Chemistry

The bridge to stoichiomety course has been designed to help students develop and strengthen their skills with stoichiometry calculations. It contains a mix of videos, tutors, Virtual Lab activities, and text to provide a varied learning experience. We also have a collection of problems that use our Virtual Laboratory. The Virtual Laboratory is a simulation-based learning environment for aqueous chemistry. It allows students to select from hundreds of standard reagents and manipulate them in a manner that resembles that of a real lab. Students can design and perform diverse experiments in acid-base chemistry, thermo-chemistry, solubility and redox chemistry.

The Virtual Lab integrates easily into existing instructor lead courses and allows current paper-and-pencil homework to be supplemented with on-line activities that provide varied practice.

During the OLI summer workshop participants will learn how to use the course materials to support their teaching and will learn how to use the authoring environment to create their own exercises in the virtual chemistry lab.

French

French Online is an interactive video-based course intended for use by university students and independent learners on the Internet. The course is web-based and can be adapted for a blended delivery system (face-to-face and on-line) or a purely distance delivery. Hallmarks of the course include a carefully chunked and highly interactive presentation of French language and culture and a media-rich course environment including new video shot in France with professional actors.

The beginning of each lesson is always a set sequence, from simple recognition of language in a video dialogue, through explicit learning of grammar and pronunciation, to written and spoken production of variations on that language. After this ordered beginning, a number of activities are offered to the student in which the language learned is used in understanding new texts, sounds or videos or in creative production (conversation or writing).

Each of the 15 lessons follows the same structure of activities:

• Introduction: presentation of communicative and cultural goals for the lesson
• Communication 1: Recognize sounds and words in a video dialogue.
• Mots et expressions: Learn to repeat and understand parts of dialogues.
• Structures: Study the grammatical basis of the spoken dialogues.
• Sons: Learn the sound system of the language.
• Communication 2: Learn to understand and produce French.
• Univers culturel: Study aspects of French and francophone cultures.
• Activités de synthèse: Use your French in writing and speaking activities.

During the OLI summer workshop participants will learn how to use the course materials to support their teaching.

Logic and Proofs

Logic and Proofs is a web-based course that introduces students to central issues in logic. The broad informal question is: How can one analyze the structure of rational discourse or, more specifically, the logical structure of argumentation? To answer this question, the course teaches students four distinct steps:

1. uncover the logical form of statements;
2. define the correctness or soundness of logical steps;
3. formulate sound inference rules appropriate for the logical forms;
4. design strategies for logical argumentation using the inference rules.

The course does this for two different analyses of “logical form,” namely, one provided by Sentential Logic and one provided by Quantificational Logic (also called Predicate or First-order Logic). The sophisticated framework for on-line exercises is provided by the Carnegie Proof Lab in which the student constructs logical arguments.

Physics

The Andes Physics course is designed around the Andes physics tutor, an intelligent tutoring system. The course may be used with most physics textbooks and supplements the textbook by providing problems for students to solve with the aid of Andes. Students solve problems with Andes just as they would with pencil and paper, by entering vectors, coordinate systems, equations and variable definitions and are free to make as many entries as they want in order to solve a problem. After they make each entry, they receive immediate feedback on its correctness. They can also ask why an entry (e.g., an equation) is wrong, and they can request hints on what to do next in order to solve the problem. Their score on a problem can be based mostly on the entries made while deriving the answer, and not just on the answer itself.

During the OLI summer workshop participants will learn how to use the course materials to support their teaching. Specifically, instructors will learn how to select and sequence a set of existing Andes problems to support their course, customize Andes behavior with respect to grading policies, and learn how to author new Andes problems for existing topics.

Statistics

The Statistics course introduces students to the basic concepts, logic, and issues involved in statistical reasoning. Major topics include exploratory data analysis, an introduction to research methods, probability, and statistical inference. The objectives of this course are to give students confidence in manipulating and drawing conclusions from data and provide them with a critical framework for evaluating study designs and results.

An important feature of the course is the use of an intelligent tutoring system developed at Carnegie Mellon called "StatTutor." StatTutor facilitates understanding of statistical ideas and analytical techniques by helping students construct useful knowledge representations and thereby develop effective problem-solving skills. It uses a specified outline of steps to follow in solving problems, or "scaffolding". StatTutor uses scaffolding and immediate feedback flexibly, tracking and responding to individual students as they navigate the learning environment.