Teaching and Learning

New Instructional Design Platform for Adaptive Learning Materials

• By Rhea Kelly
• 07/23/15

Smart Sparrow has launched an instructional design platform that allows faculty to create their own adaptive courseware. Expanding on the company's adaptive lesson authoring suite, the platform incorporates new templates for creating interactive, adaptive learning materials, as well as data analytics tools that monitor student progress.

"As a professor of computer science, technology is at the heart of my classroom. But when it comes to creating engaging content that give students hands-on practice, I've found off-the-shelf content to be limiting. Smart Sparrow gave me control over both the substance and the pedagogy," said Richard Simpson, associate professor at New York Institute of Technology, in a press release. "I've created over 200 lessons, which my students complete before and after class, leaving more class time for problem-solving."

Features of the platform include:

• Collaboration and organization tools, including a new dedicated space called "Classes" that allows instructors to manage a single cohort of students across multiple lesson deployments;
• Lesson analytics for following student progress, with the added ability to filter analytics by class; and
• Enhanced design options, such as new templates and alignment tools.

The instructional design platform will be available for faculty and instructional designers by the end of July 2015, with additional features rolled out over the following months. For more information, visit the Smart Sparrow site.