#Atutor e learning archive

The course taught students about learning skills, individual differences, and focused on developing self-awareness of individual learning capacities to help learners better adapt to a range of learning activities. Greg Gay was developing an online course called Learning to Learn. The concept behind ATutor originated in a graduate school project in 1994. From its early adherence to accessibility and HTML standards, much effort has also gone into the implementation of interoperability standards, ensuring that content authors and course developers are not locked into the system, but instead can easily package up their learning content and their online courses and move them into other systems. Part of the mandate at ATRC is to introduce inclusion into developing standards, and to this end, ATutor has been a model for standards implementation. The ATRC is a not-for-profit organization that promotes accessibility on a global scale. A blind person, for instance, would be able to participate fully in online learning activities, develop and teach an online course, or manage his/her own Web-based learning environment.ĭeveloped at the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) at the University of Toronto, ATutor is one of many projects at the centre that focus on inclusive access to information and information technology. ATutor can also be classified as a learning management system (LMS) or a course management system (CMS) or a virtual learning environment (VLE) - all terms for describing tools used to offer courses over the Web.įrom the beginning, accessibility has been a major focus of ATutor development, ensuring that anyone could access the system, not only to learn online, but to function as an author, instructor or an administrator of the e-learning environment. In addition to its content authoring and content sharing capabilities, it also has a large collection of modular tools that can be combined in different ways to adapt the system to various theoretical approaches to teaching and learning.

#Atutor e learning archive

IntroductionĪTutor is labelled a learning content management system (LCMS), which is a designation generally assigned to tools used to author and archive learning content. While ATutor does accommodate smaller e-learning scenarios, it scales easily to accommodate larger installations. ATutor development has also focused on accommodating small e-learning scenarios, a market virtually untouched by other similar systems whose major focus is on capturing a part of the large institutional e-learning market. Since its initial release late 2002, ATutor has continued to evolve, with a development focus on its accessibility and conformance with interoperability standards.

ATutor developed as a proof of concept that a fully inclusive e-learning environment was possible. At the time of these studies (19), none of the popular e-learning environments fared very well, all containing a variety of potential barriers that would prevent, or make difficult, online learning activities for some groups of people. , last updated 12 November 2012 Introduction Brief descriptionĪTutor is an open source, online learning environment used to develop Web-based courses, author e-learning content, and present instructional materials on the Internet.ĪTutor came about after two studies that looked at the accessibility of Web-based learning environments for people with various types of disabilities.