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Course Platform Evaluation Report

show details | show criteria descriptions

Products

ATutor 1.5.1

Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, Canada: http://www.atutor.ca/

Last major evaluation update: August 2005

About product
ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. The first public release of ATutor was in December of 2002.

About producer

Strengths
ATutor has a pleasant interface, and navigation is easy. A course can be created quickly with most standard features of a course platform. The ability to import/export SCORM/IMS content packages is also a useful feature.

Weaknesses
The two different types of content can sometimes make course creation more difficult. Also, course elements cannot be bookmarked. For developers, there is no possibility to easily extend ATutor's functionalites. Only ATutor's internal database can be used for authentication.

General
Multilinguality
The primary interface for ATutor is English. Instructors can set a default language for their course, and students can override it with their own preference. Translations in French, German and Italian are under way (they already existed in previous versions). The current version has 13 completed languages, with about 10 others nearing completion.

Student's Environment
Ease of Use
ATutor is generally easy to use and navigate, with a nice and clean interface. Course elements (tools or content pages) cannot be bookmarked, however, since the system uses sessions to store the current course.
ATutor is W3C WCAG AA compliant, which encompasses most other international accessibility guidelines.
Compliant with common web technology
No problem on Windows Firefox 1.0.4.0, Windows Internet Explorer 6.0.2 or Macintosh Safari 2.0. ATutor also functions with text based browsers, such as lynx, which may be used by blind users, or those on low bandwith connections.
Functional environment
Straightforward navigation, with fast access to most tools. There is no assignment tool.

Tutoring and Didactics
Ease of use
Managing a course is mostly straightforward. Contextual online help is available for many instructor tools.
Communication
ATutor provides standard communication tools : forums, chat. Instructors can also send regular emails to students from within the platform. Participants can subscribe to forums to get notified by email of new postings. There is no search function in forums.
ATutor courses can also make use of ACollab, a complete collaboration/groupware from the same developers. ACollab has a completely different interface however, so its integration with ATutor is not really seamless.
Student management
ATutor offers different modes of enrollment : self enrollment by student (with/without confirmation), enrollment by uploading a list of students.
Students who are enrolled in a course can also be assigned course administrative privileges, e.g. to define teaching assistants. This allows them to perform actions like managing content or creating and marking tests.
Groups are only used to administer different tests to different groups of students.
Activity tracking
Statistics by class and student are available for course usage and tests, but not for other tools.

Course Development
Ease of Use
Course development is usually easy. There is however one problem, due to the fact that there are two different kinds of content : "internal" pages, which are edited directly in ATutor, and files uploaded with the File Manager. Uploaded files can only be linked from internal pages, and are not considered when searching. This might be confusing for course designers.
Flexible Development Framework
ATutor provides no way to extend the standard functionality of the system.
Developers support
ATutor provides an online handbook for administrators, instructors and developers. The developers forum is not very active, since development is done by a small group of people (most developer communications happens outside the forums).
Compatibility with common web authoring tools
Documents (HTML, images) created with other programs can be imported in the file manager and also into content pages using the Content Editor. There is no ftp or WebDAV access.
Assessment
ATutor provides a limited number of question types. Management of tests/surveys is easy, and detailed statistics on submissions are available.
Support for e-learning standards
ATutor can import and export content packages in IMS 1.1.3, SCORM 1.2 or ATutor formats. These appear as normal content.
There is also a SCORM RTE (Run Time Environment) that can play SCORM 1.2 Sharable Content Objects (SCOs). SCOs remain separated from the course content as complete learning units.
Adaptable look and feel
Themes can be used for changing the look and feel of ATutor. Administrators select a default theme, and users can choose among installed themes. Administrators can also apply specific themes to categories of courses, disabling the personalised theme preference. Administrators can quickly create custom themes.

System & Administration
System management
ATutor is based on a php/mySQL architecture, which can be tuned for improved performance.
Administration
Multiple instances of ATutor can run with the same code base (configuration options are set in a single file, which makes this easier).
Only internal authentication is currently supported.