RealizeIt Can Make Your Program Adaptive

Imagine a platform that would turn static content into an adaptive sequence, and would get smarter the more it was used.

RealizeIt, based in Dublin and Chicago, can semi-automatically ingest almost any form of learning content and, with a little coaching, can identify prerequisite relationships and build a competency-based sequence of granular learning nodes with assessment gateways.

Founder David Collery spent 14 years teaching Mathematics in inner city Dublin schools. His first startup provides scheduling software still used by all of the schools in Ireland. Eight years ago he co-founded CCKF, the company behind RealizeIt, with Frank Claffey, another teacher and software developer, and John Keane, Chief Technology Officer.

CEO Manoj Kulkarni was the CTO at Career Education Corporation, the first big customer of the adaptive platform, implementing the system in schools including CTU and AIU.

The platform is designed to provide a personalized learning experience. The goal of the platform is to deliver learning at an appropriate time using appropriate material. The platform learns about each learner with use, and also provides analytics to support faculty and the institution.

Each module of content has associated assessment items. Many forms of content come with assessment (e.g., questions at the end of a chapter), but RealizeIt assesses also at the individual node level. Instructors can also create assessment items from a variety of templates including multiple choice, fill in the blank, manipulation, and constructed response, building question templates that can generate multiple different versions of each question. Project-based learning and authentic assessment is supported by rubric templates. After initial setup, the system searches for the most effective questions to ask.

The platform calculates a probability distribution for each content module from 0-100% assurance of knowledge. The system navigates students through the content based on the probabilities to serve precise learning at the point of need. Data from each student interacting with the system provides the instructor with an understanding of how the course is running and how effective the content is.

Chief Product Officer Claffey says the platform is content agnostic and works in any subject domain. It was piloted in sequential subjects like Math but is now successfully used in over 100 courses including English composition, Sociology, and Psychology.

RealizeIt has course building tools for the intrepid instructor who wants to develop content. Instructors and students can add content, worked examples, and questions.

Student and educator dashboards track competencies. Both benefit from learning analytics in real time. RealizeIt is a cloud based platform that provides both mobile and browser base experiences for the user.

RealizeIt can run on top of a legacy learning management system. For a new program, it could take the place of an LMS. RealizeIt can export to a gradebook, ePortfolios and business intelligence systems through LTI integration, an API or a data export.

Over 50,000 students are enrolled in over 300,000 courses on RealizeIt. The UT System is piloting the platform in a competency-based health care degree in one of their schools in fall. In addition to UT, Colorado Technical Institute and American Intercontinental university, RealizeIt has been rolled out in Bay Path University and is involved in pilot programs at Indiana, Central Florida, and Western Universities. The system is also about to be piloted at K-12 level.

This blog is part of the Learning Platforms Series brought to you by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more, stay tuned in for the final published project, Getting Smart on Next-Gen Learning Platforms and check out additional posts in the series:

• Beyond the LMS: What Next-Gen Learning Platforms Should Do
• Impact at Scale: The Learning Platform Series