus is fixed and although users can take different routes up the ‘skills tree’ or ‘knowledge graph’, they are totally confined by the pre-determination of those trees and graphs. This is no more personalized learning than asking students to make five true sentences using the present perfect. Arguably, it is even less!

This is not, in any case, the kind of personalization that Obama, the Gates Foundation, Knewton, et al have in mind when they conflate adaptive learning with personalization. Their definition is much broader and summarised in the US National Education Technology Plan of 2010: ‘Personalized learning means instruction is paced to learning needs, tailored to learning preferences, and tailored to the specific interests of different learners. In an environment that is fully personalized, the learning objectives and content as well as the method and pace may all vary (so personalization encompasses differentiation and individualization).’ What drives this is the big data generated by the students’ interactions with the technology (see ‘Part 4: big data and analytics’ of ‘The Guide’ on this blog).

What remains unclear is exactly how this might work in English language learning. Adaptive software can only personalize to the extent that the content of an English language learning programme allows it to do so. It may be true that each student using adaptive software ‘gets a more personalised experience no matter whose content the student is consuming’, as Knewton’s David Liu puts it. But the potential for any really meaningful personalization depends crucially on the nature and extent of this content, along with the possibility of variable learning outcomes. For this reason, we are not likely to see any truly personalized large-scale adaptive learning programs for English any time soon.

Nevertheless, technology is now central to personalized language learning. A good learning platform, which allows learners to connect to ‘social networking systems, podcasts, wikis, blogs, encyclopedias, online dictionaries, webinars, online English courses, various apps’, etc (see Alexandra Chistyakova’s eltdiary), means that personalization could be more easily achieved.

For the time being, at least, adaptive learning systems would seem to work best for ‘those things that can be easily digitized and tested like math problems and reading passages’ writes Barbara Bray . Or low level vocabulary and grammar McNuggets, we might add. Ideal for, say, ‘English Grammar in Use’. But meaningfully personalized language learning?

‘Personalized learning’ sounds very progressive, a utopian educational horizon, and it sounds like it ought to be the future of ELT (as Cleve Miller argues). It also sounds like a pretty good slogan on which to hitch the adaptive bandwagon. But somehow, just somehow, I suspect that when it comes to adaptive learning we’re more likely to see more testing, more data collection and more depersonalization.

[1] Trilling, B. & Fadel, C. 2009 21^st Century Skills (San Francisco: Wiley) p.33

[2] Personalized learning: a new ICT­enabled education approach, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, Policy Brief March 2012 iite.unesco.org/pics/publications/en/files/3214716.pdf

 

Privacy

I mentioned the issue of privacy very briefly in Part 9 of the ‘Guide’, and it seems appropriate to take a more detailed look.

Adaptive learning needs big data. Without the big data, there is nothing for the algorithms to work on, and the bigger the data set, the better the software can work. Adaptive language learning will be delivered via a platform, and the data that is generated by the language learner’s interaction with the English language program on the platform is likely to be only one, very small, part of the data that the system will store and analyse. Full adaptivity requires a psychometric profile for each student.

It would make sense, then, to aggregate as much data as possible in one place. Besides the practical value in massively combining different data sources (in order to enhance the usefulness of the personalized learning pathways), such a move would possibly save educational authorities substantial amounts of money and allow educational technology companies to mine the rich goldmine of student data, along with the standardised platform specifications, to design their products.

And so it has come to pass. The Gates Foundation (yes, them again) provided most of the $100 million funding. A division of Murdoch’s News Corp built the infrastructure. Once everything was ready, a non-profit organization called inBloom was set up to run the thing. The inBloom platform is open source and the database was initially free, although this will change. Preliminary agreements were made with 7 US districts and involved millions of children. The data includes ‘students’ names, birthdates, addresses, social security numbers, grades, test scores, disability status, attendance, and other confidential information’ (Ravitch, D. ‘Reign of Error’ NY: Knopf, 2013, p. 235-236). Under federal law, this information can be ‘shared’ with private companies selling educational technology and services.

The edtech world rejoiced. ‘This is going to be a huge win for us’, said one educational software provider; ‘it’s a godsend for us,’ said another. Others are not so happy. If the technology actually works, if it can radically transform education and ‘produce game-changing outcomes’ (as its proponents claim so often), the price to be paid might just conceivably be worth paying. But the price is high and the research is not there yet. The price is privacy.

The problem is simple. InBloom itself acknowledges that it ‘cannot guarantee the security of the information stored… or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.’ Experience has already shown us that organisations as diverse as the CIA or the British health service cannot protect their data. Hackers like a good challenge. So do businesses.

