Today’s students have no illusions about the difficulty of staying competitive. To reach and stay at the top, one must master the course material quickly, while never falling behind. Educators, in turn, must support students with diverse learning styles, while managing increasing classroom sizes and cutbacks in resources. In such an environment, meeting individual needs becomes nearly impossible.
Fortunately, there’s a fix for this situation. Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces, or ALEKS, is a powerful artificial intelligence learning system that’s cost-effective, personalized, and always available. ALEKS pinpoints what students need to learn, and functions like a personal tutor by adapting to their unique needs.
Learning Builds Momentum
ALEKS is the brainchild of internationally renowned UC Irvine mathematical psychologist and UC Irvine School of Social Sciences research professor Jean-Claude Falmagne. Before ALEKS, academic aptitude was quantified with standardized tests. This approach is familiar to most through exams like the I.Q. test, S.A.T., and G.R.E. For many, the mere mention of these exams triggers anxiety, but Falmagne opposed them for a different reason: He found the theory they were based on flawed.
At the time, psychometrics was the main tool for assessing mental processes. It treated measuring mental aptitude like measuring physics. Falmagne opposed this method, recognizing the limitations of relying solely on numbers to describe mental traits.
With his partner Jean-Paul Doignon, Falmagne pioneered a new field of research called knowledge space theory. Rather than ranking students with a score, ALEKS identifies what a student has mastered and the subjects they’re ready to learn based on their responses on a test. While tests like the I.Q., S.A.T., and G.R.E. merely assess students, ALEKS takes it a step further by providing instruction as well. This tailored approach creates an individualized learning path for each student.
Since students are always working at the periphery of their knowledge, they’re not frustrated or bored like they often are when working on material that’s either too hard or too easy. Students gain confidence as their learning builds momentum. When ALEKS identifies a student’s readiness to learn a concept, they master it with at least a 90% success rate. Many ALEKS courses boast success rates over 95%.
Assembling the Dream Team
Today, ALEKS is a remarkable success story. But thirty years ago, it was just an idea, and Falmagne didn’t have a team to realize his vision. What he did have was a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and a knack for recruiting talent.
The first student Falmagne recruited was Eric Cosyn. After completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993, Cosyn had plans to pursue a Ph.D. Cosyn’s professor, Doignon, recommended him highly, and Cosyn signed on as employee number one.
After bringing Cosyn on board, Falmagne continued his search for his dream team. He recruited two more students, Nicolas Thiéry and Damien Lauly, from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (E.N.S.T.; now called IMT Atlantique), the engineering university in France. Falmagne, while teaching as a visiting professor, was so impressed by the students at E.N.S.T. that he realized he would need their programming expertise to successfully turn his knowledge space theory into a computerized teaching system.
A little later, Lo-Jen Yu, a student living in Tawain, was interested in working with Falmagne and applied independently. Falmagne was impressed and invited her to become the fourth and final member of the original team.
“All four of them were crucial in the creation of the relevant software,” Falmagne says.
A Meaningful Impact on Education
Falmagne’s NSF grant enabled ALEKS to grow steadily, with more people joining the project every year. The team would meet for “sometimes wild and undisciplined” meetings once a week. Despite (or perhaps because of) its unstructured culture, ALEKS remained highly productive. In 1996, two years after they began work, the team had a program ready to be used by students.
“Jean-Claude was able to bring the right mix of talents to get this done,” Cosyn says.
Remembering the move from theory to practical application is still something that excites Thiéry and Cosyn.
“It was a big deal to see students actually using our product. I remember when Nico [Thiéry] set up a counter to show how many times students were accessing our platform. Every click was a reminder that real students were learning with what we’d made. It made us feel like what we were doing had a meaningful impact on education,” says Cosyn.
With a working product, ALEKS had to decide where to house their program. With the benefit of hindsight, online delivery is a no-brainer. But these were the days of floppy disks, CDs, and disk drives. The internet was in its infancy and the decision to deliver software online wasn’t obvious. Although setting up servers in schools seemed logical, Thiery had the foresight at the end of 1994 to recognize that a centralized web-based system would be more efficient.
“When the grants ran out, it would’ve been very easy to put ALEKS in the drawer and move on to something else.”
– Nicolas Thiéry, Chief Technology Officer, ALEKS
Navigating Growth and Success
On both the theoretical model and implementation side, ALEKS was a pioneer. At the time, ALEKS was one of the most sophisticated web applications around.
