Codon is an evidence-based (scientific) teaching and learning courseware platform.
The fine print, up front. Our courseware replaces overpriced textbooks, online homework, and polling systems; it integrates with all the major learning management systems. Students retain access to their courses for at least five years.
We focus on the evidence-based practices that are hard to implement without good technology and high-quality content. For example:
Codon’s Course Planner helps faculty design and teach aligned high-structure courses using lesson-level learning objectives and backward design.*
Codon’s structued Study Path helps students develop stronger self-regulated learning skills by applying self-testing, spaced learning, and metacognition (Hazlett, Jimenez, & Knight).
In Codon’s majors biology course, Introducing the Life Sciences by Scott Freeman et al, students learn from streamlined and active Readiness Readings that replace the traditional textbook.
Codon’s In-Class Active Learning and polling system helps spark in-class student engagement with plug and play active-learning materials and technology.
*All of our learning objectives have been vetted over many years by the community. For example, our course Introducing the Life Sciences by Scott Freeman (University of Washington) et al, is based on validated learning objectives from the NSF consensus study Nationally endorsed learning objectives to improve course design in introductory biology by Hennessey and Freeman recently published in PLOS ONE.
A creative (but tedious) low-tech way to track alignment of course components. One the first challenges we addressed was to provide course frameworks that align (via backward design) learning objectives to assessments and content.