The anti-privatization (and, by extension, the anti-adaptivity) lobby in the US has found an issue which is resonating with electors (and parents). These dissenting voices are led by Class Size Matters, and their voice is being heard. Of the original partners of inBloom, only one is now left. The others have all pulled out, mostly because of concerns about privacy, although the remaining partner, New York, involves personal data on 2.7 million students, which can be shared without any parental notification or consent.

This might seem like a victory for the anti-privatization / anti-adaptivity lobby, but it is likely to be only temporary. There are plenty of other companies that have their eyes on the data-mining opportunities that will be coming their way, and Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program means that the inBloom controversy will be only a temporary setback. ‘The reality is that it’s going to be done. It’s not going to be a little part. It’s going to be a big part. And it’s going to be put in place partly because it’s going to be less expensive than doing professional development,’ says Eva Baker of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at UCLA.

It is in this light that the debate about adaptive learning becomes hugely significant. Class Size Matters, the odd academic like Neil Selwyn or the occasional blogger like myself will not be able to reverse a trend with seemingly unstoppable momentum. But we are, collectively, in a position to influence the way these changes will take place.

If you want to find out more, check out the inBloom and Class Size Matters links. And you might like to read more from the news reports which I have used for information in this post. Of these, the second was originally published by Scientific American (owned by Macmillan, one of the leading players in ELT adaptive learning). The third and fourth are from Education Week, which is funded in part by the Gates Foundation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/01/big_data_puts_teachers_out_of_work_partner/

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/01/08/15inbloom_ep.h33.html

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2013/12/new_york_battle_over_inBloom_data_privacy_heading_to_court.html

Part 8: theory, research and practice

One could be forgiven for thinking that there are no problems associated with adaptive learning in ELT. Type the term into a search engine and you’ll mostly come up with enthusiasm or sales talk. There are, however, a number of reasons to be deeply skeptical about the whole business. In the post after this, I will be considering the political background.

1. Learning theory

Jose Fereira, the CEO of Knewton, spoke, in an interview with Digital Journal[1] in October 2009, about getting down to the ‘granular level’ of learning. He was referencing, in an original turn of phrase, the commonly held belief that learning is centrally concerned with ‘gaining knowledge’, knowledge that can be broken down into very small parts that can be put together again. In this sense, the adaptive learning machine is very similar to the ‘teaching machine’ of B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who believed that learning was a complex process of stimulus and response. But how many applied linguists would agree, firstly, that language can be broken down into atomised parts (rather than viewed as a complex, dynamic system), and, secondly, that these atomised parts can be synthesized in a learning program to reform a complex whole? Human cognitive and linguistic development simply does not work that way, despite the strongly-held contrary views of ‘folk’ theories of learning (Selwyn Education and Technology 2011, p.3).

Furthermore, even if an adaptive system delivers language content in personalized and interesting ways, it is still premised on a view of learning where content is delivered and learners receive it. The actual learning program is not personalized in any meaningful way: it is only the way that it is delivered that responds to the algorithms. This is, again, a view of learning which few educationalists (as opposed to educational leaders) would share. Is language learning ‘simply a technical business of well managed information processing’ or is it ‘a continuing process of ‘participation’ (Selwyn, Education and Technology 2011, p.4)?

Finally, adaptive learning is also premised on the idea that learners have particular learning styles, that these can be identified by the analytics (even if they are not given labels), and that actionable insights can be gained from this analysis (i.e. the software can decide on the most appropriate style of content delivery for an individual learner). Although the idea that teaching programs can be modified to cater to individual learning styles continues to have some currency among language teachers (e.g. those who espouse Neuro-Linguistic Programming or Multiple Intelligences Theory), it is not an idea that has much currency in the research community.

It might be the case that adaptive learning programs will work with some, or even many, learners, but it would be wise to carry out more research (see the section on Research below) before making grand claims about its efficacy. If adaptive learning can be shown to be more effective than other forms of language learning, it will be either because our current theories of language learning are all wrong, or because the learning takes place despite the theory, (and not because of it).

2. Practical problems

However good technological innovations may sound, they can only be as good, in practice, as the way they are implemented. Language laboratories and interactive whiteboards both sounded like very good ideas at the time, but they both fell out of favour long before they were technologically superseded. The reasons are many, but one of the most important is that classroom teachers did not understand sufficiently the potential of these technologies or, more basically, how to use them. Given the much more radical changes that seem to be implied by the adoption of adaptive learning, we would be wise to be cautious. The following is a short, selected list of questions that have not yet been answered.

