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 adds navigation links, keeps track of where students are, and computes and records their exercise scores.

However, the strength of Bolt is its support for evolutionary adaptive courses. Such a course evolves over time. At any point, it may contain any number of micro-experiments that estimate and compare the effectiveness of alternative lessons. On the basis of experimental outcomes, lessons may be changed, added, or discarded. The course may be made 'adaptive' so that different materials are shown to different types of students. Thus, Bolt is ideal for developing online learning materials in situations where 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 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