Tools and Strategies for Using Adaptive Learning, Peer Learning and Co-creation in Higher Education

Introduction: Educators continue to face significant challenges in providing high quality, post-secondary instruction in large classes. A significant portion of these challenges may be categorised as either content-related or support-related. Content-related challenges mostly emerge from high levels of diversity in learners’ academic ability, and support-related challenges emerge from less direct and indirect contact time of the teaching staff with each leaner. These challenges often lead to the learners receiving less timely and helpful feedback and guidance from the teaching staff. The usage of recent advancements in educational technologies coupled with new methods of course delivery provides promising perspectives in addressing these issues. In particular, there is a growing body of knowledge that provides evidence that adaptive learning platforms can be leveraged in assisting with content-related challenges and peer learning and mentoring can be utilised in assisting with support-related challenges. Additionally, learning sciences provide a plethora of evidence that inviting learners to be more actively involved in their construction of knowledge, by facilitating learning across many of the higher-level objectives of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy, improves learning and increases learner satisfaction.

Aim: This workshop aims to introduce strategies and a platform called RiPPLE for employing adaptive learning, peer learning and co-creation in large classes, aiming to narrow the gap between these large bodies of research and effective approaches that instructors can easily employ in their courses.

Intended audience:

Tentative schedule

If you are interested in using RiPPLE, please fill in this Expression of Interest form.

Workshop Organiser: Hassan Khosravi is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation and an Affiliate Academic in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology at The University of Queensland. Prior to joining the University of Queensland, he held a Lecturer position in the Department of Computer Science at The University of British Columbia. Hassan holds a PhD from the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. As a computer scientist by training, he is passionate about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of education. In his research, he aims to apply insight from adaptive learning, peer learning, crowdsourcing and recommender systems to narrow the gap between these large bodies of research, and practical implementations that contribute to personalisation of education.