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ALEKS

AI-driven learning assessment tools to produce personalized diagnostics, learning recommendations, and feedback for students

6.4

28 Votes

Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces, or ALEKS, is an online education platform that includes course materials designed to work with basic core classes. Students and educators can use ALEKS to teach business, chemistry and mathematics. They can also design classes that have to do with special cases related to the field of statistics.

While most educational platforms are based around giving out numerical test scores or letter grades to students, ALEKS eschews all of these assessment methods in favor of an emphasis on combinatorial understanding. As the name suggests, ALEKS is designed to incorporate the theory of knowledge spaces into a virtual classroom.

Over time, ALEKS will give students a series of test questions to determine what sets of topics they understand. Based on these questions, the software will figure out what topic the student needs to practice next. Students are free to pick and choose lessons from a series of interactive learning modules assigned to each subject. This may help some pupils who find it difficult to learn in a traditional classroom environment. As a result, ALEKS has proven successful in gifted education programs as well as remedial ones.

Plug-in modules have helped to expand ALEKS over time, though some educators might find that it might not be the best choice for those who want to exclusively teach the humanities. The software can be expanded to support subjects that cover all grade levels K-12 as well as those that would be common in a higher education setting. A few modules are also available that make ALEKS an attractive platform for the continuing education market.

Courseware for ALEKS covers everything from basic chemistry and arithmetic all the way up to pre-calculus. The business module provides some support for financial accounting preparation courses based around what one might find in MBA-level programs. In fact, it's fully possible to use ALEKS in a classroom teaching MBA prospects or as part of a virtual education curriculum for those who haven't been able to attend in person.

Educators are also free to develop their own interactive materials if they have time. Some professionals may wish to edit the statistics module in particular, because it's the one that's most open to expansion. Science and engineering courses often collect a large amount of data over time, especially if they require students to conduct some of their own experiments. As a result, instructors may wish to incorporate these into a project and ALEKS gives them the power to do so. Some students may learn best when they're manipulating data that they were involved in the collection of.

Due to its unique nature and the longevity of the software itself, the interface of ALEKS has changed somewhat over time. That being said, it should be easy for instructors to acclimate students with the platform in a relatively short amount of time.

Pros

  • Very lightweight
  • Stable platform
  • Mature, so updates don't change many features

Cons

  • No support for traditional grades
  • Only works with certain school subjects

Company
McGraw-Hill Education
HQ Location
New York, NY
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