Design for a General-Purpose, Time-Locked, Group Teaching Machine

A new approach to the design of group teaching machines of the branching type is presented. The approach may be described as follows: A lecture is divided into several topics, each of which ends with a quiz. Through reviews which always end with a quiz, it is insured that a student has understood the current topic before he proceeds to the next one. When a simple restriction on review durations is imposed, it is possible to combine relatively few sections of a program in a relatively large number of ways. Each student's answers to the quizzes deternine the particular, uninterrupted sequence of topics and reviews that he is exposed to. A machine utilizing this approach can teach an unlimited number of students simultaneously, at a reasonably low machine cost per student.