This joint project is designed to adapt and expand educational materials developed for undergraduate statistics courses for use with the LON CAPA system, which is being developed with support from the NSF's Information Technology Research program. CAPA (Computer Assisted Personalized Approach) is a type of course management system developed in the early 1990s and now used in a number of universities. LON (Learning Online Network) is a new technology designed to work with CAPA to create an integrated system for online learning and assessment. LON CAPA consists of a learning content authoring and management system allowing new and existing content to be used flexibly, a course management system, an individualized homework and automatic grading system, data collection and data mining system, and a content delivery system. This collaborative project is adapting this new system to the teaching of statistical methods in the social sciences. CAPA has been used for several years for this purpose. The new LON CAPA system is expected to be more flexible and better suited to connecting departments with common interests to share learning materials and assessment results. The new system allows more personalized attention to the learning problems of individual students. It can more effectively connect students to resources that they can use to overcome learning barriers in undergraduate statistics. We are translating the existing statistics problem library of over 600 problems from CAPA into LON CAPA format. We are also creating multimedia class material designed to help students learn the concepts underlying the assigned problems, and this material is being woven into their homework assignments. After implementing the LON-CAPA system in the fall semester of 2003 and refining our materials, we plan to collect student performance data during spring and fall of 2004. These data will be used to test the greater efficacy of LON CAPA relative to CAPA. An extensive database of student performance information already exists for the statistics material from courses in statistics for the social sciences that have been using CAPA. Equivalence in examination content can be maintained after the LON CAPA system is in place, making a direct test of whether students have benefited from the adapted materials possible.
