The AIM system (Adaptive Instructional Materials) is an indexed and annotated database of electronic resources incorporates state-of-the-art examples that illustrate the core principles of How People Learn and Knowing What Students Know in action and activities for using these examples in an instructional setting.

AIM is designed to accomplish two primary objectives: (1) to support engagement with the concepts and issues discussed in How People Learn and Knowing What Students Know, and (2) to support instructors with resources and activity ideas that they can use to create courses that involve How People Learn and Knowing What Students Know topics. Having these twin goals of supporting learning and instruction, AIM integrates exploration of instructional resources such as case examples, illustrative video, and pre-rendered lesson designs with the ability to compose such resources into personalized lesson and course plans for particular learning contexts.

The challenge in designing a system to support multiple goals and users with varying levels of instructional design and content expertise is finding the appropriate balance between being sufficiently open-ended to accommodate flexible use, yet be sufficiently constrained to provide coherence and meaning with respect to its intended uses.