Algorithms have been around for a long time, and while they have not yet been used widely used for the sole purposes of education, the trends surrounding inquiry based education could learn to new innovations of the technology.
The three factors of a successful algorithm are:
– Personalization
– Performance
– External factors
If we look closely at how YouTube engages with its viewers, we can imagine that there are many ways we can harness this technology to support inquiry learning.
Imagine the following:
You are trying to learn about some back end programming in order to support your ability to create a game for a game design course. You start to learn what you would require through a series of videos/articles, but algorithm detected that you are looking for very specific things that is associated with database of a certain type of video game. The website/app then decided to test out whether if the algorithm was correct or not by giving you more content related to your topic, thereby increasing the efficiency and the amount of content that you learn. Yay algorithm?
Algorithms are a great way for us to improve the quality of our learning and the time spent on relevant topics. It works for major corporations and it can be beneficial for education.
Sources: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-algorithm-works/