Adaptive Educational Systems

What is an adaptive educational system?

• system that adapts to individual students
• to achieve personalization
• enhance larning
• increase motivation

Examples

• Outline Maps (geography)
• other systems
  • anatom.cz
  • matmat.cz
  • cerego.com

How does it work?

• collects data (e.g. students' answers)
• uses (mathematical) models to represent students
  • e.g. to estimate difficulties, skills, etc.
• predicts correctness of answers
• selects questions with 70 % probability of correct answer

Modeling Human Memory

• why?
  • better student's representation ⇒ better predictions
• how?
  • encoding key aspects of human memory
  • ⇒ learning, forgetting, spacing effect

How to design models that encode forgetting, learning, ...?

• inspiration comes from cognitive psychology
  • i.e. the study of mental processes
• the process usually goes like this
  1. choose a suitable model
  2. implement the model
  3. do some modifications
  4. compare results with other models
  5. goto 1.

How to encode e.g. forgetting?

• explicitly (mathematical functions, ...)

• implicitly (neural networks, ...)

• research group at FI MUNI
• http://fi.muni.cz/adaptivelearning