1. Bolt: A platform for Web-based training and education
David P. Anderson
UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab
11 Oct 2007

2. Why educate volunteers?
Distributed thinking
create better workers
expand range of amenable problems
Volunteer computing
enhance recruitment, retention

3. 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?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. Bolt and Bossa How to grade essay or other subjective exercise type?
Make it a Bossa task, assigned only to qualified users

10. 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