The values of the Tutors Open Source Project
Tutors: An Open Learning Web Toolkit
A collection of open source components & services supporting the creation of transformative learning experiences using open web standards. Tutors supports three complimentary perspectives:
The Learner Experience prioritises web interactions that are engaging, contextual, linkable, searchable, accessible and responsive. In addition the experience should foster a sense of community and connection among fellow learners.
The Educator Experience prioritises the creation of a guided paths through a curriculum via the creation of learning materials that are autonomous, structurally aligned, composable, auditable, extensible, versioned and independent.
The Developer Experience prioritises the specification and implementation of robust, well documented, loosely coupled components & services, integrated into a coherent toolkit open to contributions from diverse skill sets.
The Learner Experience prioritises web interactions that are engaging, contextual, linkable, searchable, accessible and responsive. In addition the experience should foster a sense of community and connection among fellow learners.
Engaging: The web experience should be visual, stimulating and provoke a sense of exploration and investigation.
Contextual: Suitable navigation features should enable the Learner to visually explore learning objects in the appropriate context, easily reach related material, including parent/child, sibling, and schedule oriented indicators + selected external services. Transitions & Animations should subtly enhance this contextual awareness.
Linkable: All meaningful learning objects should be capable of being bookmarked. If these links are sent to another browser session the link should enable the complete learning context to be rebuilt in that session.
Searchable: A tutors course should support full text search + filter/summary views.
Accessible: Learning resources should support best in class accessibility, including dyslexia, colour blindness and visual impairment.
Responsive: Learning material should adapt adequately from the full range of device characteristics and orientations from mobile phones to widescreen workstations.
Community: A Learner should be able to avail of a community of learners, optionally sharing their presence and activity stream as appropriate.
Connection: A Learner should be able to reach out to fellow learners within the current context, initiating chat, content sharing or other meaningful exchange.
The Educator Experience prioritises the creation of a guided paths through a curriculum via the creation of learning materials that are structurally aligned, composable, auditable, extensible, versioned, independent & autonomous.
Guided Paths: It should be possible to create learning paths adhering to a curriculum but adaptable to individual learning styles and patterns.
Structurally Aligned: The structure of learning content should mirror the structure of the guided learning paths.
Composable: It should straightforward to construct courses from elements of other courses and combine courses into programmes and other configurations.
Auditable It should be possible to ascertain whether students have engaged with specific learning resources.
Extensible: It should be possible to introduce new, parallel learning services within a family of tutors tools.
Versioned: It should be possible to place a course under git based version control, supporting rollback, branch previews and other version management conveniences.
Independent: It should be possible for an educator to migrate from the tutors to other comparable systems within the static site generator category of tools.
Autonomous: Learning resources should be capable of being self hosted, independent of any tutors cloud services.
The Developer Experience prioritises the specification and implementation of robust, well documented, loosely coupled components & services, integrated into a coherent toolkit open to contributions from diverse skill sets.
Robust: Unit & acceptance tests should a key part of each component
Well Documented: Each component should be adequately documented, sufficient to enable quality improvements and other enhancements
Loosely Coupled Components: The project should, as far as possible, consist of a set of reusable components, assembled into a range of applications and services. These components should strive to be independent , testable and shareable.
Loosely Coupled Services: Shares services like authentication, data store, presence, analytics should be shared across the tutors components and potentially decoupled, removed, or substituted as appropriate.
Coherent Toolkit: The role of each Component/Service should be clear and potentially substitutable by alternatives fulfilling equivalent roles.
Diverse Skill Sets: The project should be open to all skill levels, with a welcoming and supportive environment.