ATutor

ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, and develop custom templates to give ATutor a new look. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily retrieve and import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment.

What is new in this release:

- MultiSite ATutor Updates: Additional modifications have been made to ATutor Multisite for added stability, including better support for subsite custom themes, and for automated upgrading of multisite installations.
- Expanded Metadata: For courses that are public and should be indexed by external search engines, keyword, description, and title metadata has been improved to produce more effective search results.
- Simple Desktop Update: Various adjustments have been made to the Simple Desktop theme to produce more consistent cross-browser display of the user interface.
- PHP 5.4 Support: The codebase has been updated to support the changes introduced in PHP 5.4.
- Session Timeout Improved: Users are no longer logged out when they have multiple ATutor windows open and one of them happens to timeout. Administrators can also control the timeout period, extending or reducing it in the System Preferences.
- Disable Create Courses: For administrators that would prefer to manage the creation of new courses rather than leaving it to instructors, a Disable Create Course setting has been added to System Preferences.
- Randomized Questions: The bug that caused questions not to be randomized when presenting tests from a pool of questions, has been resolved.
- Math Equation Editor: The WIRIS math equation editor has been added to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor adding a full range of mathematical notation authoring from anywhere in ATutor that uses the editor.
- Remedial Content: Test authors can now include remedial content with the feedback presented after failing test questions.
- Live Link AContent: Instructors can link content from the AContent repository into the content of their courses, leaving the content in the repository rather than importing the associated files. This allows authors to maintain a single copy of content, with updates to it automatically updating across all courses using it.
- Language Caching Improved: The caching of language has been improved to minimize the need to access language from the database, improving page load times by about a factor of 10. This greatly improves database efficiency for system with many courses and many students accessing ATutor at the same time. Administrators can also set the lifetime of the cache, controlling how often it gets refreshed.
- Web Search Details: A new Web Search detail box has been added to make it possible to embed a Google search box along with other course tools.
- New DB Access Function: In preparation for the switch over to mysqli when PHP deprecates the long standing "mysql" functions for accessing MySQL, and in preparation for support of databases other than MySQL, as well as reducing the size of the codebase and reducing the risk of inadvertantly introducing sql injection vulnerabilities, the new "queryDB()" function has been added. Developers should now use this function rather than the "mysql" functions to query the ATutor database. See the ATutor Developer Documentation for details.