eContent Mastery Tutoring^sm System

The BrightZone Institute, Inc., in partnership with founding consortium member, BrainX, Inc., has developed an online system to extend outside of the physical school environment safe digital math learning opportunities targeted specifically for have-not learners. These learners can be linked to pre-approved and screened community volunteer virtual mentors to provide additional online support from individuals for whom math is either a passion and/or a discipline used daily in their work or professional careers.

This system will also greatly accelerate learning, lock information into long-term memory, and produce true math eContent Mastery, which is defined as the ability to properly recall and effectively use information whenever it is needed. Once learners have been stimulated by exposure to engaging math BrightBytes, they are then more likely to engage in mathematical reasoning, communication, and problem solving activities (Problems of the Week or POW’s). When learners can then successfully experience the mastering of these basic math problem solving concepts, then their math self efficacy (belief in their ability to learn math) will skyrocket. The expected result will be increased learner engagement in the other math learning activities provided in their formalized school learning environment.

This math problem solving process is designed to help learners gain a thorough understanding of concepts. The latest research into the neurobiology of learning shows that understanding is just the first step in the learning process. If that understanding is not reinforced on several different days, then the understanding will fade. We call this fading process forgetting. The best way to reinforce eContent is with questions that are spaced at an interval that is dependent on a number of factors all related to the individual learner.

This reinforcement timing and intensity must be individualized. To accomplish this process, the BrightZone eContent Mastery Tutoring System uses a Personal Digital Tutor. The system keeps track of each learner and will send reinforcement messages directly to the learner by way of text messages. The learner’s responses to those messages will be reviewed by the Personal Digital Tutor and used to set the next time that the eContent needs to be reinforced in order to achieve the maximum impact on the brain for the purpose of achieving eContent mastery.

Research studies have regularly shown the effectiveness of mentors or tutors both for learners who are performing at grade level and for learners who need remediation. The problem of effectively coordinating the schedules of volunteers and learners is very difficult, which often results in learners not getting as much tutoring help as they may require. This Personal Learning Environment approach will help solve this problem by supporting live mentors with the Personal Digital Tutor. A live mentor communicates by test message with the learners once a week and sets up the study plan for the week. The learners then work with the Personal Digital Tutor on a daily basis for the rest of the week. If a problem is encountered that the Personal Digital Tutor can not handle, then contact to the live mentor for assistance can be established via text messaging. 

Unique features of the BrightZone eContent Mastery Tutoring System 

The Personal Digital Tutor: Every learner gets his or her own Personal Digital Tutor that is based on a real person instead of a cartoon character and :

creates a personal connection between the learner and the system, which lowers course abandonment, increases the time a learner spends on task and improves the learner’s experience.

molds every part of the course to the needs & learning preferences of the learner, which accelerates learning and increases long-term retention.

continues to reinforce learned information over time until it is locked in the learner’s long term memory.

Complete Performance Management System

Competency Management

Manager Reviews that are used to create custom training

Skill Gap Analysis

Easy-to-use integrated Learning Content Management System (LCMS)

Multi level user administration

SCORM compliant

Highly flexibility

Easy to use content creation tools that save time and lower the cost of  
creating courses

A powerful yet flexible reporting system

A Robust Pre-Test and Post Testing Engine

The ability to handle multi-content types:

Flash and other multimedia files

Immersive Simulations

Functional Learning Questions

The ability to import and instantly use any SCORM compliant 3rd party  
course

Neurobiologists have shown that Content Mastery is achieved via two distinct steps, Initial Understanding and Memory Reactivation.

Step 1 – Initial Understanding

Step 1 requires the learner to have a good initial understanding of the material. But what does initial understanding look like in the brain? For example, if I meet you on the street and tell you that I just discovered a new fruit, and describe the fruit as an apple that is blue and tastes sour, you instantly have a mental picture of a blue sour apple. How is this possible? It turns out that your brain already has an existing neural network for an apple, an existing neural network for the color blue, and an existing neural network for the taste of sour. When you hear my news about the new fruit, your hippocampus instantly connects the three existing neural networks to form a new network that becomes your mental image of the fruit.

However, what if you came from a land that did not have apples and you had never seen or experienced an apple. Then you would lack a neural network for a critical component of my explanation, and no connection, or initial understanding, would take place. You might ask me what an apple is and I would try different ways of describing an apple until I hit on an explanation that allowed you to connect existing neural networks to form a mental image of an apple. Armed with this new neural network, your brain could then instantly connect it with blue and sour to form the full neural network of a sour blue apple.

Initial understanding is a great challenge for teachers and curriculum designers. One must understand the level of pre-existing knowledge in the audience in order to create material that produces initial understanding. This is not a new concept, as educators have known for a long time that new knowledge is built on what learners already know.

The items that have not been properly appreciated, and effectively programmed into e-learning systems, are the two big problems with initial understanding. First, during a teaching event (lecture, e-learning course, reading etc.), every student misses some items. Perhaps their mind was wondering when an important point was made, or they just did not understand the explanation. Regardless of the cause, the system has to identify and remediate these understanding gaps on an individual basis, otherwise the learner will not be able to use the information and knowledge mastery will be impossible.

The second problem is that the brain is designed to forget - or in the terminology of neurobiology, most memories do not fully consolidate. This turns out to be a good thing, because without it, our brains would be filled with useless information.

The problem of forgetting is not always easy to explain to learners. After they read a chapter in a book, take an e-learning course or listen to a lecture, most of the information is still resident in their working memory, which leads learners to think they will remember the information when in fact they will not. Research shows that almost all learners dramatically overestimate how much they will remember from new material. This is like walking down a city block and at the end of the block, being able to think back sequentially and remember most of what you saw. However, a few days later, almost all of this information is lost.

Forgetting is a daunting problem for designers of e-learning systems. Research shows that it takes much longer then we previously thought for memories to fully consolidate.

Step 2 – Memory Reactivation

Fortunately, there are ways to accelerate consolidation. This is where the second step in the Learning Mastery Formula comes into play. The best way to accelerate consolidation is to fully reactivate the memories on several different days, over a period of time that varies with the difficulty the learner originally had in gaining the initial understanding. By fully reactivate we mean forcing the brain to fully recall the information in the context of how that information is likely to be used. The best way to do this is with Learning Questions that are primarily fill in the blank, short answer, or scenario based questions. They are specifically not multiple-choice questions. Educational researchers have recognized the problems associated with using multiple-choice questions as not being an effective approach to knowledge mastery.

During the second Mastery stage, the system has to be sensitive to concepts that the learner did not properly understand during the initial understanding step, or that they have forgotten. These concepts must be re-explained on demand.

The Learning Mastery Formula cannot operate in a vacuum. Proper sequencing and context are also critical components. Finally, the system must form a personal connection with the learner in the same way a good teacher or live tutor does.

The implications of the Leaning Mastery Formula for e-learning systems are profound. It shows why e-learning needs to be more personalized than we ever imagined, and why the systems have to work with the learner over a much longer period of time. The formula demonstrates the folly of taking a learner through a course and testing them right after the completion of the last module. The only thing you are testing is initial understanding - not mastery. If you want to test mastery, you have to wait until 10 to 30 days after the completion of the course, before you give the final exam. In that period of time, the learner should use a system that reactivates memories to speed full consolidation.

The BrightZone eContent Mastery Tutoring System excels at both steps, as it was built on the Learning Mastery Formula. The system includes a Personal Digital Tutor that personalizes the eContent and the learning experience for each learner.