| | November 20179step educational system. Consistently, removing learning time as a constant has been shown to be a positive element in successful course completion. Further, students from underserved communities have much less financial and temporal slack in their lives to manage the many pressures that poverty creates; these students have too many needs and not enough resources, causing trade-off thinking where their studies become secondary to their life demands. Adaptive learning has the potential to relieve some of those pressures especially if combined with online learning.These methods also maximize student retention and success with predictive analytics, identifying early on when intervention is most effective for students at higher risk of failure or dropping out. Adaptive Learning ChallengesAdaptive learning presents a number of challenges to higher education in its current form. Adaptiveness is not consistent across platforms and mismatches in design and operational characteristics with the university culture can be formidable to overcome. Relaxing the learning time constraint causes instruction to exceed or shorten traditional education boundaries such as semesters and academic years. How do we accommodate students who need a few more weeks to achieve mastery in terms of transcripts and financial aid? What is to be done with students who complete intermediate algebra in half a semester and are ready to go on to college algebra in the middle of the term? Adaptive learning is much better suited for a continuous skill set than discrete components such as courses. Adaptiveness also changes the teaching and learning paradigm. Although the instructor remains a critical part of the process when serving in an augmented mentor role, students' primary interaction is with the adaptive platform. This constitutes a fundamental role transformation for both teacher and student. Finally, how do we incorporate a social learning component into adaptive systems where education is more than the student interacting with the machine? These are substantial challenges but excellent opportunities as well. We just have to adapt to them. At the pedagogical level, adaptive learning offers the flexibility in educational programs, freeing students from the traditional lock step educational system
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