• Language teachers often struggle with mixed ability classes. If adaptive programs (as part of a blended program) allow students to progress at their own speed, the range of abilities in face-to-face lessons may be even more marked. How will teachers cope with this? Teacher – student ratios are unlikely to improve!
• Who will pay for the training that teachers will need to implement effective blended learning and when will this take place?
• How will teachers respond to a technology that will be perceived by some as a threat to their jobs and their professionalism and as part of a growing trend towards the accommodation of commercial interests (see the next post)?
• How will students respond to online (adaptive) learning when it becomes the norm, rather than something ‘different’?

3 Research

Technological innovations in education are rarely, if ever, driven by solidly grounded research, but they are invariably accompanied by grand claims about their potential. Motion pictures, radio, television and early computers were all seen, in their time, as wonder technologies that would revolutionize education (Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 1986). Early research seemed to support the claims, but the passage of time has demonstrated all too clearly the precise opposite. The arrival on the scene of e-learning in general, and adaptive learning in particular, has also been accompanied by much cheer-leading and claims of research support.

Examples of such claims of research support for adaptive learning in higher education in the US and Australia include an increase in pass rates of between 7 and 18%, a decrease of between 14 and 47% in student drop-outs, and an acceleration of 25% in the time needed to complete courses[2]. However, research of this kind needs to be taken with a liberal pinch of salt. First of all, the research has usually been commissioned, and sometimes carried out, by those with vested commercial interests in positive results. Secondly, the design of the research study usually guarantees positive results. Finally, the results cannot be interpreted to have any significance beyond their immediate local context. There is no reason to expect that what happened in a particular study into adaptive learning in, say, the University of Arizona would be replicated in, say, the Universities of Amman, Astana or anywhere else. Very often, when this research is reported, the subject of the students’ study is not even mentioned, as if this were of no significance.

The lack of serious research into the effectiveness of adaptive learning does not lead us to the conclusion that it is ineffective. It is simply too soon to say, and if the examples of motion pictures, radio and television are any guide, it will be a long time before we have any good evidence. By that time, it is reasonable to assume, adaptive learning will be a very different beast from what it is today. Given the recency of this kind of learning, the lack of research is not surprising. For online learning in general, a meta-analysis commissioned by the US Department of Education (Means et al, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practice in Online Learning 2009, p.9) found that there were only a small number of rigorous published studies, and that it was not possible to attribute any gains in learning outcomes to online or blended learning modes. As the authors of this report were aware, there are too many variables (social, cultural and economic) to compare in any direct way the efficacy of one kind of learning with another. This is as true of attempts to compare adaptive online learning with face-to-face instruction as it is with comparisons of different methodological approaches in purely face-to-face teaching. There is, however, an irony in the fact that advocates of adaptive learning (whose interest in analytics leads them to prioritise correlational relationships over causal ones) should choose to make claims about the causal relationship between learning outcomes and adaptive learning.

Perhaps, as Selwyn (Education and Technology 2011, p.87) suggests, attempts to discover the relative learning advantages of adaptive learning are simply asking the wrong question, not least as there cannot be a single straightforward answer. Perhaps a more useful critique would be to look at the contexts in which the claims for adaptive learning are made, and by whom. Selwyn also suggests that useful insights may be gained from taking a historical perspective. It is worth noting that the technicist claims for adaptive learning (that ‘it works’ or that it is ‘effective’) are essentially the same as those that have been made for other education technologies. They take a universalising position and ignore local contexts, forgetting that ‘pedagogical approach is bound up with a web of cultural assumption’ (Wiske, ‘A new culture of teaching for the 21^st century’ in Gordon, D.T. (ed.) The Digital Classroom: How Technology is Changing the Way we teach and Learn 2000, p.72). Adaptive learning might just possibly be different from other technologies, but history advises us to be cautious.

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[1] http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/279940?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+frc+(First+Round+Capital+News)

[2] These figures are quoted in Learning to Adapt: A Case for Accelerating Adaptive Learning in Higher Education, a booklet produced in March 2013 by Education Growth Advisors, an education consultancy firm. Their research is available at http://edgrowthadvisors.com/research/

Part 6: the selling points of adaptive learning

Adaptive learning is a product to be sold. How?

