In study after study, conventional educational templates (textbooks + teaching + homework, etc.) boost concept-inventory scores from around 40% (before a course) to 50% (at course completion) — only one-sixth of the targeted outcome skill gap. Individual student blindspots block the other five-sixths. Courselets is the empirical process of reliably identifying and fixing all blindspots, starting from the most common.
Even the best help becomes dramatically less usable for the student if there is any delay whatsoever. Courselets can reliably give students help with their individual blindspot(s) within seconds of their first attempt to solve a problem, because it already has a catalog of the common blindspots on that problem — and we immediately add new blindspot help as soon as one student makes a truly novel conceptual error.
Courselets is nothing more or less than the blindspot help that you and other teachers write, and own. You get the benefit of a mutual-aid community of many teachers, helping each other help students. Actually delivering Zero Blindspots + Immediate Resolution is way too big a mission for any one instructor or textbook — but as a community we can crush this.
Study after study have shown the average student completes a class with basic misconceptions about 50% or more of the concepts taught in the class. Moreover, these blindspots are individual -- different for each student. For a student to learn to use a concept correctly means not only identifying her individual blindspot(s) for that concept, but also helping her understand and overcome them.
To do this we have to dramatically change how we give feedback. Click the one-minute video clip to see how Courselets does this, and how much it improved student learning in a UCLA research study.
Say a student is having a lot of difficulties on a Khan Academy exercise on a specific topic, e.g. geometry problems like the problem on the left from Aplusclick.org. Here's how our platform transforms this material to give the student as many opportunities as she needs to help her identify and overcome her specific blindspots. Note that a student can even draw or scribble her answers instead of typing, using a tablet (e.g. iPad + Apple Pencil works great!) or any touchscreen device.
This school year, our community platform will use:
Khan Academy math exercises (over 28,000 math questions covering grades K-12): students, teachers and parents are very familiar with Khan Academy's teaching materials and exercises, so this enables them to continue using the learning materials they're familiar with, but with a fundamentally different level of support — immediate help diagnosing each student's individual blindspots.
A+Click math exercises (over 10,000 open-response math questions covering grades K-12): enables students to answer in their own words (instead of just multiple-choice), or by scribbling their answer on a tablet, or even by drawing a picture. This is how our community platform can diagnose exactly what each student is actually thinking, and help her with her individual blindspots. Click to see examples of how A+Click exercises work at the start of our process — i.e. before we begin adding help for individual student blindspots.
Courselets is nothing more or less than the blindspot help that you and other teachers write, and own:
It gives you far better way to help your students, because our "free-hand" open-response platform makes it much easier to diagnose exactly what each student is actually thinking, and far more efficient: diagnosing a specific blindspot in one student's answer automatically helps all students who make that mistake in the future. You get the benefit of a mutual-aid community of many teachers, helping each other help students: specifically, if you give 1.5 hours of help (diagnosing student blindspots) per week, your students will get 15 hours per week of immediate help (i.e. other teachers providing diagnoses of their blindspots). You own the copyright on the help contributions you write on the community platform, and (if you want) can earn income long-term, proportional to their usage, as the platform grows to become a valuable service that parents and students use as a monthly subscription.
As part of the Courselets 2022 Launch trial:
Whenever your students have difficulties on Khan (and other) exercises, they get immediate, individual help to identify the specific blindspot that's blocking them. If you can spend 1.5 hour per week helping identify student blindspots, your students will receive immediate help 15 hours per week. The service is completely free this school year, but in future years will be supported by modest student subscription fees to enable teachers to earn money from helping students. Specifically, the blindspot help you contribute will generate income for you based on the number of students that your contributions help each month (measured automatically by the community platform).