Experience with adaptive learning
Each of us has a different understanding of the world, different opportunities to achieve our goals, and therefore different learning needs. However, organizations often provide the same training to everyone, as if we are all the same. This means that none of us ever get the training we need.
We can learn, but we do not become professionals as effectively as if each of us had received training tailored to our individual requirements.
Think about your own learning. Ask yourself: How often have you not gotten what you needed when you needed it, or gotten something you soon forgot?
This is the root problem that adaptive learning is designed to solve. Provide instruction that provides exactly what each student needs, and only what is needed.
So what is adaptive learning? The definition is extremely broad: adaptive learning is any learning design that tailors learning to an understanding of each individual's skills and interests.
Learning design can be adaptive using what we call artificial intelligence or machine learning (collectively “AI”). But this can be as simple as providing students with additional links or doing some interesting branching. Or providing opportunities to make mistakes and provide useful lessons for recovery. Or creating learning content on the fly while they engage in cognitive activities that reliably meet learning needs. All of this can be achieved in any number of ways, with or without AI. “We feel that the goal is essentially the same whether we use algorithms, non-linear storytelling (branching), links and/or human intervention to achieve it.”
What makes flexible people different?
A person with a flexible mind constantly rethinks ways to solve a problem and finds new ones to cope with the problem better, easier and faster.
Many successful people we admire have been endowed with this ability. The key to their fruitful activity is the daily desire for something new.
It's important to keep asking questions. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One can only reverently admire the mysteries of eternity, existence or the amazing structure of reality. It is enough to try every day to comprehend this mystery at least a little.
Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner
Leonardo da Vinci maintained his curiosity throughout his life, and today he is considered one of the most unique people in history. His passion for knowledge led him to success in a variety of fields: da Vinci devoted himself to art, technology, philosophy and the natural sciences.
The eccentricity of great people is the result of their own desires and efforts. Vivid imagination, curiosity and observation are the qualities we should adopt.
I always do what I don't know how to do. So I can learn it.
Pablo Picasso, artist
Examples of adaptive learning from everyday life
Here's an example of "adaptive learning" that doesn't involve computers at all. Imagine that you want to learn how to bake bread, so you ask your mother to teach you. She knows how to bake bread: how to mix ingredients, how to knead, how long to let the dough rise, how to bake it. She also knows that you tend to throw away ingredients haphazardly, like getting your hands dirty to learn, and you can easily mess things up, like not adding flour during kneading so the dough sticks to the counter. But she's your mom, so she's patient. She allows you to make mistakes and figure things out, and always steps in when needed to save the day, so you don't throw the wad of dough that should be your bread across the room in frustration. And it can answer a lot of your questions, like how much salt to add to the flour when you mix and what "yeast proofing" means, so you gain experience as you go.
In short, your mom will tailor the learning environment just for you, so you'll learn to bake a loaf of bread pretty quickly—certainly faster than if she made you watch a YouTube tutorial. She does this by using her knowledge of you and the subject matter. Her approach may be different for your older brother, the more patient brother who also has more baking experience: your training is tailored just to you and your unique situation at that point in your life.
Compare the above with the principal's orientation toward parents at the beginning of the school year.
Parents come to the classroom with different interests. Some already have children who were previously in school and just want to hear what has changed. Others are doing this for the first time and for them all the information is new, they perceive it with great enthusiasm. Some have specific questions they want to ask about their child and the care they will receive; others are looking for a general orientation to school policies and procedures, and some are there only because their spouse or child insisted on it. They all take their seats and the principal begins showing slides and talking about classes, teachers, policies and procedures, giving everyone the same information.
What is the result of such training? Some people will get bored quickly because they already know (or think they know) what it's about. Others will be confused because the information is not relevant to their understanding. Some people grasp at a few pieces of information and miss the rest; others are dozing. No one learns as well as they could if a personalized approach were taken.
Online training is more like a school meeting than teaching a child how to bake bread. And much of it is pre-scripted: Students must watch each video and interact with a specific component to complete the course. So everyone should spend, say, 30 or 40 minutes, regardless of whether they are bored or that they already have this knowledge. Not only is this terribly ineffective, but it can also create a strong aversion to learning on the part of the student, who may be reluctant to participate in any future learning without being forced to do so.
In contrast to this one-size-fits-all approach, imagine an eLearning course that dynamically adapts to the understanding, skills, and interests of the individual learner. In such a course, each person receives only the necessary instructions and nothing extra that is not needed. Someone who demands more explanation, more context, or more practice gets it, while someone who is already familiar with it may fall on deaf ears. The training goes exactly as long as everyone needs to master the content, without giving anyone what they don’t need.
