DreamBox Claims
DreamBox captures every decision a student makes and adjusts the student’s learning Path both within lessons and between lessons, thereby providing millions of individualized learning paths, each tailored to a student’s unique needs in real-time. It represents a systemic way for students to master skills and knowledge levels at a pace that is especially tailored to their strengths and weaknesses. It provides unprecedented visibility into data on student achievement to inform teachers’ daily practice.
DreamBox vs CLARITY Critique
1) Content structuring and granularity is limited, just a set of disconnected lessons. (No Architecture of Content causes No Architecture (chaos) of learners’ experience). The lessons don’t even have explicit Objectives (which is a fundamental concept of instructional design), just a script (single Path) hidden behind the scenes.
In contrast, our CLARITY platform supports an explicit multilevel structure of Content. Each Lesson has explicit Objectives and Tasks aligned to Objectives, which is critically important to assure high quality of teaching and learning.
2) In practice, DreamBox recommends just a “right” Next Lesson. This approach can be qualified as Macro/Coarse-Management without any supervising within the lesson. What learners need most is a Micro/Fine-Management within a Lesson.
In contrast, CLARITY makes recommendations on any level of Content Granularity including Course, Chapter, Section, Lesson as well as Tasks within each Lesson. It also generates multiple recommendations, not just one assignment, to facilitate learner’s own choice.
3) DreamBox, like many other adaptive learning systems, uses pretest to identify knowledge/skills gaps. These gaps are then used to prescribe one of predefined personal Paths. Despite the claim that DreamBox uses Big Data and may generate millions of Path, it misses the point. It prescribes an average Path of similar learners, not what individual learner really wants to know right now when she needs it for her success. So, each learner is supposed to passively follow the prescribed static Path.
In contrast, CLARITY does not create a whole individual Path in advance. It dynamically generates next step recommendation(s) and a learner may make her own choices at every step of the educational process. Our platform helps a Learner in real-time to dynamically create her own learning path based on her own wishes, needs and preferences, not on average needs and preferences of others).
4) What DreamBox lacks is the dynamically generated human tutor-like interactivity, which is proven to be the most effective. Dynamic generation is incomparably richer than any single Path, and may provide branching, loops of repetitions, root-cause diagnosing, rolling back and exactly focused remediation starting from roots. Such rich interactivity is a condition of personal success in learning. Absence of such rich interactivity in DreamBox’ individual Paths creates multiple dead-ends in individual learner’s progress.
In contrast, our CLARITY platform dynamically generates all of these branching, loops of repetitions, root-cause diagnosing, rolling back and exactly focused remediation starting from roots. As a result, it does not create dead-ends in learning progress and guarantees individual success of practically all students.
5) DreamBox lacks a Learner Model, which is a MUST part of any Intelligent Tutoring System. That is why DreamBox is not really Intelligent and cannot claim effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
In contrast, our CLARITY platform includes an explicit Learner Model, which is visually presented to Teachers and Learners. Our Intelligent Tutoring Engine has all necessary components of classical Intelligent Tutoring Systems and theoretically is the most cost-effective Intelligent Tutoring System Platform on the market now.
6) DreamBox has no its own Authoring Tool. But the Authoring Tool is a critically important instrument that allows the authors to effectively create new content without any programming and teachers to update, adjust and improve content.
In contrast to DreamBox, our easy-to-use web-based Authoring Tool opens new horizons for authors and teachers to collaborate in creating, updating, adjusting, and perfecting content.
7) DreamBox has no explicit unified framework for content representation and development. Each lesson is developed as a unique monolith piece of software with participation of programmers. It is a very labor intensive method.
In contrast, our CLARITY lesson is based on explicit unified framework for content representation, authoring and sequencing. Namely, this unified content framework has facilitated creation of our unified Learner Model, unified Tutoring Engine and unified Authoring Tool. Altogether these components of software significantly simplify the process of creating AI-based courses of any complexity in any domain.
8) DreamBox as it is now has no future because of its limited technology, not unified content, absence of the learner model and extremely inefficient production of content.
In contrast, our CLARITY platform is a future of personally supervised learning (tutoring), education and training due to:
(a) Unification of content and learner representation in any domain
(b) Complete automation of full-fledged Intelligent Tutoring functionality
(c) Recommendation Engine providing rich supervising functionality to guarantee learning success
(d) Unified Authoring Tool for rapid-to-serious creation/perfection of any specific content
(e) Unlimited capacity for further improvement.
Between us, our Adaptive Learning-Authoring Platform is the next big thing happening in Education. READ MORE
May be just better marketing 🙂
Then why are they so popular?