Changes between Version 9 and Version 10 of BoltIntro

Timestamp:

Oct 3, 2007, 1:03:57 PM (17 years ago)

Author:

davea

Comment:

--

BoltIntro

@@ -6 +6 @@
 and is designed to meet the needs of:
 
- * Skill aggregation project, in which volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks;
- * Volunteer computing, in which educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment.
+ * Skill aggregation projects, where volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks;
+ * Volunteer computing projects, where educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment.
 
 These areas have properties that are much different from those of formal education:
 
- * Churn: constant turnover, thousands 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 acknowledgement (e.g. being marked as an "expert" on the project web site)
+ * Churn: constant turnover, thousands 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 acknowledgement (e.g. being marked as an "expert" on the project web site).
 
 == What Bolt does ==
@@ -20 +20 @@
 Using Bolt, you can
 
- * Create exercises or quizzes of various types: multiple-choice, fill in the blank, graphical, etc.
- * Specify a ''course'' as a sequence of alternating lessons and exercises.
+ * 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:
 
- * Guide students sequentially through the course;
- * If the student fails a quiz, repeat one or more lessons and retry the quiz (Bolt courses are designed to be "fail-proof");
- * Store each student's progress in a database, and resume at that point when they return to the course later.
- * Maintain an estimate of each student's mastery of the course material.
+ * It guides students sequentially through the course;
+ * If the student fails a quiz, they repeat one or more lessons and retry the quiz (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.
 
-Bolt's deeper goal is to let you create better courses:
-to find out exactly how effective each lesson is,
-to make statistically valid comparisons of alternative lessons,
-and to make "adaptive" courses in which different lessons are used
-for different groups of students.
+In addition, Bolt lets you create better courses; specifically, you can
+ * find out exactly how effective each lesson is;
+ * 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: