It 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.