Bolt: A platform for Web-based training and education David P. Anderson UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab 11 Oct 2007
Why educate volunteers? Distributed thinking create better workers expand range of amenable problems Volunteer computing enhance recruitment, retention
How to teach on the web? Put up some web pages no assessment Put up some web pages and a final exam What if your course has “weak links”? What if your course doesn’t work for some people?
Berkeley Open Learning Technology (Bolt) CMS and analytics engine for web-based teaching content items (lessons, exercises) teaching engine (PHP) Sequencing, navigation Students course structure (JSON) student info, interaction DB analytical tools Educators
Goals of Bolt Enable fine-grained interaction tutorial, not lecture Provide data warehousing, analytics Support adaptive courses lesson exercise lesson exercise exercise 17 sec 9 sec 33 sec 15 sec 21 sec
Components of a Bolt course Content items lessons arbitrary HTML/PHP; Bolt supplies navigation exercises PHP scripts with three functions show exercise show answers/feedback grade response Bolt API: various question types Course document specified in JSON sequence of content items, “sets” set selection criteria
Course analytics Traffic maps How many students at each point, and for how long? filter/subdivide by demographics Lesson comparison Is A better/worse than B for a subset of the student population? based on demographics based on “collaborative filtering” lesson A exercise lesson B
Review and long-term retention lesson exercise (1 week) exercise (3 weeks) exercise Bolt keeps track of times for next review Reminders sent via RSS feed Bolt maintains “mastery level” estimate
Bolt and Bossa How to grade essay or other subjective exercise type? Make it a Bossa task, assigned only to qualified users
Venues for education research Volunteer computing Very diverse student population High arrival rate Pre-existing interest Computer literate Formal education less diverse population year/semester cycle usually no pre-existing interest varying computer literacy