Accountancy lectures, textbooks and one-size-fits-all revision were designed for a different era, and Chartered Accountants Ireland (CAI) has found the new way forward!
CAI says its new adaptive learning platform and ecosystem is both innovative and bespoke. And after an 18-month pilot period the new programme is now fully live across two of the three stages of the qualification.
CAI’s Ian Browne said; “It gives candidates a dynamic hyper-personalised route through each subject. Short bursts of learning coupled with immediate practice through targeted assessment-style questions. To our knowledge, nothing quite like it has been built anywhere else before in professional accountancy education and at this scale. This is not an incremental improvement on existing e-learning tools. It is a genuinely new model that is a quantum shift in how a professional body can teach and assess its candidates.”
PQ magazine understands that every 30 seconds the system adapts to each individual candidate’s progress, pinpointing exactly what they understand and what they don’t, and tailoring content in real time to meet their specific needs. Rather than moving every candidate through a subject uniformly at the same pace, the platform continuously builds a precise picture of each learner’s strengths and gaps, then adjusts the difficulty, sequencing, and format of learning material accordingly.
Browne explained: “The result is an individualised learning journey delivered at scale, without requiring additional tutor resource for each learner. The results have been remarkable, and we are certain they represent something genuinely new and exciting for the profession.”
He points to the early wins: “Take introductory-level finance, a subject that has historically proven challenging for many candidates. Under traditional delivery, only circa 75% of all students taking this exam achieved a passing mark. During our Adaptive Learning pilot, that figure rose to 92% — a 17 percentage-point improvement in a single year.”
What is important to Browne is the fact that candidates were mastering fundamental areas that students had struggled with for decades — and they weren’t just answering questions correctly, they were doing so at speed and with greater confidence in their answers.
For more great insight from CAI’s Ian Browne check out the magazine: https://digital.magmanager.co.uk/Reader/Index/2884158
