Course
A course is the top content level in Brian. For example, a course might be called "Chemistry 101". For each course, you will define a course level, course language, and a subject focus.
Important: A "course" is not the same thing as a "class" because its content can be made available to different classes (parallelly or sequentially). If you wish to do so, you create a new "course timeframe" within the course.
The picture below shows the students' view of the course overview. Each "brain in a jar" designates a separate course this particular student is enrolled in.
Course Unit
A course can be divided into any number of sections. Brian calls these sections "Course Units". They are used to organize the content--a Course Unit may contain all the materials for a certain temporal portion of the course ("Week 1") or all the materials belonging to a certain area of study ("The Causes of the Russian Revolution"). In the course “My First Brian”, for example, the first module is called “Get to know Brian”.
The learning units are displayed as hills in the learning environment.
Exercises
There are three types of exercises that can be created within a Course Unit: Quizzes, AI-Dialogues and Chatbots.
Quizzes
Quizzes are catalogs of questions based on a document that has either been supplied by the teacher or created via Brian's AI. Each quiz contains single- or multiple-choice questions and associated answer-, and explanation-sets. Any number of topics can be created within each module
The quizzes are displayed as rectangles in the learning environment.
Context, Questions, Explanations
Each quiz has an associated context (a document, video, image, etc. referenced by the questions).
Each quiz consists of question-, answer-, and explanation-sets that can be customized by AI or manually.
AI-Dialogue
Like quizzes, AI-Dialogues are exercises that are anchored in a course unit's learning path. A course unit can contain an unlimited number of AI-Dialogues. Each dialogue contains an exercise that requires free-text answers. Students work on these exercises in collaboration with a chatbot. The exercises are created by the teacher using either templates or a guided creation tool ("AI-dialogue creation by chatbot").
In the learning environment, the AI dialogues are displayed in the form of speech bubbles - so they can be distinguished from the quizzes.
See also: AI Dialogue: Concept and Creation
Chatbot
Like quizzes and AI dialogues, chatbots are an exercise type that is part of the learning path of a course unit. Unlike AI dialogues, chatbots do not have a clear endpoint and do not provide structured feedback and a systematic evaluation according to evaluation rubrics. Rather, they offer open-ended chats. Each chatbot can be given a specific focus. They are often used to provide searchable, interactive information to the students or to invite students to independently explore a specific topic or practice a specific skill.
See also: What is a chatbot?
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