Instructor-Designed Tutorials--Meeting the Needs of Our Students

We have developed an easy-to-use online tutorial generator designed to allow instructors to make tutorials quickly and with a minimal learning curve. The motivation was to create a generator that would allow instructors to create tutorials as needed and possibly build up a bank of tutorials over a number of years. A key design feature of the online tutorials was the inclusion of branching pathways through the material to provide targeted remedial aid for conceptual difficulties as they appear. We tested the generator by creating a small number of online tutorials that focus on areas where typical first-year students encounter difficulty: vectors, Newton's second law, circular motion, and rotation. We found that students using the online tutorials achieved a better result on the related online quizzes and final exam questions for these topics. The results of our analysis indicate that the online tutorials have been partially successful at reinforcing these key concepts.