Individualization for Education at Scale: MIIC Design and Preliminary Evaluation

Abstract

We present the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of our Adaptive Educational System (AES): the Mobile Integrated and Individualized Course (MIIC). MIIC is a platform for personalized course delivery which integrates lecture videos, text, assessments, and social learning into a mobile native app, and collects clickstream-level behavioral measurements about each student as they interact with the material. These measurements can subsequently be used to update the student’s user model, which can in turn be used to determine the content adaptation. Recruiting students from one of our Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), we have conducted two preliminary trials with MIIC, in which we found (i) that the majority of students (70 percent) preferred MIIC overall to a one-size-fits-all (OSFA) presentation of the same material, (ii) that the mean level of engagement, when quantified as the number of pages viewed, was statistically higher (by 72 percent) among students using MIIC than among OSFA, and (iii) that the integrated multimedia learning features were generally favorable among the students (e.g., 87 percent found the videos helpful).