An AI-Based Adaptive Learning Platform for Multilingual and Low-Resource Educational Contexts: A Case Study on Nigeria

Abstract

Educational platforms in under-resourced and multilingual contexts, such as Nigeria, often struggle with limited personalisation, inadequate language support, and weak curriculum internationalisation, leading to reduced learner engagement and inclusivity. This paper presents an AI-based adaptive learning platform designed for multilingual and low-resource educational contexts, with a case study on Nigerian Pidgin English. The system integrates fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) within a personalised and adaptive learning (PAL) framework, addressing linguistic inclusivity and computational constraints in resource-limited environments. To enhance linguistic alignment, a curated Nigerian Pidgin corpus was developed and used to fine-tune an instruction-tuned LLM. The study further investigates model optimisation through multi-level quantisation (4-bit, 5-bit, and 8-bit), enabling systematic analysis of trade-offs between semantic fidelity and computational efficiency. Experimental evaluation combines automatic semantic metrics (BLEU, ROUGE-L, BERTScore, perplexity, lexical diversity) with human-centred cultural assessment conducted by native speakers. Results demonstrate that higher-bit quantisation improves semantic preservation and structural coherence, while lower-bit models offer reduced inference latency with minimal degradation in instructional quality. The findings establish a deployable, resource-aware intelligent learning system that balances semantic robustness, cultural relevance, and computational efficiency. This work contributes an experimentally validated framework for adapting large language models to low-resource languages while maintaining practical feasibility for scalable educational deployment.