1 Individualised learning

In the vast majority of contexts, language teaching is tied to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model. This is manifested in institutional and national syllabuses which provide lists of structures and / or competences that all students must master within a given period of time. It is usually actualized in the use of coursebooks, often designed for ‘global markets’. Reaction against this model has been common currency for some time, and has led to a range of suggestions for alternative approaches (such as DOGME), none of which have really caught on. The advocates of adaptive learning programs have tapped into this zeitgeist and promise ‘truly personalized learning’. Atomico, a venture capital company that focuses on consumer technologies, and a major investor in Knewton, describes the promise of adaptive learning in the following terms: ‘Imagine lessons that adapt on-the-fly to the way in which an individual learns, and powerful predictive analytics that help teachers differentiate instruction and understand what each student needs to work on and why[1].’

This is a seductive message and is often framed in such a way that disagreement seems impossible. A post on one well-respected blog, eltjam, which focuses on educational technology in language learning, argued the case for adaptive learning very strongly in July 2013: ‘Adaptive Learning is a methodology that is geared towards creating a learning experience that is unique to each individual learner through the intervention of computer software. Rather than viewing learners as a homogenous collective with more or less identical preferences, abilities, contexts and objectives who are shepherded through a glossy textbook with static activities/topics, AL attempts to tap into the rich meta-data that is constantly being generated by learners (and disregarded by educators) during the learning process. Rather than pushing a course book at a class full of learners and hoping that it will (somehow) miraculously appeal to them all in a compelling, salubrious way, AL demonstrates that the content of a particular course would be more beneficial if it were dynamic and interactive. When there are as many responses, ideas, personalities and abilities as there are learners in the room, why wouldn’t you ensure that the content was able to map itself to them, rather than the other way around?[2]’

Indeed. But it all depends on what, precisely, the content is – a point I will return to in a later post. For the time being, it is worth noting the prominence that this message is given in the promotional discourse. It is a message that is primarily directed at teachers. It is more than a little disingenuous, however, because teachers are not the primary targets of the promotional discourse, for the simple reason that they are not the ones with purchasing power. The slogan on the homepage of the Knewton website shows clearly who the real audience is: ‘Every education leader needs an adaptive learning infrastructure’[3].

2 Learning outcomes and testing

Education leaders, who are more likely these days to come from the world of business and finance than the world of education, are currently very focused on two closely interrelated topics: the need for greater productivity and accountability, and the role of technology. They generally share the assumption of other leaders in the World Economic Forum that ICT is the key to the former and ‘the key to a better tomorrow’ (Spring, Education Networks, 2012, p.52). ‘We’re at an important transition point,’ said Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education in 2010, ‘we’re getting ready to move from a predominantly print-based classroom to a digital learning environment’ (quoted by Spring, 2012, p.58). Later in the speech, which was delivered at the time as the release of the new National Education Technology Plan, Duncan said ‘just as technology has increased productivity in the business world, it is an essential tool to help boost educational productivity’. The plan outlines how this increased productivity could be achieved: we must start ‘with being clear about the learning outcomes we expect from the investments we make’ (Office of Educational Technology, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The greater part of the plan is devoted to discussion of learning outcomes and assessment of them.

Learning outcomes (and their assessment) are also at the heart of ‘Asking More: the Path to Efficacy’ (Barber and Rizvi (eds), Asking More: the Path to Efficacy Pearson, 2013), Pearson’s blueprint for the future of education. According to John Fallon, the CEO of Pearson, ‘our focus should unfalteringly be on honing and improving the learning outcomes we deliver’ (Barber and Rizvi, 2013, p.3). ‘High quality learning’ is associated with ‘a relentless focus on outcomes’ (ibid, p.3) and words like ‘measuring / measurable’, ‘data’ and ‘investment’ are almost as salient as ‘outcomes’. A ‘sister’ publication, edited by the same team, is entitled ‘The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes’ (Barber and Rizvi (eds), Pearson, 2013) and explores further Pearson’s ambition to ‘become the world’s leading education company’ and to ‘deliver learning outcomes’.

It is no surprise that words like ‘outcomes’, ‘data’ and ‘measure’ feature equally prominently in the language of adaptive software companies like Knewton (see, for example, the quotation from Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton, in an earlier post). Adaptive software is premised on the establishment and measurement of clearly defined learning outcomes. If measurable learning outcomes are what you’re after, it’s hard to imagine a better path to follow than adaptive software. If your priorities include standards and assessment, it is again hard to imagine an easier path to follow than adaptive software, which was used in testing long before its introduction into instruction. As David Kuntz, VP of research at Knewton and, before that, a pioneer of algorithms in the design of tests, points out, ‘when a student takes a course powered by Knewton, we are continuously evaluating their performance, what others have done with that material before, and what [they] know’[4]. Knewton’s claim that every education leader needs an adaptive learning infrastructure has a powerful internal logic.