Does this sound like an educational utopia, an unattainable ideal? In fact, there are many ways to achieve this goal, some technological, others involving instructional design, or a combination of both. To see this, we gave an example of a mother learning to bake bread.
Soft Skills and Hard Skills: What's the difference?
In Soviet times, narrow specialists were at a premium. Back then, information was difficult to obtain; technology did not change for decades. As a rule, a person worked in one place all his life.
Changes at the end of the 20th century broke the traditional idea of professionalism. Now “narrow” knowledge can be obtained on the Internet in a few seconds. Technologies are constantly updated. Forms of employment are also changing. Therefore, “narrow professionalism” ceases to be an advantage, and sometimes begins to interfere with a person’s success in the labor market.
Two terms have appeared:
- Hard Skills are “hard”, that is, specific, deeply technological knowledge, skills and abilities that are in demand only in a given area, and sometimes only in this enterprise.
- Soft Skills are “soft” or “soft” competencies that are applicable in a variety of professional areas. Next, we will analyze what it is – Soft Skills – in simple words, we will give examples of soft skills.
In recent years, employers have begun to pay more and more attention to Soft-Skills. This is easy to explain. Developing narrow professional skills is now faster and cheaper than developing broad, flexible competencies. But it is the latter that determine the effectiveness of a modern specialist. Therefore, it is important to know what soft skills are and how to develop them.
These competencies are especially necessary for freelancers, since they have to promote their services on the market themselves.
Digital adaptive teaching methodology
Here is a functional diagram of an online course that provides adaptive learning. This is the logic in an eLearning module that contains a set of lessons and has a final mastery exam to ensure that students who complete the course achieve the required level of proficiency.
Students who enter a course with confidence that they have mastery of a topic can take a "test" exam that determines whether they have mastered the subject, and thus proceed directly to the final exam. If other students are unsure, they can work through all the lessons before taking the final exam. And there are those who may start studying and after a few lessons decide that they have the necessary skills, and then take a test only to abandon the rest. Ultimately, different people will have different paths through the course, but they will all achieve their desired goals. And note that, other than the quiz, there was no additional content to be created, as if the course had been presented in a simple linear sequence.
What are soft skills? Full list
To explain what it is – Soft Skills – in simple words, it’s easier to use examples of soft skills. Their list is quite extensive and is updated periodically. But we can distinguish several groups and key skills in each of them. So, let's see what Soft Skills are and what they are.
Communicative:
- Establish contact and organize dialogue with different people.
- Exert influence and negotiate effectively.
- Speak and write clearly, convincingly, and master various formats of business communication.
- Present (yourself, company, product, etc.).
- Be able to listen and hear.
List of Social Skills Soft Skills:
- Flexibly switch between roles (this means being able to both lead and obey, and be on an equal footing depending on the situation, and not get “stuck” in professional deformations, statuses, behavior patterns, etc.).
- Establish connections and position yourself in the community.
- Work independently and in a team.
- Manage conflicts.
- Have emotional intelligence.
- Maintain work ethics.
Self-management (or more simply – self-regulation):
- Ability to manage your time and resources.
- Deep knowledge of oneself, one’s characteristics and the ability to effectively socialize in different environments, taking into account these circumstances.
- Adaptability to changing conditions.
- The ability to learn, unlearn and relearn.
- Keeping yourself in “working shape”, self-motivation, preventing burnout, etc.
- Skills in goal setting and development management (project, own career, etc.).
List of Management and Research Soft Skills:
- Analyze and predict.
- Create and modernize systems.
- Decisions.
- Ability to think outside the box;
- Search and create resources, information, ways out.
- Be able to distribute tasks and synchronize with other team members even with large differences in work styles and content.
Sometimes computer literacy is also added to the list of Soft Skills. But today it is no longer a soft skill, but a basic “default” concept - how to read or count. Therefore, it does not belong to Soft Skills. Additionally, it is worth mentioning the desirability of at least minimal economic and legal “savvy” for a representative of any profession in demand on the Internet.
We looked at what Soft Skills competencies are. Next, we’ll explain in simple terms what their value is and who needs to develop them.
Benefits of adaptive learning for an organization
Adaptive learning can bring a number of important benefits to an organization:
Less boredom and confusion
Students should not sit through learning that is not beneficial, which is a waste of time and money. If there are only 20 minutes of a 60-minute course that benefit a given person, but the person must sit for the entire hour, that's 40 minutes that the person could have spent doing something else. Likewise, if the training is too hard, students are likely to get lost, resulting in unnecessary re-training and hours spent trying to master the skill. Learning that helps us gain speed more efficiently results in us spending our time more efficiently.
Better learning
If a student does not have to go through learning that is not relevant, they are more likely to pay attention to and engage in the learning that is more relevant to them. This leads to greater retention of the knowledge gained during training.
