Why do we need to adapt education?

We are all human beings. But we are different. Different genders, tastes, different social conditions, different life paths.

People are different.

So, given that, it is reasonable to think that somethings that are offered in the same way for a large group of people will be more relevant or effective on some people than the other. And education is one of these things.

Since we are kids, we are used to study inside rooms with lot of other people, with all of them receiving being taught by the exact same teacher, with the exact same books, being tested with the exame, in the exact same room. We are being taught by the exact manner, even though every one of us are completely different from the other. This way of teaching obviously beneficts a lot more some people than the other by the simple fact that the ones that are beneficied are luckier to be better affected by the way the teacher is dealing with the class. That doesn’t mean the other people that do not go so well in the class are less capable than the other. They just need a different approach that suits their style and way of thinking.

Unfortunatelly it is not possible for a teacher in a class room to tackle everyone specific needs and way of learning because of some reasons:

• The teacher would have to have a up to date model of every student to know their needs;
• The teacher would have to know how to deal with each of these models, the best approach to deal with them and also be capable of doing so;
• The teacher would have to assess the changes of each student to update the student model.

Due to human limitations, a teacher alone is not up to the task. Computers to the rescue.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

One popular way to help on these tasks is to use a intelligent tutoring system (ITS). An ITS is a computer system that is able to provide adapted learning content to the student. Its architecture is generally the following:

ITS general architecture.

Inside and ITS have 3 models:

• Student model: Responsible for represent all the student related information, like his knowledge, difficults, prefered way of learning, prefered topics etc.
• Domain model: It represents the knowledge that will be taugh by the systems. Inside this model there is theorems, theorys, proofs, facts etc.
• Tutor model: Also known as pedagogical model, it is responsible for represent the ways the content will be presented to the student, based on the domain model and student model. It will decide how to best present material to the student in order to fit his needs.

Of course we just can’t replace every teacher by a computer, due to a lot of facts, but this “ideal” architecture is very useful to guide us towards a better adaptive and personalized teaching environments.