The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Chinese proverb
I originally conceptualised Yacapaca as system that would be entirely teacher-controlled and teacher-led. That fits the market well, but I have always had a nagging itch that I don’t personally learn that way. My preference is to control my own learning, including my own assessment. Eventually I just had to scratch that itch, and the result is what I am calling the Revision Package.
The idea is really simple: just tag every question in our question bank according to subject, syllabus, difficulty level, average time required to complete, quality and core concept assessed. Then use this information to dynamically deliver a stream of questions that will keep the student both engaged and appropriately challenged for anything from 5 to 30 minutes at a stretch.
Well it would have been easy, had we not had 144,000 questions to chew through. As it is, it took rather a long time, even though we were able to automate some of that work. But it’s done now, and we launched it today.
Here are the key features:
- Matches the student’s current level in each subject
Yacapaca uses Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) algorithms to continually adjust to find the exact level of challenge for each student. - Matched to syllabus
The questions are matched, topic-by-topic to the 55 most popular syllabi across all subjects. To check if yours is covered, look under the Resources tab for a Topics button against your syllabus. - Spaced practice, automatically
The key to successful revision is spaced practice. Yacapaca Revision uses an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve reinforcement schedule to re-present concepts to students at optimum intervals. - 144,000 questions written by teachers
Our teacher-authors have been enthusiastically adding questions to the question bank for over 7 years. - Formative feedback
Most questions incorporate formative feedback. This helps students to understand and think more deeply, and turns each wrong answer into a learning opportunity. - Instant motivation
Every action brings an immediate reward, so there is always an incentive to do just a little bit more.
Because we are launching late in the term, I have set the price at just £25 for all your students, from now to the end of term. Hopefully that’s cheap enough that you will be able to just dive in and try it out. Whether it works or not is really for the students to decide – that’s the whole point of student-led learning, isn’t it?
If you’re interested, log into Yacapaca and sign up here.





Don’t flip the classroom – flip the whole school!
•12/08/2012 • 6 CommentsWhat can be flipped?
Here is my list of things students can now do at home, including the traditional ones
* didactic presentations
* demonstrations
* practice exercises
* essays
* tests and low-stakes assessments
* educational computer games
* and probably much more
In tertiary education, these are now routinely getting packaged up into MOOCs – Massively Open Online Courses that have been shown to be highly effective and highly engaging. Because they have many game-like aspects, they should work even better with secondary-aged students.
So what’s left?
With the students doing all this at home, you can now knock out a lot of teacher activities that are no longer necessary
* patrol and control
* taking the register
* handing out/taking in worksheets, books, etc
Now the difficult question for someone whose mortgage is paid through teaching. What’s left? Sitting in the staffroom drinking Maxwell House?
A better use of resources.
Actually, I am quite convinced that this is the wrong question. Instead, let’s ask “What else?” Freed from the drudgery of classroom routine, how can you apply yourself to developing the young minds in your charge beyond what could have been done in the past?
What would a flipped school look like?
What I’m going to propose is a variation on the Oxbridge tutorial system. Oxbridge separate teaching into “lectures” (that can now be flipped) and “tutoring” (Oxford) or “supervision” (Cambridge). Tutoring is done in small groups of 2-3 students with one tutor, and has the key aim of developing the students’ ability to think. The tutor’s role is to challenge and to guide the discussion, whilst the students work out the answers collectively.
Organising this with just your own class is difficult: if you are tutoring 6 students, what do the other 24 do? It works best if organised on a whole-school basis. Let’s do the sums.
Wow, that’s an hour a day of small-group tutoring. What’s that going to do for your GCSE results?
Doing this requires a complete reorganisation of the school, and that is precisely what I am calling for. Create open learning spaces where students can study individually as they would at home – or extend the ‘study leave’ idea and allow them to study at home if that if that works for them. Chop classrooms up into tutoring spaces organised for discussion, not presentation. Give staff intensive un-learning of redundant didactic habits so they can develop their tutoring skills. And, as a by-product, watch job satisfaction soar.
So what are you waiting for. It’s still three weeks to the start of term in England. Get your sledge hammer, and go start remodelling classrooms!
Posted in Commentary, elearning
Tags: classroom, k-12, k12, mooc, oxbridge, secondary education, secondary school, supervision, tutor, tutorial