Analytics

Bolt offers two web-based analytic tools, course maps and lesson comparer. You can use these tools to iteratively refine your course:

1. Develop an initial course
2. Operate the course until a statistically significant sample size of interactions exists
3. Use the course map tool to find problem spots
4. Develop alternative lessons
5. Operate the course some more
6. Use the lesson comparer to find better lessons or to do demographic adaptation
7. go to 1.

Course maps

A course map shows you the overall flow of students through your course (in the style of Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's march to Moscow in the war of 1812), revealing the points where they are getting bored or discouraged.

A course map shows you graphically how many students enter each step of the course, how many seconds they spend there, and their average performance on exercises. You can get a color-coded breakdown by any student attribute, and you can select a subpopulation based on attributes.

Lesson comparison

You can develop several alternative lessons for the same concept and, using the "set" construct, arrange for them to be selected randomly, followed by a single exercise. You can then use Bolt's lesson comparer tool to study the results. The tool will tell you, for a given statistical confidence level:

• whether one lesson is worse than another, e.g. students viewing lesson A score worse than students viewing lesson B
• whether a given lesson is better for a particular demographic subgroup, e.g. a lesson is highly effective for females under 18.