Teachpoint's goals

Educational goals

Teachpoint's primary goal is: to enable cost-effective development of online instruction that is effective for large and diverse student populations. This has led to the following design decisions:

• Teachpoint courses don't rely on student/teacher and student/student interactions. These interactions are supported (e.g. teachers can answer student questions) but their results become embodied in the course. In its ideal final form, the course operates hands-free.
• Teachpoint has features that that make it relatively easy to make courses that adapt to student characteristics such as intelligence, language level, and depth of interest.
• Teachpoint courses are intended to be "failure-free": common sources of student frustration (incomprehension, questions, vocabulary) are addressed by mechanisms that allow each student to make continued progress.

Software structure goals

An online education system involves many policy components that are course-specific or embody pedagogical assumptions. The software structure of Teachpoint has the following goals:

• The policy components are cleanly factored; they can be changed or replaced independently of each other, and independently of the course content.
• The policy components are represented as XML or XSLT documents. It is assumed that course developers are familiar with XML technologies.

• The layout of pages.
• Student navigation controls.
• The policy for course adaptation to students.
• The policy for long-term memory refresh.