ENHANCED LEARNING WITH WEB-ASSISTED EDUCATION: THE TUTOR-WEB

The tutor-web is a web-based educational system accessible and free to use for anyone having access to the Web. The system is based on open source software and the teaching material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This is done to provide usage of material to institutions of limited resources. The system has been used for computer-assisted education in statistics and mathematics and research on education. It offers a unique way to structure and link together teaching material and includes interactive quizzes with the primary purpose of increase learning rather than mere evaluation. An interesting research question is: how should questions/items be allocated so the students get the most out of the quiz sessions? Current methods used in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) tend to use Point Fisher Information (PFI) to allocate questions, which is well-justified when attempting to evaluate the current knowledge of the subject. With an emphasis on learning, not evaluation, new methods needs to be developed.

It is of interest to measure possible difference in learning between students answering quiz questions in the tutor-web and students doing more traditional homework such as handing in written assignments. While no additional work is needed by teachers after tutor-web assignments have been handed in, written solutions needs to be corrected which is time consuming and therefore costly. The system could therefore save time and effort if it can replace traditional homework to some extent. To answer this question a randomized experiments have be conducted where students either worked within in the tutor-web as homework or handed in written assignments corrected by a teaching assistant. The main results of the experiments will be given in the talk along with a description of the tutor-web system with special focus on the item allocation algorithm.