Tutorials

Tutorials:  Teacher on tube….

Discussion:  Tutorials are self-paced learning units.  Students guide themselves through complete instructional units that may also include some drill and practice.  Similar to drill and practice, most would recognize this as traditional classroom education.  The instructional units involve some reading although some programs will read the text aloud. They also may include videos, examples and solved problems, and problem sets.  There are two type of tutorials: Linear and branching.

Linear behave very similar to a traditional classroom experience.  In a linear tutorial students will traverse through an entire tutorial at their own pace and solve all of the provided problems.  Each student completes the same tutorial and when they reach the end, they would move on to the next instructional unit.

A branching tutorial is more like a differentiated classroom where students are guided through the unit based on their performance on question sets.  Each student gets a slightly different learning experience based on their perceived needs.  It takes students varying amounts of time to complete the unit.

Teacher Perspective:  Again, tutorials are a safe bet because they mirror traditional education. Often the online course offerings of some high schools are simply a sequence of tutorials with drill and practice.  Tutorials can also be assigned for students to complete as homework or suggested for remediation.

Student Perspective:  Tutorials offer a varying degree of engagement for the student.  As a student, I like tutorials because they are self-paced and I can skip through sections I find easy and spend extra time on things I find challenging.  They are easy for a student, because the course becomes a series of checkboxes of tutorial completion.

Reality: Positive and negative.  Tutorials are a good way to learn new things or reinforce current knowledge.  Some tutorials are better than others.  Just as with other traditional methods, they may or may not result in cognitive development and are often dependent on what a student chooses to gain from it.

Examples for Physics

The Physics Classroom: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class  this section of the physics classroom site is dedicated to tutorials.  This includes animations, links to other resources in thephysicsclassroom, solved problems, and practice.

Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ap_physics_b this site is a series of individual lessons about advanced placement physics.  Excellent tutorials with problems, problem solutions, video and verbal discussion of physics concepts.