| | 1 | It is designed to meet the needs of: |
| | 2 | |
| | 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. |
| | 5 | |
| | 6 | These areas have the following properties: |
| | 7 | |
| | 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). |
| | 12 | |
| | 13 | == What Bolt does == |
| | 14 | |
| | 15 | Using Bolt, you can |
| | 16 | |
| | 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. |
| | 19 | |
| | 20 | Given such a course, Bolt does the following: |
| | 21 | |
| | 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. |
| | 26 | |
| | 27 | In 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 |
| | 30 | |
| | 31 | This is done as follows: |
| | 32 | |
| | 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. |
