VISION OF THE FUTURE

How do we make the most of this opportunity?  Here at Compare the Macaque, we believe that teachers should be heavily involved at every stage of the process.  Automation technologies should be developed by teachers, not just for teachers (Ross et al., 2019) so that the smart algorithms have been created with learners front of mind. 

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In the classroom, great teachers contextualise content to their students and it is here that educators can add great value by adapting to what their learners require (Kitchin, 2017). This is in contrast to just leaving the smart algorithms to do the teaching. 

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We see a huge opportunity in the future for teachers, and learners, to complete the loop and provide more input.  Adaptivity requires data about learners (Aleven et al., 2016), and teachers, as well as learners themselves, are best placed to provide this.  The more information about a learner, the more personalised the experience.  In addition to this, we also see more opportunity for crowd-sourcing of responses (Heffernan et al., 2016).  Adaptive learning technologies need to better understand what the user is trying to do when responding to a question and, even in mathematics, there are generally multiple ways to achieve the same outcome.  It is here, once again, that an algorithm can be used to assess the quality of the feedback provided – if students answer their next question correctly, it would suggest that feedback from the previous question was high quality and should be used more by the system for other learners (Heffernan et al., 2016).