= Design goals of Bolt =

Bolt is designed to meet the needs of:

 * Distributed thinking projects, in which volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks.
 * Volunteer computing projects, in which educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment.

These areas have the following properties:

 * Churn: constant turnover (scores or hundreds of new students per day);
 * Wide geographical distribution;
 * Wide age distribution;
 * Motivation: most volunteers have a pre-existing interest in the topic, and are motivated by recognition (e.g. being marked as an "expert" on the project web site).

== What Bolt does ==

Using Bolt, you can

 * Create exercises of various types: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, graphical, etc.
 * Specify a ''course'' as a sequence of lessons and exercises.

Given such a course, Bolt does the following:

 * It guides students sequentially through the course;
 * If the student fails an exercise, they repeat one or more lessons and retry the exercise(Bolt courses are designed to be "fail-proof");
 * Each student's progress is recorded in a database, and when they return to the course later they resume at that point.
 * Bolt maintain an estimate of each student's mastery of the course material.
 
In addition, Bolt lets you create better courses; specifically, you can
 * make statistically valid comparisons of alternative lessons;
 * make "adaptive" courses in which different lessons are used for different groups of students

This is done as follows:

 * Bolt records the timing and results of each student interaction (viewing a lesson or completing an exercise) in a database.
 * Demographics (age, sex, education level, nationality) are stored for each student.
 * Course documents can have various types of "control structures".  For example, they can specify that a lesson should be chosen randomly from a given set, or should be chosen based on student demographics.
 * Bolt offers analytic tools that let you evaluate the effectiveness of your lessons, and that help you make your course  adapt itself to different types of students.

== Other features of Bolt ==

By default, every Bolt page includes an "ask a question" link.
These questions are delivered as private messages to the course developer.



== The bigger picture ==

Bolt's primary goal is to serve the needs of volunteer computing and skill aggregation projects.
However, we believe that it can also become a tool for research in education and cognitive science,
for a variety of reasons:

 * Experiments can be deployed with large sample sizes.
 * Experiments can be deployed immediately, with no dependence on the academic calendar.  Significant results are available in days rather than months or years.
 * The student population varies widely in age, language, and education level.
 * The student population is self-selecting for interest in the topic area, and has diverse learning goals.
 * Experiments are not limited by standards or syllabi.
 * Experiments can be conducted without dependence on educational institutions or teachers.