“Jean-Claude is very much a visionary,” says Cosyn.
But of course, all this doesn’t guarantee commercial success. Plenty of promising startups end up going nowhere.
“When the grants ran out, it would’ve been very easy to put ALEKS in the drawer and move on to something else,” Thiéry says.
But it was always Falmagne’s intention that the computerized teaching system based on his theory would result in a working product available to students.
During ALEKS’s initial years of transitioning from university to business, UCI offered crucial support.
“The university was very helpful in providing licensing terms that were reasonable for all parties. It was good for UCI and it was good for the company,” says Thiéry.
Not only was the university helpful, but Cosyn also praises their effort in anticipating and actively searching for research with a broad impact. “It’s great that UCI was looking for those opportunities and was actively developing them,” he says.
ALEKS appreciated the importance of a student’s mood and psychology. They realized that constantly pushing students could backfire. When asked too many difficult questions, students got frustrated. They’d either give up or respond incorrectly just to move on. The team discovered it was often better to ask easier questions to keep students engaged.
“We grew steadily. Everybody was doing a bit of everything. We focused on making something that people would be happy to pay for. That was the key to our success over the following two decades. It was an adventure”
– Eric Cosyn, Senior Director, Applied Research, ALEKS
A Launching Pad
With UCI in their corner, ALEKS forged a key relationship with top education publisher McGraw-Hill. A distribution agreement allowed McGraw-Hill to handle ALEKS’s sales and promotion, enabling the core team to focus on system development. The terms of the deal, and ALEKS’s lean operations, allowed the company to survive on existing revenue and avoid venture capital funding.
“We grew steadily. Everybody was doing a bit of everything. We focused on making something that people would be happy to pay for. That was the key to our success over the following two decades. It was an adventure,” says Cosyn.
Choosing to remain lean was a pivotal decision for the company. Thiéry recommends that other startups carefully consider the long-term consequences of financial matters before making any hasty decisions.
“Do you want quick venture capital funding or gradual growth with limited resources? This decision shapes your company’s path and the equity you retain. It’s a crucial choice that can’t be altered easily,” he says.
Collaborative Growth
While Falmagne hired his core group of programmers/graduate students from abroad, he recruited several key personnel at UCI. He found managing director, Wil Lampros, literally next door. Lampros’ wife was a political science professor at UCI and the couple lived next door to Falmagne in University Hills. Lampros, a lawyer who had just sold his company, was looking for his next venture. The two got to talking and Lampros was soon on board.
Both Christopher Grayce and Harold (Biff) Baker were assistant professors at UCI before joining ALEKS full time. Baker, from the Russian literature and languages department, was hired to make ALEKS multilingual. He moved on to become the director of advanced customer solutions and has since retired. Grayce, from the chemistry department, created ALEKS Chemistry, which has now been used by millions of students.
Exit Strategy
In 1993, Thiéry applied for a six-month internship at UCI so that he could work with Falmagne and fulfill a requirement for his degree in France. Little did he know that he, along with Cosyn, would decide to stay at UCI to complete a Ph.D. and build a life here.
“My plan was to stay there six months and return to France,” Thiéry says. “A teacher at the time told me to be careful because if I went, I might end up staying for 20 years. I laughed it off saying, ‘No, of course I won’t be there in 20 years.’”
Thiéry wasn’t wrong when he said he wouldn’t be in Irvine for 20 years. Now, it’s closer to 30.
In 2013, ALEKS agreed to sell to McGraw-Hill Education for more than $100 million. By the time ALEKS was acquired, the company had grown to more than 170 employees. Of the original four graduate students hired to create ALEKS, three of them—Cosyn, Thiéry, and Lauly—still maintain core roles in the company.
Falmagne, who joined the faculty in 1989, remains at UCI as a research professor. With his wife Dina, Falmagne founded a $5 million trust for UCI and established three UCI endowed chairs of mathematical psychology.
Since the company’s founding in 1996, ALEKS has been used by over 30 million students, from kindergarteners to undergraduates and in subjects from math, chemistry, accounting, and statistics. According to Falmagne, the system’s effectiveness has led to numerous universities adopting ALEKS instead of placement tests, including the S.A.T.
“We were true pioneers,” says Cosyn. “Not only in terms of the model we designed, but knowledge space theory itself. Even today, it remains the most advanced and effective model available.”
Individuals can access ALEKS at: https://www.aleks.com/independent