The Adaptive Learning Pilot School Program

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Creating autonomous learning materials for the MOE-funded online platform, Adaptive Learning

The Learning Management System

The algorithm of Adaptive Learning assigns videos to students based on the error pattern analysis. When watching a video, students can pause, rewind, or rewatch it at their learning pace.

Take junior high English for example. Students will take quizzes on the website for the autonomous system to determine that a specific "knowledge node" is a prerequisite for that mastery learning. After watching the video, students will take another quiz from the question bank and supposedly get everything right this time.

Pilot School Program

As a pilot school, me and the other two team members have been creating original and authentic learning packages for each knowledge node. These learning materials are in line with the national curriculum core competencies. Each package includes question banks, PowerPoint slides, and EMI (English as a medium of instruction) teaching videos.

The pilot schools will have student accounts ready for teachers to assign quizzes and videos. They can keep track of each student's test results and learning progress in the form of a "star chart.", which visually displays a student's bright stars and dark stars. In other words, the mastered and unfamiliar concepts of a subject.

The Highlights of My Packages

My assigned category for the knowledge node is "Listening Comprehension: Understanding a dialogue with sentence patterns." It's both demanding and challenging because I need to create quality learning materials and EMI videos.

1. Creating Original Stories

I'd use two characters for each package and have them talk about an interesting topic related to students' real life. For example, Tony Stark and Peter Parker, Little Prince and Fox, or Harry Potter and Hermione Granger would be talking about their trips to Taichung, a favorite food in Taiwan, and so on, using various sentence patterns in the textbooks. I really hope students can learn about grammar for real communication in life, not just getting good grades on tests.

2. Recording EMI videos

I referred to three of my favorite English teaching shows, Actual English with Jennifer, Easy English, and Business English Pod, for scripting my videos. They include the intro, the topic, review and practice, actual conversation and expressions, comprehension check, and the outro. Then, I make my videos on Corel VideoStudio 2019 with the MultiCam Capture feature, which allows me to record slide presentations and edit out unwanted parts.

3. Post-processing Voice-overs

I bought a dynamic USB microphone, the Audio-Technica ATR 2100, for better audio. To make myself sound more professional, I used Audacity and followed a recipe by 5 Steps to Improve Your Voiceover in Audacity, including Noise Reduction, Compressor, Limiter, Bass and Treble, and Normalize.

4. Toonly Animated Lectures

I had wanted to make animations and do voiceovers for cartoon animated explainer videos. With this project, I finally got a good reason to spend the money and purchase a life-time enterprise membership. However, I can only use Toonly as transitions in my videos because I'm almost certain that I can't churn out what I promised.

One thing that has been bothering the other members and me is the quality of the reviews. Some reviewers seemed not to understand what makes a good package of Adaptive Learning. They sometimes even gave unprofessional as well as unrealistic feedback and suggestions of our works.