Learning science

CyberCourse is a Drupal distro for authoring courses. It focuses on university skills courses, like programming, writing, and math. It makes flipped, blended, assessment-driven classes practical.

Build a course with many exercises. Students write programs, write emails, find math logic errors... No multiple choice quizzes. Students get individual formative feedback from humans. Practical at scale, at low cost.

Students can fix and resubmit their work until they get it right. Supports mastery learning.

There's a new group at:

http://groups.drupal.org/learning-content-authoring-system

It's for creating a distro to help authors write learning content, like Web sites that replace textbooks. The distro will have tools to help authors follow learning science principles, like outcome-based learning.

An learning content authoring system (LCAS) is not the same as an LMS. An LCAS instance will house content for, say, one course. Multiple LMS will use LTI/SCORM/TinCan to load content from the same LCAS instance.

(This is going out on several channels. Apologies if you get more than one copy.)

There are many Web sites and tools for authoring textbooks: iBooks Author, Flat World Knowledge, etc. Good tech, but there's a fundamental flaw in their specs. They're based on an obsolete view of learning.

Education researchers have shown how we can help students learn STEM skills (STEM: science, tech, engineering and math). Deep learning, formative feedback, other things. We need to redesign authoring software based on these research findings.