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Re: [school-discuss] Fwd: Re: Evaluating Tutor-Web



Hi,

> What is  http://www.tutor-web.net  used for.   I browsed it but no 
> introduction there.

I have long been interested in computer-assisted teaching and some 10+
years ago I started using powerpoint for presentations.  A few years
ago I decided that this had become archaic and started looking for
mechanisms by which I could link my in-class slides to other things
such as quiz questions, elaborations on the slide, other courses, etc.
As I couldn't find anything that suited my purpose, my hobby in recent
years has been to try to design something and this has resulted in the
tutor-web.

The tutor-web (http://tutor-web.net) is designed so that an instructor
can flip through electronic slides while presenting material to a
class.  A student can subsequently flip through the same slides on the
Internet, accessing background detail, examples or quizzes as (s)he
goes through the tutorial.  Everything is on-line, in open formats and
does not depend on anything proprietary.  Presentation is mainly in
html but one can also present slides in pdf - this was just a question
of defining another output format.  The student can also obtain a
printable version of the tutorial (postscript or pdf), which provides
boxed slides embedded in the detailed text.

At present there is no decent interface for a teacher wanting to set
up his/her own new tutorial, but this is on the ToDo list along with
piles of other things.  Setting up a small slides-only tutorial is no
big feat, since it can be done either by setting up individual
ASCII slide-files or automagically splitting a LaTeX document.
Linking things together, cleaning up slides, adding detail, examples
and decent questions is the bear, though: A truly complete tutorial
basically contains an entire textbook along with quizzes and slides.
If you are interested, let me know and we'll figure out a way to do
this.

The system is open in the sense that anyone can have a copy of it and
any student is free to access it.

In live courses I have found it very useful to use the quizzes as a
part of the final course grade.  In my environment the homework
returns are often a requirement for taking a written exam.  When using
the t-w I have typically enforced a minimum return of correct quiz
questions.  The fact that the questions are selected at random seems
to be enough to deter cheating.

The plan is for this to evolve through incremental additions of
individual tutorials - each typically consisting of 1-2 weeks' worth
of course material.

Gunnar