3 New business models

‘Adapt or die’ (a phrase originally coined by the last prime minister of apartheid South Africa) is a piece of advice that is often given these days to both educational institutions and publishers. British universities must adapt or die, according to Michael Barber, author of ‘An Avalanche is Coming[5]’ (a report commissioned by the British Institute for Public Policy Research), Chief Education Advisor to Pearson, and editor of the Pearson ‘Efficacy’ document (see above). ELT publishers ‘must change or die’, reported the eltjam blog[6], and it is a message that is frequently repeated elsewhere. The move towards adaptive learning is seen increasingly often as one of the necessary adaptations for both these sectors.

The problems facing universities in countries like the U.K. are acute. Basically, as the introduction to ‘An Avalanche is Coming’ puts it, ‘the traditional university is being unbundled’. There are a number of reasons for this including the rising cost of higher education provision, greater global competition for the same students, funding squeezes from central governments, and competition from new educational providers (such as MOOCs). Unsurprisingly, universities (supported by national governments) have turned to technology, especially online course delivery, as an answer to their problems. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, universities have attempted to reduce operating costs by looking for increases in scale (through mergers, transnational partnerships, international branch campuses and so on). Mega-universities are growing, and there are thirty-three in Asia alone (Selwyn Education in a Digital World New York: Routledge 2013, p.6). Universities like the Turkish Anadolu University, with over one million students, are no longer exceptional in terms of scale. In this world, online educational provision is a key element. Secondly, and not to put too fine a point on it, online instruction is cheaper (Spring, Education Networks 2012, p.2).

All other things being equal, why would any language department of an institute of higher education not choose an online environment with an adaptive element? Adaptive learning, for the time being at any rate, may be seen as ‘the much needed key to the “Iron Triangle” that poses a conundrum to HE providers; cost, access and quality. Any attempt to improve any one of those conditions impacts negatively on the others. If you want to increase access to a course you run the risk of escalating costs and jeopardising quality, and so on.[7]’

Meanwhile, ELT publishers have been hit by rampant pirating of their materials, spiraling development costs of their flagship products and the growth of open educational resources. An excellent blog post by David Wiley[8] explains why adaptive learning services are a heaven-sent opportunity for publishers to modify their business model. ‘While the broad availability of free content and open educational resources have trained internet users to expect content to be free, many people are still willing to pay for services. Adaptive learning systems exploit this willingness by deeply intermingling content and services so that you cannot access one with using the other. Naturally, because an adaptive learning service is comprised of content plus adaptive services, it will be more expensive than static content used to be. And because it is a service, you cannot simply purchase it like you used to buy a textbook. An adaptive learning service is something you subscribe to, like Netflix. […] In short, why is it in a content company’s interest to enable you to own anything? Put simply, it is not. When you own a copy, the publisher completely loses control over it. When you subscribe to content through a digital service (like an adaptive learning service), the publisher achieves complete and perfect control over you and your use of their content.’

Although the initial development costs of building a suitable learning platform with adaptive capabilities are high, publishers will subsequently be able to produce and modify content (i.e. learning materials) much more efficiently. Since content will be mashed up and delivered in many different ways, author royalties will be cut or eliminated. Production and distribution costs will be much lower, and sales and marketing efforts can be directed more efficiently towards the most significant customers. The days of ELT sales reps trying unsuccessfully to get an interview with the director of studies of a small language school or university department are becoming a thing of the past. As with the universities, scale will be everything.

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[1]http://www.atomico.com/news/item/our-investment-in-knewton (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[2]http://www.eltjam.com/adaptive-learning/ (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[3] http://www.knewton.com/ (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[4] MIT Technology Review, November 26, 2012 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506366/questions-surround-software-that-adapts-to-students/ (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[5] Published March 11, 2013 http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/10432/an-avalanche-is-coming-higher-education-and-the-revolution-ahead (last accessed 1 January 2014)

[6] Eltjam August 28, 2013 http://www.eltjam.com/elts-collective-consciousness-what-can-we-learn-from-the-questions-we-ask/ (last accessed 13 January 2014)

[7] Tim Gifford Taking it Personally: Adaptive Learning July 9, 2013 http://www.eltjam.com/adaptive-learning/ (last accessed January 13, 2014)

[8] David Wiley, Buying our Way into Bondage: the risks of adaptive learning services March 20,2013 http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2754 (last accessed January 13, 2014)