Genesis
MIT students affirm that doing challenging p-sets (weekly problem sets) is the key to doing well in the examinations. To help them when they most need it, I dreamed of moving my office hours to 1:00 AM in student’s dorm rooms. (Admittedly, the administration might well find this problematic.) The intrinsically two-way communication offered by the internet offered a way to realize this dream. If we moved homework online, we could give a challenging problem for the strong students, then allow the less strong students to request hints or sub-problems that would lead them to the solution. Since we envisioned automatic grading, they could check that each sub-problem was correct as they progressed towards the solution.
The internet offered easy distribution of our problem library. Importantly, this would be directly to students without having the teacher modify our hints or specific wrong answer messages – except that they could assign what they thought were the best problems in the library for their class.
Starting in 1998, the PI’s son, Alex Pritchard, offered 4 years of partnership, and wrote a platform initially used as cybertutor.mit.edu, while the PI wrote problem content for introductory Mechanics with the help of several undergraduates. Our father-son discussions ultimately resulted in a hugely effective learning environment that embodied a Socratic learning dialog. This grew into our family company Effective Educational Technologies that made mycybertutor.com that became MasteringPhysics.com, Mastering Chemistry.com, ….
Mastering was purchased by Pearson Education in 2006 and has been the dominant homework system (and the best tutor) in science and engineering for the last decade, with over 2M students using it each year; ~ 300k in physics (vs. ~ 30k for the best-selling physics textbook).
Description of Mastering Physics
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