Adaptive Teaching in Higher Education:Real-Time Design Patterns for Educator-Led Instruction

Educators in higher education routinely adapt their teaching in real time to respond to student needs, classroom dynamics, and emerging understanding. While adaptive learning systems offer personalisation through algorithms, they often overlook the nuanced, moment-to-moment decisions educators make during live instruction. This study explores how university educators enact real-time instructional flexibility and formalises these practices as a set of four adaptive teaching design patterns. Drawing on interviews and lesson graph analysis with twelve university educators, we identify common strategies for dynamically modifying lesson flow, content delivery, and engagement techniques. The resulting design patterns offer a structured vocabulary for describing and supporting educator-led adaptation. We discuss how these patterns can inform the design of hybrid and digital learning environments that preserve teacher agency and enhance pedagogical responsiveness. The findings have implications for both educational practice and the development of adaptive technologies that align more closely with the realities of university teaching.