It’s a challenge as old as education: adapting learning to each student instead of imposing the same lesson on both the best and the worst. To face this challenge, education professionals began to dream, as early as the 1960s, of artificial intelligence (AI) capable of doing so at low cost and on a large scale. In recent years, the arrival of ChatGPT, available from 2022 and already used by teachers to personalize their exercises, has rekindled this hope.
However, it is not the conversational robot developed by the American company OpenAI that is currently being deployed by national education but rather an older technology, based on the precepts of “adaptive learning” – adaptive learningin English. After experiments carried out starting in 2020 with six companies, Gabriel Attal announced in 2023 the deployment of a digital tutor, Mia Seconde, for 800,000 second grade secondary school students (an almost complete age group) to support mathematics lessons and French from the beginning. of the 2024 school year, his successors at the Ministry of National Education have downplayed this ambition: “Mia Seconde is only offered to a few tens of thousands of students at this time.” observes Catherine de Vulpillières, co-founder of EvidenceB, the company that won the tender and is now developing the software.
Looking at the latter’s simple menus, you can’t guess how complex its machinery is. From the thousands of memorized exercises with minimal level variations, choose, for each student, only a few dozen exercises, in order to build a learning path that is neither too complex nor too simple. The course is personalized thanks to an initial level test, then thanks to an AI that observes the student’s response times, their errors and their rate of progress. “The hope is to promote a feeling of competence and prevent the student from becoming demobilized.” analyzes Christophe Jeunesse, director of the department of educational sciences at the Paris-Nanterre University.
“Adaptive learning”, an obsolete technology?
Choosing software based on this technology may be surprising because the popularity of adaptive learning has been declining among digital learning experts since 2017, according to a survey by research company Opensesame. Media startups of the 2000s and 2010s, such as Knewton and Amplify, sold for very modest sums. “Too many systems implemented are too basic or poorly theoretically founded”says Fien Depaepe, professor at the Center for Educational Psychology and Technology at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.
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