More joy
Adult learners like to control what they see and do; This is a quality people value in work experience; one-size-fits-all training takes away our freedom of choice, which can lead to frustration, even if this loss of control ultimately benefits us. Giving students control over their learning gives them positive emotions and is likely to make them happier. This leads to better results. If learning brings us joy, we are more likely to seek it out in situations where it is possible. If this does not happen, we will try to avoid learning.
Easier Instructional Design
If a course is presented in a generic form, the instructional designer has to work hard to ensure that every part of it is relevant to the entire target audience, in all situations. Do all stakeholders believe that these topics and these presentations are necessary and sufficient for everyone in their community to perform better? Most likely no. This results in the instructional designer writing them very carefully and rewriting and reworking them over and over again. This may be due to difficult decisions regarding what to include and what to omit.
If, alternatively, there is a means of assigning content based on the learner's knowledge and skill level, the content designer can create content much more easily and do less editing because each participant's concerns can be conveyed to the audience segment that needs it. The text also does not have to meet the lowest common denominator of understanding. This leads to faster learning development.
Who needs to develop Soft Skills?
Of course, the answer is everyone. But special attention to the development of Soft Skills is recommended for those who, for a number of reasons, are less competitive in the labor market:
- People without work experience (recent graduates and those changing their career profile).
- Specialists over 50 years old (as a rule, they focused on Hard Skills in their professional growth, and soft skills often “sink”).
- For beginning managers.
- Those planning to move or emigrate.
- Representatives of professions for which demand is falling.
We will look at how to develop Soft Skills later in the article.
So why not use adaptive learning?
Given the benefits of adaptive learning, why aren't more organizations doing it? Two obstacles often stand in the way.
First, when faced with the need to teach a particular subject, it is quite difficult to understand what exactly needs to be taught, much less determine how different people can get it, especially if these people number in the thousands. This is especially true when the dominant approach is instructor-led learning, which usually has to be the same for everyone due to having a class full of students and an hour to learn something. Those who convert instructor-led learning to digital learning often don't see an opportunity to do anything differently. The ability to take into account the different needs of learners and to adapt learning to these differences requires a set of skills developed through repeated attempts and learning from each attempt, which takes time to acquire.
Second, many may not realize that there are ways to incorporate adaptive learning into their teaching that do not require extensive engineering or proprietary technology. Almost all development tools, including the AntiTraining platform, allow the e-learning developer to incorporate adaptive learning methods into a course without the need to build complex algorithms.
Why are soft skills needed and what is their value?
The modern labor market does not guarantee that a person will be able to maintain his existing employment for a long enough time. The same applies to the company as a whole. Work formats, employment, demand, technologies and products are changing, professions appear and disappear.
The need to develop soft skills and the ability to adapt adaptively was clearly demonstrated to the whole world by the 2020 pandemic. Employees and managers suddenly needed to move their companies to remote work quickly and efficiently. At the same time, do not lose productivity and competitiveness. Or even find a way to survive in the conditions of a ban on this or that activity. The success of solving these problems was almost entirely determined by the development of flexible competencies among employees and managers.
How does having Soft Skills affect your career in the office and freelancing?
- Working in a large organization sometimes still allows you to rely only on Hard Skills. Large companies can have a branched structure and a strict division of functionality, complementing narrow professionals in a large team with specialists with soft skills.
- Freelancing, self-employment and small business are impossible without a high level of Soft Skills. Soft competencies in modern conditions determine competitiveness in the labor market and the ability to move up the career ladder.
- Even a super-professional in the field of Hard Skills without soft skills will remain an ordinary performer with an impenetrable “ceiling” of salary and will have a high level of risk of being stuck with problems with employment in the event of losing his job.
Developing communication skills, the ability to negotiate and negotiate, and managing a team can contribute to rapid career growth and success in general.
Author: Kadrof.ru (KadrofID: 79032) Added: 07/16/2020 at 20:59
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Comments (2)
Vladimir Kazakov (KadrofID: 15518)
“The employer understands: a mid-level programmer can be upgraded to a pro. But teaching an adult to interact with colleagues is unlikely.”
“Developing soft skills is a solvable task. This can also be learned by a non-contact, non-communicative person, as in the TV series “The Good Doctor”. But only he himself can do this. The employer has no opportunity to either influence the process or help it.”
I don't agree. It is quite possible to teach a person to communicate with other people. at least in person or at special courses. and it’s no more difficult than prof. skills.
07/19/2020 at 14:42
Sergey Antropov (KadrofID: 5)
Vladimir, you can, of course. But for this, the person himself must want to improve his skills, which is what the article talks about. Those. It is possible to upgrade an employee professionally without his active desire, but it is unlikely to change some psychological attitudes in the same way.
07/22/2020 at 00:14
