Face 3: The Buyer
The adaptive learning software market has attracted significant attention in recent years. High governmental interest in quality education, increased adoption of ALT and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) in schools and colleges, and greater demand for personalized learning have all contributed to a significant growth in the ALT market (Technavio market report).
Major purchasers of ALT include large organizations and corporations, textbook publishers, educational facilities and government agencies. For instance, the company behind the ACT high school exit exam announced earlier in 2018 that they will invest $7.5 million USD into Smart Sparrow, an adaptive learning platform that allows teachers to create interactive digital courseware (Lederman, 2018). Similarly, “textbook publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years buying up software companies and building new digital divisions, betting that the future will bring an expanded role for publishers in higher education” (Young, 2013). Likewise, a growing number of American universities are adopting adaptive learning platforms such as Knewton, to teach introductory undergraduate courses.
The military sector has also become a major purchaser of ALT in recent years as it satisfies “the need to take large numbers of individuals from very heterogeneous backgrounds and train them to uniformly high standards of performance and the need to do so under extremely tight financial constraints (McCarthy, 2008). Additionally, several large corporations such as Walmart and Bloomingdale’s have adopted Axonify, an adaptive micro-learning platform, to provide personalized corporate training to their employees (Axonify).
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