Where rigour
meets the
human story.
Research at the intersection of cognitive science, pedagogy, and the AI era.
ALERTS is the dedicated research wing of Abhidnya Learning Spaces — building an evidence base for human-centred learning in a world of intelligent machines. Our work begins where classroom experience ends: in the question of why certain learners thrive when technology amplifies, and why others disappear beneath it.
“We do not study learning from the outside. We have lived it — across twenty years, four countries, and thousands of classrooms where something real happened when the right question was asked at the right moment.”
We are living through the most significant shift in human cognition since the printing press. The question is not whether AI will change how we learn. The question is whether we will notice what we are losing while we celebrate what we are gaining — and whether we will build the evidence base to protect it.
Two contributions to the science of learning.
Both frameworks emerged from decades of practice before they were named. They are not theories waiting to be tested. They are observations waiting to be formalised.
The MIL Framework
Management in Learning — The New Pedagogy of Super-Abundance
In an era of infinite information access, the defining human competency is no longer retrieval — it is direction. The MIL Framework repositions Fayol’s classical management function of Directing as the core cognitive skill of the AI-era learner, arguing that the ability to manage one’s own learning process is the irreplaceable human contribution to any human-AI collaboration.
The SLT Framework
Student Learning Taxonomy — Returning Cognitive Authority to the Learner
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a teacher’s tool. It governs how educators design instruction. The Student Learning Taxonomy inverts this — placing the same cognitive architecture in the learner’s hands as a real-time decoding instrument. A student who can identify what a question is asking before attempting to answer it is a fundamentally different kind of learner.
Milind Majalkar
Founder & Director, Abhidnya Learning Spaces
“I did not develop these frameworks by reading about learning. I developed them by watching what actually happens in a room when a human being encounters an idea they did not expect — and asking, over and over again, why that moment works when it does.”
The research that ALERTS publishes is not borrowed from elsewhere. It is observations made in real classrooms, across four countries, across two decades, and then subjected to the rigour that such observations deserve.
The MIL Framework emerged from watching students disappear beneath the weight of information they had been given every tool to access but no architecture to manage. The SLT emerged from watching capable students lose marks not because they didn’t know the content but because nobody had taught them to read the question.
Both frameworks were practised long before they were published. That sequence — anubhava first, theory second — is the epistemological foundation of all ALERTS research.
What is being built next.
ALERTS operates a rolling research agenda. Current and forthcoming papers across pedagogy, cognitive science, and learning in the AI era.
If this work
resonates with yours,
let us think together.
ALERTS welcomes dialogue with researchers, educators, institutional partners, and practitioners who are working at the intersection of learning, cognition, and technology. We are particularly interested in collaborative research, peer review, co-authorship, and institutional partnerships.