4. Developer Overview
The CSTutor application aims to provide educational institutions with a tutoring application for students that desire tutoring in a subject, but find themselves reluctant or unable to attend existing tutoring resources or a professor's office hours. Although many commercially available tutoring programs exist, the CSTutor provides a solution with certain functional improvements over existing tools. In short, the CSTutor intends to provide an intuitive, straightforward interface for instructors to create informative and useful tutorials for their students.
The CSTutor consists of 2 main parts: Tutorial management/creation and Communications. The former contains all the tools necessary to create the actual Tutorials that students view. The instructor creates the individual Pages and/or Quizzes he or she wishes to make into a Tutorial, and then connects the appropriate Pages and Quizzes within the Tutorial builder to make a Tutorial. Saved Tutorials, Pages, and Quizzes are put into an SIS database, so they have the capability to be reused, edited, and shared by instructors.
The latter portion, Communications, allows for direct student-student and student-instructor interactions in the form of message boards and chat rooms, if students have further questions.
Some of the more complex aspects of the CSTutor, especially in terms of implementation, include the following:
- Generating corresponding HTML from Pages and Quizzes (and vice versa)
- Java Beans executable Code Segments
- Internal Links
- Interacting with servers/databases to update and retrieve Tutorials, Pages, and Quizzes
- Administrative Access
- Remote Access
Hopefully, students who use the CSTutor find themselves with a better grasp of material and tracking of how they are progressing in a class, relative to the instructor's pace. Quizzes give students an idea of possible midterm/final questions, and also ascertain their understanding of concepts.
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