Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of BoltGoals


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Timestamp:
Dec 3, 2007, 8:57:06 PM (17 years ago)
Author:
davea
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  • BoltGoals

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     1It is designed to meet the needs of:
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     3 * Distributed thinking projects, in which volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks.
     4 * Volunteer computing projects, in which educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment.
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     6These areas have the following properties:
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     8 * Churn: constant turnover (scores or hundreds of new students per day);
     9 * Wide geographical distribution;
     10 * Wide age distribution;
     11 * 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).
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     13== What Bolt does ==
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     15Using Bolt, you can
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     17 * Create exercises of various types: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, graphical, etc.
     18 * Specify a ''course'' as a sequence of lessons and exercises.
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     20Given such a course, Bolt does the following:
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     22 * It guides students sequentially through the course;
     23 * If the student fails an exercise, they repeat one or more lessons and retry the exercise(Bolt courses are designed to be "fail-proof");
     24 * Each student's progress is recorded in a database, and when they return to the course later they resume at that point.
     25 * Bolt maintain an estimate of each student's mastery of the course material.
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     27In addition, Bolt lets you create better courses; specifically, you can
     28 * make statistically valid comparisons of alternative lessons;
     29 * make "adaptive" courses in which different lessons are used for different groups of students
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     31This is done as follows:
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     33 * Bolt records the timing and results of each student interaction (viewing a lesson or completing an exercise) in a database.
     34 * Demographics (age, sex, education level, nationality) are stored for each student.
     35 * 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.
     36 * 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.