Adaptive learning is not new. Yet, with the rapid advances in the field of artificial intelligence and the global shift to online education, which occurred almost overnight due to the Covid-19 pandemic, adaptive learning is seen by many as a promising path to a smarter higher education. This chapter aims to shed light on both the opportunities and the challenges of the adoption of adaptive learning in higher education. The cases of universities, business schools and corporate universities adopting this approach are used to illustrate the role and benefits of adaptive learning powered by artificial intelligence at the current stage. The chapter concludes with an open call for academic experts and regulatory agencies to hold adaptive learning up as the defining shift in the future of education. It will likely become the established approach in education, filling the existing gaps in knowledge procurement.

Teaching formats are constantly evolving over the years to adapt to newer methods of student learning. In the ancient times, the practice of ‘Gurukul System’ where students would go and live with a teacher and learn all that teacher would know and practice by listening and observing. Here the method adopted was more tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer between the teacher and the students. The learning here used to be a function of student’s ability to absorb skill and knowledge, and the evaluation used to be a function of real demonstration of student’s ability. This method has changed in the last hundred years where a more formal schooling system has evolved to get both teachers and students in one place, and the knowledge is transferred explicitly in the form of a prescribed curriculum. The learning in a ‘classroom’ environment is more formatted and the evaluation is based on formal assessments. In the recent years, lot of interest has been developed to innovate the teaching formats so that a ‘student centric learning’ can be practiced in a classroom environment. As described by Kaplan (2021) in this book’s first chapter, changes triggered by the COVID 19 pandemic have impacted the Education Sector extensively giving birth to a digital mode of instruction as the new normal. The digital platform and the transformation it can bring into the practice has created new interest among the teaching community to explore better teaching formats.