Personalised, adaptive, multimodal learning for every student

Aisha, a curious student in Grade 3 is reading about changing seasons and the cycle of day and night in her textbook. She tries hard, but struggles to imagine how earth would move around the sun and how this could cause the hot summer or cold winter seasons that come every year.

Class 4 student Raghav, whose first language isn’t English, finds it hard to follow when his teacher reads from the textbook in class. He wants to speak, but hesitates since he is uncertain about his pronunciation, leaving him shy and unable to understand concepts.

On the other hand, Grade 3 student Sam understands concepts quickly, and is ready to go beyond what his textbook currently covers. However, his textbook has a fixed number of questions and he quickly gets through them. Then he waits around in the class or if he is feeling bored, he disturbs other students.

These examples highlight the fundamental issue with traditional textbooks, as is evident from Aisha’s struggle to visualise, Raghav’s language barrier and Sam’s stifled curiosity. Unfortunately, Aisha, Raghav and Sam are not alone. In today’s world where every aspect of our lives is personalised and improved by technology, textbooks have remained traditional, inert and limited in scope. And yet, they are the primary source of instruction and knowledge in Indian classrooms. As a result, students tend to become disengaged, bored or disruptive; they struggle with focus; and are not able to reach their full academic potential.

NCF 2023 also emphasises personalised learning to cater to the diverse needs, abilities and interests of students. However, traditional textbooks often fall short of addressing these needs due to their one-size-fits-all nature. As I see it, there are three main areas of incongruence between traditional textbooks and the NCF’s recommendations:

Uni-modal versus multi-modal learning

The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2023 recommends multi-modal learning to help students learn better. However, the uni-modal nature of traditional textbooks means that they do not naturally lend themselves to interactive, experiential and hands-on learning. The static content of a traditional textbook offers little or no scope for integrating other learning resources. As a result, students like Aisha who find it difficult to visualise new concepts, struggle to grasp and retain abstract ideas.

Standardised content versus personalised learning

NCF 2023 recommends flexible curriculum frameworks to enable personalised learning, beginning with foundational education. While standardised textbooks cover syllabi in a structured and uniform manner to ensure that all students receive the same content and learning materials, they do not meet the individual learning needs and paces of different students. For Raghav, who struggles with both reading and speaking English, his textbook doesn’t help. And though she would like to, neither can his teacher in a 1:40 classroom. A customized learning experience that adjusts to his current language proficiency levels would be far more effective.

Non-adaptive versus adaptive learning

What about students like Sam, who are ahead of the rest of their class and ready to take on more advanced academic challenges in subjects they excel at? How can we ensure that students like him remain engaged and continue to progress by offering more complex and challenging learning content? Standardised textbooks do not offer individual learning plans tailored to the advanced abilities of such students.

We need to remove these incongruities to help students such as Aisha, Raghav and Sam learn to their fullest potential, but if the only tool that teachers and students have is the traditional textbook, how is that possible?

By leveraging technology to upgrade the ubiquitous textbook.

Imagine, if you will, a Grade 3 Mathematics classroom of the future. Each student has a Mathematics textbook in their hands and is learning fractions. But peek over their shoulders, and you’ll realise that each student is working on a different problem. One student is watching a video of an apple being sliced into portions to learn the concept of fractions, while nearby, Sam has already moved on to equivalent fractions. Sam is also accumulating points as he moves on to solve increasingly higher order fractions problems. With this learning is literally different, adaptive and personalised for each student!

Or, join Raghav at home as he listens to his English textbook read aloud a chapter on the different parts of speech. The book is reading at a pace comfortable for Raghav and asks him a series of questions to test his understanding of nouns. With each answer, Raghav becomes increasingly confident of his ability to identify types of nouns. His textbook can also listen to him and give him feedback on his reading fluency!

Sounds like scenes from a sci-fi movie? But all of this is possible with the use of technology! Given the pace at which generative AI is progressing the world over, why should textbooks be exempt from the never-before possibilities that it is enabling across industries and walks of life?

It is time to herald a new era of textbooks. An era in which textbooks are responsive and adaptive to each student’s unique learning journey.

An era in which stories, essays, and poems come to life as they are read aloud by textbooks, helping students associate text with audio and visual cues, and even providing feedback. An era in which books can bring concepts to life in a 3D world, allowing students to interact with and explore complex subjects in a dynamic and immersive way.

The time has come – now more than ever – to reimagine, redefine and repurpose textbooks.

Only then can multimodal, personalised and highly engaging learning truly become a reality in our schools.

(The author is Co-founder and CEO, LEAD Group.)