Courselets - The Adaptive Learning Project for UCLA

The Adaptive Learning project for UCLA professor

About the Courselets Project

Courselets.org is an adaptive learning project of professor Christopher Lee from UCLA. It is a system centered around the idea that wrong answers are the main source of learning improvement. The concept is proven by impressive results of Courselets usage in UCLA:

50% higher exam scores
320% lower course dropping rates (1000% in the case of female audience)

The current version of Courselets became an integral part of UCLA curriculum. Basically this product has shown how to make adaptive learning work.

Courselets project incorporates an interactive chat interface for answering target problems, API for smooth integration of courselets into eLearning solutions, and LTI-support.

The Challenge

The Next Step For "Courselets"

At the starting point, Christopher had an MVP — a self-built prototype that used textual dialogues and worked with the learner’s misconceptions (reasons of making wrong answers). Based on received feedback on misconceptions, system would make the assumptions regarding which material the student needs to study to eliminate knowledge gaps.

The main task was to improve the platform, make it available globally and compatible with any device, LMS and even other applications.

"Courselets" to-do list

1 Rework the Overall UX and UI

We needed to enhance the concept of interaction with Courselets so it can be suitable for most applications
2 Enhance the Integrability

We needed to make "Courselets" universally integrable through the LTI
3 Make "Courselets" suitable for any application

We planned to make the product accessible through any system, eg Google, Facebook or some ERP system

The Solution

The New Design: Main Page

We formed a team of UX and UI designers and developers to repurpose the overall Courselets design

The New UX and UI: Learning Experience

The overall learning process is implemented as an interactive chat, which works by the principles of the Socratic dialogue

The New UX and UI: Practical Exercises

Practical exercises are implemented as a conversation as well

"Courselets" Integrability

We’ve changed the whole Courselets system so it became standardized according to LTI specifications. This means that Courselets can be embedded in any LTI-supporting software like LMS (Moodle, Open edX) or even Facebook messenger

API and Third Party Authentication

1 API

We have completed the code refactoring of Courselets and developed the API that provides a smooth and fast data flow between almost any application
2 Third party authentication and SSO

We implemented multiple Social Logins and Single Sign-On feature

The Results

"Courselets" Project Development Highlights

We delivered the product on time and within budget, providing all the features requested by the customer:
- Complete UX/UI overhaul in a form of Socratic dialogue
- LTI for simple interaction into LMS’s like Open edX and Moodle
- API for smooth integration with various software
- Wide cross-platform accessibility capabilities using 3rd party auth and SSO.

Raccoon Gang are currently working on further evolution of the Courselets project, including:
- GitHub-like system of course component sharing to improve the author’s experience and collaboration capabilities (each time a student has a question/misconception that did not fall into any of predefined error models, the issue-tracking system automatically forms an issue. Each issue has the counter of occurrences and any time the problem repeats, the counter is increased by 1, automatically pushing the most often occurring problems to the top)
- Ability to add varying content and show it to predefined groups of learners in order to gather differing measurable feedback (content A/B testing)
- Better UI for instructors
- Improved interactions (drawn answers in addition to textual and numeric options)