During the Maseno workshop we also covered the concepts of Schools and Classes in the tutor-web system but I completely forgot to mention it in the writeup so here goes.

The need for "Schools and Classes"

The tutor-web has at its core a content hierarchy: Departments, Tutorials, Lectures, Slides and Drills. When someone want to design a "tutor-web course", it is simply a collection of tutorials which can be reused in many courses. This is fine for keeping content in order and allows easy sharing of content among content providers, teachers and students. In this regard the tutor-web is a Content Management System (CMS).

But a teacher has a specific group of students who need to be tracked during a school semester. Traditionally this has been the domain of Learning Management Systems such as Moodle.

Defining a school

The tutor-web home page has a button labelled Schools and classes. Clicking the button takes the user to a page listing all schools who have asked to use the feature.  If you are an instructor and want to set up a School, please send us a note (to tw@raunvis.hi.is if you don't have a contact already). 

Defining a class

Clicking on one of the schools provides you with a listing of all the "classes" within the school.If you are not an instructor or a student in one of the classes you will see a comment of the form "You are not part of this class". If you are a student and want to enroll you will need to contact the instructor. If you are an instructor and want to set up a class, please send us a note (to tw@raunvis.hi.is if you don't have a contact already). 

Applications

To date folks in the tutor-web development team have simply set up these schools and classes after discussions with the instructors. In the future we will likely assign the class setups to someone within each school.

Once a school/class has been set up the instructor is given full access to it and is then free to add any lectures from the tutor-web as an assignment in the class. The instructor can also bulk-assign students to the class using a simple copy-paste mechanism.

The instructor then tells the students which lectures to look at (usually to work on drills) and can view grade summaries or raw answers from the students via a simple button click..

It is the long-term goal of the tutor-web project to automatically link to Moodle, both for registering students and uploading grades, but at the moment instructors commonly just export grades into a CSV file using the provided button and import that file into Moodle.