Top Five Value-Adding Features of LON-CAPA

Feature

Sub-Feature

Who?

What we think is good about it

Content Sharing

Cross-institutional

Faculty

Wider selection of available content

Students

Higher quality of material, cross-institutional de-facto standards

Cross-course

Faculty

Course material more easily handed off between faculty teaching same course

Cross-disciplinary

Faculty

Wider range of material, easier to locate applications and “integrative” curricular material

Different levels of granularity

Faculty

Material can more easily be adopted at different “chunk sizes”

Individualized Assessment

Different numbers, graphs, options, formulas, images, text, etc, from student to student

Faculty

Cut down on “cheating”

No additional work to generate different versions of exams

Students

Students don’t cheat themselves

Item and concept analysis across

Faculty

Ability to pinpoint misconceptions and problem areas early on, just-in-time teaching

Different choice of problems, follow-up questions

Students

Material can be written so it adapts itself to the students level

Immediate Feedback

Immediate correct/incorrect

Students

Students do not fall behind in their classwork

Faculty

Cuts down on time spent grading

Adaptive hints

Students

Students can get feedback that can be targeted to their specific misconception

One Source – Multiple Target

The same assessment content can be used for online homework, PDAs, printed Scantron exams, and online exams

Faculty

Time savings, direct connection between homework and exam, ability to do in-class assessment (enhanced PRS)

Higher, compact print quality, particularly for mathematical formulas

Students

Readability, paper savings

Open-Source Freeware

Code can be modified and adapted at user institution

Administrators

System can more easily be adapted into campus environment

Faculty

Can adapt software to projects and research purposes

Code can continually be improved by wider community

All users

Sustainability

Low initial monetary investment

Administrators

Funds freed up for support, training, etc

Transparency of internal workings, trust

All users

No proprietary “mystery”