Terracotta (a portmanteau of Tool for Education Research with RAndomized COnTrolled TriAls) is a plug-in to the learning management system that allows the contents of online assignments to be differentiated for experimental treatment variations, and to be assigned randomly to different groups of students. Terracotta also enables privacy protections for student participants, such as informed consent that is hidden from the teacher, filtering of non-consenting participants from result summaries and data exports, and removal of student identifiers from these exports. Terracotta's goal is to lower the technical and methodological barriers to conducting more rigorous and responsible education research.
