As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I have been working with iCampus tools in general and specifically, XTutor. XTutor is an iCampus tools which was developed specifically for self learners. The XTutor tool provides content and feedback via the network (Internet or Intranet) without direct faculty involvement. The student moves through a series of web pages that present text, graphics and audio. It would probably work best as a self paced course offering found at many of the MCCCD colleges (i.e. OE/SP courses at GCC).
To learn how to use XTutor and familiarize myself with its features, I signed up to take the MIT iCampus Intro to CS (Computer Science) class taught with XTutor (http://icampus.mit.edu/xtutor/). I am early in the class but I am impressed with what I have seen so far. At its best, XTutor seems more interactive than what is delivered in a typical online course management system (such as BlackBoard) and provides better feedback on assignments than what would be available in a textbook alone.
XTutor includes a menu interface (like a table of contents) to direct the student to a lecture (PowerPoint like with audio or transcripts) and to exercises that evaluate student progress. The student can start the instruction and more or less let it run them through the material (like a PowerPoint slide session) or stop and start different sections of the class by navigating to a chapter via the menu interface. I would say that the experience seems more integrated as it takes you from learning item to exercise to learning item much like a PowerPoint presentation. I think it would work very well in a format where the student was a more independent "self-learner."
The course I am taking is using an earlier release of XTutor which used a programming language called Scheme. The version was not necessarily designed for widespread use. Developing Scheme XTutor content is not as easy as with some of the other content management tools typically used by faculty. A new and more course developer friendly release has been written and can be downloaded from the iCampus/XTutor web site. This version was designed to be more developer friendly and uses both the Python programming language and XML document files to deliver content. I suspect faculty using XTutor should expect to have a considerable technical expertise.
My exposure so far as been limited. I need to work more on the Intro to CS course to see the full power of XTutor and I have also asked the developers of XTutor if there has been any work to develop end user tools to build the XML documents necessary for the new version of XTutor. My initial impression is that this tool is early in its development and with that, the content designer needs a significant technical background (i.e. and understanding of XML ) . I am interested in finding out if the developers at MIT think this is a fair analysis.
If anyone in the District is interested in getting started with XTutor, I would be more than happy to share my experiences so far. You can reach me at gary.marrer@gcmail.maricopa.edu.