In my first post (Materials Now – Why am I here?’) I mentioned that I’ve been designing materials since the very start of my career, it was almost entirely down to the necessity to

• better cater for my students’ needs
• allow for the fact that students only have an hour and a half of class a week, ie to reduce them to the essentials or to make them suitable for self-study
• fit the language point or skill to my students’ specialism(s)
• further exploit the material ie by additionally focussing on a language point or vocabulary
• personalise the topic
• provide authentic material
• provide up-to-date material (particularly at the Political Studies Institute where the focus was largely on current affairs).

In some cases, when starting a course from scratch with little to no resources, it was a case of creating materials to actually have materials.

In my current context, the reasons behind my adaptation and supplementation of materials aren’t as extreme in need but have been similar, with the addition of having to make the coursebook work. Since students are required to buy the book, we are required to use it. This has involved making different sections of the coursebook work together in order to fully cover a point. Fortunately our module coordinators provide an overview with a list of carefully selected pages from the book, but then we have to figure out how to make it work together. Although this can be done quite successfully, on more than one occasion, the book has failed to present the point in a clear enough manner, or with concrete enough examples and practice for the point to be made sufficiently (a flaw which likely arises from the very tight deadlines the writers had to work under). This has led to some on-the-spot adaptation and some reworking of the content. I’d say that the main difficulty in using this coursebook is that there is simply too much stuff to go at. It needs to be simplified and presented in a way that is more manageable for the students and the teachers. This is what I did in my post on Adapting and Supplementing Materials 2.

Here are some thoughts from the class as to how and why we adapt and supplement materials.

Our group’s thoughts

As with previous discussions, the amount of overlap in our ideas is notable. This almost begs the question as to why – if we’re all adapting our materials in similar ways – aren’t materials being created and supplied that way? I say ‘almost’ simply because I doubt that our ways of doing each of these things or produces similar final products. And if one requirement of materials we use is for them to be flexible (as I mentioned in my post on Principles and Frameworks), wouldn’t that flexibility be almost entirely removed if coursebooks did everything for us? Similarly, if the materials really were all singing and all dancing, wouldn’t they be self-study materials?

I guess that this might be the way things are heading since adaptive learning is a major focus of educational technology.  I do wonder though whether it will be successful only when used alongside a teacher.  The aim of adapting and supplementing resources is to provide the best, most appropriate materials for our students, and an app is only capable of seeing data, not what might be going on in the real classroom or real world (assuming that the app isn’t the only form of input).  It will be interesting to see whether tech is capable of recognising students’ needs to the same extent as an experienced teacher.  For now our jobs appear to be safe: most apps purporting to involve adaptive learning seem to apply it predominantly in how frequently language is recycled; and if there’s no motivation to learn, whatever the fancy app can do is insignificant.