Students
Basics for students
The tutor-web is a research tool which includes an on-line drilling system. It has been used as a general tool for drills and distributing material, for several classes of 200-600 students, collecting annually up to 250 thousand student answers to drill questions in the largest classes. The answers are used for research purposes. These pages contain background information regarding the tutor-web. The actual tutor-web entrance is at http://tutor-web.net but the following provides basic information for students.
If you are accessing this as a part of a course in a school, your instructor may have set up access for you. Otherwise, click the Register button on the front page. Again, if your work is a part of a class, then you will want to use your official school/university email address, not a personal email account. You do not need to register just to view material or to look around and test. You only need to register if you want to get grades for your work.
You are free to use the system without being a part of a class in a formal school, including receiving SMLY rewards. Note, however, that as a part of a school you will get higher rewards and possibly other features. If you attend a school you should ask your teacher to send us a note to register your class and register you as a student in the class. You may also ask to be admitted as a student in a class-without-a-school, but you will then be required to provide a proof of identity. This is done to reduce abuse of the system.
When you go to the opening page of the tutor-web, the registration and login buttons are in the top-left corner:
To start drills, go to the appropriate department, find a course and tutorial within the course. Then you can select a lecture and choose "Take a drill". Once you have started, you can go off-line and keep working on your phone or tablet. For a really simple test of the system, go to Elementary school mathematics and take some drills on addition. As you answer questions correctly you will see how your grade increases. Further down on this page you will find detailed instructions on how to use the drilling system.
Once you have registered, log into the system. Go to and click the login button to get
where you fill in your tutor-web Id (which is usually your official email address). Note that you can use "guest" with password "guest" for testing, but you will not get grades or Smileycoins for this. If you have forgotten your password, see the problems section below.
Next, choose a department and a course inside the department. We will choose the Math Department to get a menu like this:
Note that you can choose to look at either entire courses or tutorials. We normally start with the courses and then go to tutorials within courses. Here, if you click on High School Mathematics, you will see that there is only one tutorial within this course and your screen should look something like this:
You only have the option to click on the single tutorial, which will give you a long list of all "lectures" in the high school math tutorial:
Next you can (a) read the material available (Download tutorial notes), (b) take drills or (c) select a lecture and take a look at what is inside. Start with something easy such as integer arithmetic.
Accessing content
Select the appropriate department, find a course and tutorial within the course. Then you can choose "Download tutorial notes" to access the reading material in this tutorial. Depending on the tutorial, these notes may vary in quality and quantity from very simple handouts to a pretty complete textbook.
Accessing drills
To use the drills you need to first register and from then on you just log in, using the directions above. This is needed so that the system can keep track of how well you are doing and can give you drills which are in line with how you are doing. If your instructor has already registered you and your entire class, then you should only log in. Do not register multiple times. Use the description above to register, if needed, and to log in. Also, follow those directions until you get into "Integer arithmetic".
If you have not already subscribed to the drills in this lecture, you will be asked to do so as seen in the following snapshot. Just click the subscribe button:
This will start downloading drills into your computer and you should see a picture like this:
For a large tutorial with lots and lots of lectures, this download may take a while, so you need to be patient while the blue bar moves across the screen. If the download fails, look at the Problems section below.
When the download is done the screen should look like this:
Notice the new button, "New question". You can now click on this button to get a new question (or drill item). This will (usually) give you a multiple-choice question which you should try to answer within the time indicated.
Notice that it is NOT enough just to tick the answer: You also have to press "Submit answer". Make sure not to double-click.
Once you submit the answer you get immediate feedback on whether the correct answer was chosen, as seen in the following.
This is a fairly complicated screen, so we will take it piece by piece.
First, notice the tick mark at the correct answer. If you ticked a different box, the error will be indicated by a red x-mark.
Next notice the green-coloured section which contains an explanation of how one may arrive at the solution. For most questions a detailed solution has also been written up and is shown once an answer has been submitted.
Make sure to study the solution if you were not sure of your answer or if it was incorrect. The best way to learn is from the mistakes.
Next, you will see your overall grade for this lecture. This grade will tend to increase as you answer more questions correctly and it will go down if you answer incorrectly.
The system also shows the increase in grade by answering the next question correctly.
Finally, a tally is given, first of the number of questions answered and the number correctly answered. Below this are the individual grades for answers to the most recent questions, up to 8.
The grade is computed using a weighted average of recent answers. The weighting used varies from lecture to lecture but the most recent answers are usually given the highest weight.
Rewards
You earn Smileycoins as you work within the tutor-web.
Note: The tutor-web system is designed as a learning tool, giving SMLY as rewards upon completing drills. It is considered abuse of the tutor-web to register under multiple user names for the sole purpose of solving elementary drills to earn SMLY. There is no learning involved in simply solving the same set of drills multiple times, as different users and in copies of the same lectures. This is therefore not considered acceptable use of the system.
Problems
If you lose your password, go to the login page (click on the login button) and click on the option to get a new password:
Your browser only has limited space. If you try to download drills from several large tutorials you will get an error message.
To solve this, you need to click on the "Main menu" button, to go back and unsubscribe from some tutorials. The "Main" button gives you an overview of the tutorials which you have in the browser.
Click on a tutorial to see the lectures inside it and then click on a lecture.
This now shows an unsubscribe button. Click this to unsubscribe from the tutorial. Note that you can always subscribe to it again later.
Keep on unsubscribing until you have no error message. It may in fact be prudent to unsubscribe completely from everything and start from scratch, but this should not normally be needed.
On a small screen you may not see the unsubscribe button unless you scroll all the way to the bottom:
Implementation details
More to come.