THE TUTOR-WEB
A STEP TOWARDS BUILDING AN ACTIVE WEB
BASED UNIVERSITY
Gunnar STEFANSSON
Mathematics Dept of the University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
[email protected]
Dana CONSTANTINESCU
Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Craiova, Romania
[email protected]
The tutor-web is an international project initiated by the
University of Iceland in partnership with many Universities
around the world.
a pilot form can be found at the address
http://tw.raunvis.hi.is:8080/tutorweb .
PhD fellowship in statistics - web-assisted education A fellowship is
available for a PhD study within the Statistics Centre, collaborating with the
School of Education. The project is a part of the "tutor-web"
cooperative R&D-project between 30 university faculty and scientists
in 19 countries which includes developing a completely open web-based
university, initially towards degrees in mathematics and statistics. The
successful candidate is expected to start no later than September 1, 2009.
Applicants should hold an MSc degree with considerable statistical content.
The deadline for applications is April 15, 2009.
For further information contact
Gunnar Stefansson (email: [email protected]
with subject-line "PhD application").
The “tutor-web” is a system for computer-assisted education and
research on education, both for in-class use and for remote learning.
• freely accessible resource which can store the educational material
• provide on-line evaluation.
From an instructor's view, the system permits collaboration on and
exchange of teaching material from slides to books and quiz questions
From a student's view the system provides on-line access to material
and freedom to take quizzes at any location.
From a researcher's view the system is a vehicle for research into the
on-line student's behavior and analysis of the effect of grading
schemes.
Objectives
1). To provide a database of teaching texts, courses, slides, applications
The tutor-web shears the idea of
using small parts of lectures as
a knowledge unit. These
modules are called “tutorials”.
In this moment some tutorial in
mathematics, statistics and
fishery science can be found
on the tutor-web.
The tutor-web structure
Since its implementation in
Plone ( a leading open source
Content Management System,
see http://plone.net/ ), the tutorweb now has access control, so
instructors have full control
over their own tutorials.
A slide can have certain prespecified features (title, main
graphic and so forth)
•the main informational text
• representative images
• links to additional material
• inks to handouts or
homework
A computer programmer will
develop the tutor-web,
including an easy-to-use
interface for instructors.
The slide structure
2.
To realize the on-line evaluation of the students
Many items are accompanied
by on-line multiple choice
quizzes.
(The quiz formats basically
consist of a question, a correct
answer and 2-3 incorrect
answers, with an option of a
“none of the above” answer,
which may of course be correct or
incorrect or a similar option of “all
of the above”)
tutor-web credits transfer into
real-world credits
3. To endorse the research on computer-aided education
• The tutor-web is an excellent platform for research on how students
accumulate knowledge and how students respond to and learn from online quizzes.
• Research is needed on the most effective on-line quizzing methods
evaluation
enforcing learning
• The “tutor-web” has already been used for evaluating simple research
questions:
-is there any gain from using such a system in conjunction with a classroom?
-how to select questions to give to students and how to evaluate their grade in
a dynamic environment where it appears to be optimal to permit students to
repeat requests for questions ad infinitum?
Partnership
The project includes in this moments several PhD students and
postdocs from the University of Iceland.
A major part of this project is to entice other instructors and students to
use the tutor-web, initially in Statistics and Mathematics.
A strategy to recruit academic professionals and students from Europe (in
particular Iceland and Romania) and beyond (including South America,
Asia and Africa) to use and add to the “tutor-web” is considered.
Australia,
Barbados,
Bulgaria,
Botswana,
Benin,
Greenland,
India,
Iceland,
Malta,
Norway,
New Zealand,
Romania,
Swaziland,
Taiwan,
USA
Uniqueness of the “tutor-web”
• Storage of all educational content: (slides, examples, additional
details, handouts, quizzes
• Stored material is linked and can be viewed in different ways :as
web-slides or PDF-slides, as booklets containing slides interspersed
with other material, other views can be generated
• Code is ``Open source''
• Material is ``Open content''
• Source material is available in raw form (not just as PDF) e.g.data
behind an image can be viewed by the student, text or graphs can be
borrowed for inclusion in another lecture
• Students can take quizzes on-line
• Students can take quizzes repeatedly until results are satisfactory
• Content is stored in a modular manner (object-orientated data base)
• Content can be viewed in different ways (will be user-defined)
• All views can be easily modified
Development and upgrades
The current version of the tutor-web at http://www.tutor-web.net
Future hardware upgrades and research will be funded by grants but the
system will mostly be self sustainable like other open systems such as
Wikipedia.
(content is “moderated”, i.e. only “instructors” are permitted to insert materia)
The documentation and much of the material is currently written in English.
Individual tutorials can be in any language
• To be freely available
• To provide complete access to
all material,
• To provide evaluation
PhD fellowship in statistics - webassisted education
contact person
Gunnar Stefansson
(email: gunnar@hi
with subject-line "PhD application").