TuteMan: An Electronic Tutorial Manager
by Dr Robin Pollard,
Wednesday 26th Nov 1997, 1.00-1.50pm,
Engineering E2, Clayton campus
About the presenter...
Robin Pollard is Senior Lecturer
in Marketing and Undergraduate Courses Director (Caulfield and Peninsula) in the Faculty of Business and Economics. He has previously been Physicist and Research Chemist in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States of America and Great Britain. He has authored numerous scholarly articles and chapters, mostly on magnetism in finely divided and disordered matter, and on marketing and accounting. He has lectured students of engineering, medicine, science, business and economics on statistics, marketing models, information storage media, condensed matter physics, radiation and electronics.
About the presentation...
TuteMan is an electronic tutorial manager written by the speaker. Over the past two years the program has been used in a range of Monash subjects involving several thousand students. TuteMan-delivered exams have been administered to about one thousand students. Fail rates have improved dramatically: in one subject the fail rate fell from 45% to 16% and the subject content increased in conceptual complexity. TuteMan is used seamlessly with animated lectures, and thus retains the traditional lecture / tutorial mix but carries all the benefits of automated teaching service delivery.
The delivery is so extensively randomised that "smart" questions appear that bear little resemblance to each other, thus minimizing rote learning and freeing instructors from the tedium of writing fresh questions and manual marking. Its features are:
- Immediate feedback
- Automatic marking and recording
- Randomized question selection and parameter values
- Progressive difficulty
- Open viewing of records
- Self-cloning for use on any PC
- Tracks session duration, date and time
- Distributed collection of results (no network security issues)
- Collates each student's best marks for spreadsheet import
- Detects cheating and hacking
- Can readily conduct/generate tests and exams
- Handles both quantitative and qualitative answers
- Easy to write questions for any discipline
Contact Catherine.Ellis@dec.monash.edu.au
Telephone: +61 3 9905 3272, Fax: +61 3 9905 3278