Changes between Version 14 and Version 15 of BoltIntro

Timestamp:

Oct 5, 2007, 4:51:16 PM (17 years ago)

Author:

davea

Comment:

--

BoltIntro

@@ -6 +6 @@
 and is designed to meet the needs of:
 
- * Skill aggregation projects, where volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks;
- * Volunteer computing projects, where educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment.
+ * Skill aggregation projects (volunteers must be trained to perform various tasks);
+ * Volunteer computing projects (educating participants can increase their enthusiasm and commitment, and attainment of given knowledge levels can be shown as a web site "status symbol").
 
 These areas have properties that are much different from those of formal education:
@@ -40 +40 @@
  * 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 macro-analytic tools that let you see 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.
- * Bolt offers micro-analytic tools that let you compare a set of alternative lessons, identifying those which are uniformly better, or are better for a particular demographic subgroup.
-
-[[Image(http://boinc.berkeley.edu/images/minard_napoleon.jpg)]]
+ * 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.
 
 == Creating exercises ==
@@ -172 +169 @@
  * Bolt provides a "review mode" in which the student is presented with exercises due for review.
 
+
+== 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
+1. Operate the course until a statistically significant sample size of interactions exists
+1. Use the course map tool to find problem spots
+1. Develop alternative lessons
+1. Operate the course some more
+1. Use the lesson comparer to find better lessons or to do demographic adaptation
+1. 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.
+
+[[Image(http://boinc.berkeley.edu/images/minard_napoleon.jpg)]]
+
+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 comparer ===
+
+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.
+
 == Other features of Bolt ==