Adaptation
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
Adaptation is when an instructor alters an educational product or materials to meet their specific needs for teaching, or the needs of the students. Each learning context is different, so one size may not fit all, and adaptation can be readily expected.
Definition
An instructor or teacher will perform adaptation to instructional materials, educational products, and activities to make it work better for their specific situation. Instructors may want to use a pre-existing activity for another purpose or subject area. Similarly, instructors may need to change the product to meet the specific needs of their learners or settings. Adaptations can change the activities or the content to align better with both the teachers' and learners' interests or goals, or adaptations can be made to activities to help better facilitate scheduling issues or other constraints.
Additional Information
There are typically two types of adaptations that occur: (1) when teachers or facilitators want to change an existing product for a new purpose and (2) to fix a product while they are using it to meet the immediate needs of their learners and contexts.
Adaptations to educational products are common and are meant to address the specific contexts in which learning experiences take place. When it is released into real-world settings, an educational product has specific contexts, constraints, and backgrounds of people who are participating. Each of these factors can influence how the program is implemented, and instructors or facilitators make on-the-go choices on how to quickly meet the needs of learners in their immediate setting.
Additionally, adaptations occur when an implementer (i.e., the person who is implementing the product, usually a teacher) finds an activity that they like, but it was not designed for their immediate goals. So, to make it fit, they need to adapt it to fit their goals, usually by changing it from one content area to another (for example, switching a fun classroom game from science content to social studies content).
Because of these challenges, adaptations are an important part of implementation. The designers of a product cannot anticipate every challenge that can arise when they are planning, designing, and developing the product. In fact, because the designer has already released the product into real-world settings, it is typically only the teacher or facilitator that will likely be able to actively improve the experience by tweaking and flexibly altering the activities and content to keep everyone happy. Teachers and facilitators who are well trained on how and why the educational product is designed the way it is can make adaptations that are aligned with what the designers intended.
Adaptation is frequently seen in school settings where teachers will alter the course materials, activities, or media to meet the specific needs and interests of their students, or to alter an existing educational product to align with an instructional unit on a new content theme.
Adaptations can look like many things in educational products in different industries:
- A teacher changing an activity from a writing assignment to a presentation
- A teacher changing a fun activity used in the science classroom to have a social studies focus instead
- A teacher no longer requiring group work when it was called for in the design
- A training facilitator not having participants perform reflections because the group ran out of time
- A professor changing the level of expected participation with an online game
- A facilitator changing the roles that participants are supposed to play in a scenario-based workshop
Adaptations that do not align with the intent of the instructional designer have been called lethal mutations by some in the educational research and development field. Lethal mutations are those, which, when they are made to an educational product, change the product enough that it no longer has the desired effect. This could be changing activities and expectations to be misaligned with the theoretical expectation of how people will learn. Lethal mutations can also occur when an adaptation to an instructional activity is made where it no longer aligns with the intended learning objective. Lethal mutations can be avoided by clearly communicating the intent of the designer and having well-defined and well-documented procedures and instructions for how people should participate in activities and how instructors should implement the activities.
Working with instructors so that they understand how to implement educational products and curriculum as they were designed is an important aspect of thinking about the implementation of design. However, it is also important for implementers to know how to flexibly adapt the learning activities expectations to meet their needs while also staying aligned with the intended and expected levels of participation by the designers.
Variations in how educational products are implemented, like adaptations, can influence the desired learning achievement outcomes and should be accounted for in evaluation processes.
Tips and Tricks
- It is impossible to anticipate every single challenge that implementers will face during the ADDIE analysis, design, and development phases. Instead, it can be helpful to try to think of the reasons why people might adapt the product in the first place. From there, you can brainstorm ideas and provide tips for how adaptations might be made while preserving the intent of the activities, media, interface, and content.
- If you are doing formative assessment, try to find a way to track or otherwise identify when implementers might be performing adaptations. This can help you understand how and why adaptations are being made, and can perhaps allow for guidance or collaboration to occur with implementers on how to handle adaptations to meet the needs of the local contexts.
- If you anticipate facilitators changing the content frequently within the product, perhaps consider creating an "adaptation kit" or adding some guidelines and steps for people to change the content of the experience. For instance, if the product was originally designed to teach history, consider what teaching another subject like science or math might entail. From that point, try to think about how you would suggest to others about how they should make changes to the product if they are wanting to adapt it.
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