Adaptive Training
Adaptive Training involves tailored interventions for the development or refinement of knowledge and skills that incorporate learners’ goals and motivations, and match learning experiences and resources appropriately. Adaptive training should also engender opportunities for personal growth, foster metacognitive ability such as learning from one’s strengths and weaknesses, deliver personalized real-time performance assessment and/or feedback, and refresh learners’ understanding.
Human-computer interaction (HCI) principles, social-process simulation, and experience design methods can extend adaptive training design to include culturally-situated systems of experiences throughout training, between formal sessions, and after these sessions have concluded. Our approach to adaptive training leverages informal learning opportunities that occur during reflection, among peers, when we are at play, and in community.
Training occurs in culturally-situated contexts and as such, its technologies often reflect both the intended and unconscious values and world views of its developers, designers, and researchers. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall declared that “culture is communication” in his 1959 seminal book, Silent Language (p. 97). Whether we are aware of it or not, we designers of adaptive training technologies cannot help but communicate our own cultural values and world views through the artifacts we create. Our approach strives to better understand how to co-create training & education technology that is ethical, equitable, inclusive, and multicultural.
Research Summary
Our approach to adaptive training is concerned with increasing our understanding of adaptive technologies by exploring fundamental issues from the scientific and philosophical foundations to end user deployment. Below is a list of research interests that we believe inform the design, development, and deployment of adaptive training systems.
- Scientific Foundations
- Communication
- Human-computer interaction
- Psychology
- Cultural anthropology
- Users
- Military Active Duty
- Ministry of Defense Advisors (MODA)
- Youth and families
- Wounded Warriors
- Concept Development
- Assumptions
- Accessibility
- Design & Development
- Validation
- Deployment
- Outcomes
- Adaptive stance
- Cultural awareness
- Metacognitive agiity
- Emotional intelligence
Adaptive Training Lead – Elaine Raybourn
Dr. Elaine Raybourn has a Ph.D. in Intercultural Communication with an emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction. She brings an expertise in understanding culture and intercultural communication to the design of collaborative virtual environments and modeling & simulation. Her research and design efforts include game-based and immersive military education & training, in-game assessment techniques, and designing personalized, experiential training systems that stimulate intercultural competence, metacognitive agility, and an adaptive stance. Elaine’s greatest passion is engendering intercultural communication and multicultural understanding for all through the design of experiential and collaborative virtual environments. She has led the development of two serious game titles for the U.S. Government and was on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Serious Games Summit from 2004-2007. She is currently an Integrated Project Team (IPT) member of the I/ITSEC Serious Games Showcase & Challenge and is on the editorial boards of the international journals Interactive Technology and Smart Education, Journal of Game-based Learning, and Simulation & Gaming. Elaine is a former ERCIM (European Consortium for Research in Informatics and Mathematics) fellow and has worked at research laboratories in the U.K., Germany, and France. Elaine is a recipient of the Department of the Army Award for Patriotic Civilian Service, awarded to her by the U.S. Army Special Forces Training & Doctrine Command. Elaine is a high sensation seeker, scientist, and artist. Her favorite thing to do on and off the job is…grow.
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What is adaptive training?
Adaptive training involves tailored interventions for the development or refinement of knowledge and skills. Adaptive training should also engender opportunities for personal growth, foster metacognitive ability such as learning from one’s strengths and weaknesses, deliver personalized real-time performance assessment and/or feedback, and refresh learners’ understanding.
What is the focus of the Adaptive Training Team?
The Adaptive Training Team conducts research related to entire systems of technology-mediated interactions (among humans, avatars, software agents, intelligent and predictive tools, cognitive models, etc.) that are tailored to learners and instrumental in the co-creation of their learning experiences.
Our goal is to better comprehend these technologies from both scientific and philosophical perspectives. We strive to better understand how to co-create training & education technology that is ethical, equitable, inclusive, and multicultural.
What is an adaptive system?
An adaptive system in the ADL context stems from a learning theory/instructional design approach in addressing how the learning experiences/performance interventions themselves may be “micro-structured” in order to permit the broadest possible opportunity for variation. This capability for variation coupled with a carefully designed analysis engine driving the choice of which variation(s) to deliver to the learner enables a robust adaptive system.
“Adaptive systems” is an umbrella term that includes not only systems that deliver pre-scripted variations in learning paths, responses, screens, etc., but systems such as intelligent tutoring systems that spontaneously generate new content (some might call these “generative systems”). Whereas, under the pre-scripted variation paradigm, two learners might actually see the same content, there may be little or no chance of that in generative systems, which can create a unique experience for the learner based on what he or she knows, what an expert knows, and the intended outcome.
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