As A.J. Oconnell said in 2016, “Educators still use “adaptive” and “personalized” learning interchangeably. Does it matter?“
In June of 2015, leaders in adaptive learning hashed out the definitions of personalized and adaptive learning at a summit in Santa Fe, NM, hosted by WCET (the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies). And now, more than a year later, the adaptive learning community has moved on. The terms have been defined: “personalized learning” is any customization of learning by an instructor, while “adaptive” refers to technology that monitors student progress in a course and uses that data to modify instruction in real-time.
The formal discussion of what those terms mean, at least among experts, is over.
“Today, it’s not even part of the conversation,” said Niki Bray, WCET adaptive learning fellow and an assistant professor and instructional designer with the University of Memphis School of Health Sciences. “We’re not even having that discussion with the vendors anymore.”