This paper will analyze the requirements, costs, and benefits of establishing standards and recommended practices for a class of education technology categorized as an adaptive instructional system (AIS). AISs accommodate individual differences by tailoring instruction to facilitate learner knowledge acquisition (Wang & Walberg, 1983; Tsai & Hsu, 2012). They guide one-to-one learning activities that exercise skills defined by learning objectives (Sottilare & Brawner, 2018), and they use artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies to help people learn more effectively and efficiently (AIS Consortium, 2021).

The growing use of AISs in military training, pre-K, K-12, higher education, and adult learning contexts has prompted the AIS community (learners, instructors, instructional designers, system developers, testers and evaluators, and system providers) to initiate IEEE standards. An IEEE working group is managing the development of AIS standards and recommended practices under Project 2247. The initial focus of the Project 2247 working group was to develop a conceptual model of an AIS, its primary components and features. Other efforts have begun to focus on AIS interoperability standards to promote reuse and recommended practices for the fair evaluation of AIS performance capabilities.

While the motivation for AIS standards requirements may be evident, the contributing factors to standards costs and benefits has yet to be fully explored. Although infrequently considered by learning science researchers, cost factors can be as critical as effectiveness in improving the state-of-art and state-of-practice in both training and education. This paper will discuss recommendations for various standards and practices arising from the AIS community and analyze the business case for advancements and opportunities provided by each recommendation in a training and education context. Standards recommendations are grouped by the following categories: policy, authoring and curation tools, learner modeling, domain modeling, instructional strategies and assessments, and interface design standards.