The Impact of Personalized Learning: Strategies for Expanding Access and Improving Outcomes

Concurrent Session 2
Streamed Session

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Brief Abstract

This session will discuss how advances in data-driven instructional design and learning analytics are enabling improvements in learning outcomes – particularly in high enrollment, general education gateway courses.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Alison Pendergast, Acrobatiq

For all of her professional career, Alison has focused on understanding the trends and harnessing the power of technology to improve education. Over the past nineteen years, she has helped bring to market numerous transformative and market-leading print and digital learning products in multiple Executive roles, first at Pearson, and most recently, at Jones & Bartlett Learning. She is a long-time advocate of using technology to expand access to education and was instrumental in the development of Accesstext.org, a leading public-private partnership delivering alternate textbooks to students with disabilities. She was also a founding contributor of Coursesmart, LLC, now the world’s largest digital textbook store on the Internet. In addition to her professional career, Alison is a Distinguished Military Graduate from the University of Connecticut ARMY R.O.T.C. program and a veteran US Army Medical Service Corps Officer. She holds a Masters in Business Administration, cum laude from Norwich University.

Extended Abstract

Low income and underserved postsecondary students are balancing jobs, families and other priorities – often impeding their ability to complete their degree or credential. While studies have shown that personalized learning is one tool that can help students to improve learning outcomes, how can higher education institutions provide access to truly personalized high-quality education at a cost that makes it accessible to all students who seek it? Rather than focusing on how we can build an online classroom for one million students, Acrobatiq is focused on building a million classrooms, each for one student by empowering institutions to rapidly develop and deliver high quality online courses and programs through adaptive learning technology. Acrobatiq’s outcomes-based and data-driven approach is based on 12 years of pioneering cognitive and learning science research from CMU. This approach is proven to produce measurable learning gains for students, including improved retention and recall, faster course completion, and better long-term knowledge retention/retrieval. It delivers a truly personalized learning experience while decreasing costs and expanding access.