Professors in Deal to Design Online Lessons for AP

To ease the way for students grappling with certain key concepts, professors at Davidson College in North Carolina will design online lessons for high school students in Advanced Placement courses in calculus, physics and macroeconomics and make them widely available through the College Board and edX, a nonprofit online education venture.

“We joined edX in May, specifically because many of our faculty wanted to work on this Advanced Placement project,” said Carol Quillen, the president of Davidson. “They see kids come into their introductory classes, year after year after year, and get stuck on certain concepts, like the Phillips curve in macroeconomics, and they wanted to create some interactive online units that teachers could use to help teach the hardest ideas.”

The Davidson faculty involved in the project had already worked with the College Board, grading or writing Advanced Placement exams or teaching summer workshops for A.P. high school teachers. Now, using the College Board’s data from the Advanced Placement exams in the three subjects, and working with teachers from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, they are preparing modules on the trickiest concepts in each subject, including a video lesson and assignments.

High school teachers will be able to use them in their classes or assign them as homework. And the lessons will also be available online on the edX platform for students trying to learn the subject independently.

Advanced Placement courses and the exams given in May offer a growing number of high school students college-level work and the possibility of earning college credit.

Davidson, a small, highly ranked liberal arts college, will develop the units during the current school year, Dr. Quillen said, and try them on a pilot basis in their local schools next year, before making them generally available online in 2015, through the edX platform and the A.P. Central website.

Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, said that the design of the module, and the length of the videos, would vary depending on the topic.

“About 5 to 10 percent of our learners are high school students, and based on our experience with them, videos of 7-8 minutes long get the highest engagement,” he said. “You can’t explain electromagnetic waves in physics in seven minutes, so we’d break it up into bite-size chunks, and have a series of videos, interspersed with interactive gamelike exercises, to make up the learning sequence.”

The lessons will have a range of uses, whether as a MOOC, or massive open online course, or in a class that blends online and live teaching.

“In a blended setting in high school, teachers can use them any way they want,” Mr. Agarwal said. “As a MOOC, they will be available to any learner in the world, to help them prepare for A.P. exams.”

The material would be personalizable, responding to how well the student was doing in the exercises, Dr. Quillen said, and, if necessary, directing them to a different module.

The three initial courses were chosen as those in which the faculty had the most experience, she said, but the hope is to expand to cover chemistry and biology Advanced Placement courses — and perhaps more. The project is being developed with foundation support, she said.

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