IMPARO - The Answer to Create Online Tutorials
An advance web-based system for educators to create online tutorials and personal library of questions

With IMPARO educators no longer need to rely on IT Professionals to create their online tutorials. For example, the powerful system allows educators to create and maintain their own “Question Bank” which functions like their personal library. Instructors can build up various types of questions over years and store them in the huge database. They may also modify or share the questions in their “Question Bank” with others by granting access to one another. By using IMPARO, the educational knowledge and experiences are well preserved and effectively shared.

Comprehensive Monitoring System

Another powerful feature of the IMPARO system is its comprehensive monitoring and assessment capability. The system provides a comprehensive chart for lecturers to display students’ progress in a particular tutorial. Using this chart feature and other statistical tools, instructors can monitor students’ performance at a glance. An instructor is able to view the completion rate of each tutorial and each question in a tutorial. A low completion rate may be an indication that a particular question or tutorial is too difficult. The instructor may then take special effort to address the concepts involved in these questions to the class as a whole.

Innovative Feature

The IMPARO system features a wide variety of question types such as Numerical Question, Symbolic Question, Multiple Choice Question and Essay Question. The system also allows instructors to create online tutorials with advanced diagnostic capabilities.

Online tutorials with such advanced diagnostics capabilities are more effective in training students. It is as if the student has a virtual instructor online to provide guidance in solving the online tutorials.

Another powerful feature provided is the ability of the System to collect incorrect answers given by students and to present these in an organised manner to the lecturers who may then use the information to create more diagnostics. In this way, questions can be continually updated with more diagnostics to benefit new students doing the same questions in the future.

To discourage copying and cheating, the parameters used in the tutorial questions are also randomised and unique for each student. For students who encounter difficulties solving the questions, the system would provide them help in the form of generic solutions.In order to present the abstract and complicated engineering topics, the implementation of Numerical Questions as well as Multiple Choice Questions in teaching, sometimes, is not enough. The IMPARO system provides an exciting feature which allows students to input their answers symbolically. Its powerful symbolic input capability enables students to key in their answers in an almost infinite number of ways from a user friendly Equation Editor.

With the implementation of XML (Extended Markup Language) and other IT technologies, the system is able to intelligently mark the symbolic answer and even issue the appropriate diagnostic message if a common mistake is made by the student.

This article is contributed by Engineering IT Unit.