Berkeley Open Learning Technology (Bolt)

Bolt is a toolkit for web-based training and education. Bolt makes it easy to create a simple online course - a sequence of lessons and exercises. Any Web content may be used - HTML, Flash, video, etc. Students create accounts, log in, and take the course; Bolt provides navigation links, keeps track of where students are, and records their grades on the exercises.

However, the strength of Bolt is its support for evolutionary adaptive courses. Such courses evolve over time. At any point, they contain various experiments that estimate and compare the effectiveness of alternative lessons. On the basis of experimental outcomes, lessons may be changed, added, or discarded, and courses may be made 'adaptive' so that different materials are shown to different students. Thus, Bolt is ideal when there is a constant arrival of diverse students, and in which course developers have the need and ability to continually analyze and improve the effectiveness of the teaching materials.

Bolt is implemented in PHP (a popular scripting language). If you know PHP, it's easy to add new features to Bolt (but you don't need to know PHP to use Bolt).

• Tutorial
  • Part I: Courses and lessons
  • Part II: Exercises
  • Part III: Analytics

• Reference manual

• Analytics

• Implementation

• Context and goals