Welcome to Realizeit Labs, the website and blog of the Realizeit Research and Development team. Our mission is to build, extend and evolve the capabilities of Realizeit, our learning platform. We plan to use this space to share with you some of what we are working on, both internally and in collaboration with our partners.

So why are we doing this? There are several reasons.

First, while not a new concept, adaptive learning has new potential and possibilities given the technology and data that is available today. Back in 1963, John Carroll recognized that if educational time is held constant, student learning will be the variable. He suggested altering the paradigm so that learning becomes the constant, making time the variable - the basis of adaptive learning. We have learned much since Carroll, but given the new pace and direction of today’s implementation of adaptive learning, we are just at the start, and much still needs to be figured out. We want to contribute to the conversation and the body of knowledge, which is why we partner with institutions on research projects and share what we learn. We have developed close research relationships with several of our partner institutions including the University of Central Florida and Colorado Technical University. You can read about our collaborative work and see some of our findings in our Educause Review article, An Adaptive Learning Partnership.

The second reason for Realizeit Labs is to foster collaboration between institutions to help them, and us, get the most out of their data and to help students learn and succeed. We want to create a space where we can share what our partners are working on, so that they can learn from each other. A fantastic organic community of cooperation has grown among the users of our platform; we want to support this in any way we can.

So, what can you expect to see from us? There are several areas to the site in addition to this blog. On the Papers page, we will list any published papers that reference Realizeit. The papers will be a mix of those generated from collaborations in which we are involved, as well as those of independent research projects. The Meetings page lists upcoming sessions or meetings at conferences involving someone from the R&D team. If you want to catch us in person, then you will know where we will be. We will also keep a list of any past sessions so you can see what we’ve been doing. We plan to eventually have a Projects section that will share some more specific details and artifacts from internal and collaborative projects. We don’t just want to share our papers, but some of the workings - when possible/

Some of the topics you will soon see include our collaborative work on student behaviors with UCF and CTU, as well as some exciting collaborative work with Charles Sturt University related to their self-directed learning model underpinned by their Topic Tree. We will also share some internal projects such as our efforts to capture “soft” data from students (including their affective state), and how we plan to improve individual self-regulated learning by integrating feedback directly into the learning process.

We hope this gives you an understanding of what we plan to do and that you’ll come back and check up on our progress!