So where do you turn when you need an open source solution for course management? ATutor is one of the best and easiest tools available.

Of course many would wonder what can be added to a CMS tool to make course management easier. That answer is simple:

• Assignments
• Blogs
• Chat
• Course Email
• Profile Pictures
• Reading Lists
• Statistics
• Student Tools
• Syndicated Feeds
• Tests and Surveys
• TILE repository search
• Web search
• and much more

So ATutor is not just a re-write of a standard CMS. ATutor is a serious tool to help serious educators.

Getting and installing

Installing ATutor isn’t really that difficult. It will require a running LAMP server and root (or sudo) access to your web servers’ document root. You will also have to create a database for the installation. I like to use PhpMyAdmin for creating databases on my LAMP servers. Create a database named “atutor” (no quotes) and you are ready to install.

Download the archive from the ATutor download page and save it in your servers’ document root (on a Ubuntu server this would be /var/www). When then file is in place unpack the archive with the command:

tar xvzf ATutor-XXX.tar.gz

Where XXX is the release number. This command will create a new directory called atutor. Before you point your browser to the ATutor installation issue the following commands (from within the /var/www/atutor directory):

sudo mkdir content

sudo a+rwx content

sudo chmod a+rw include/config.inc.php

Now you’re ready to rock.

Point your browser to:

http://ADDRESS_OF_SERVER/atutor

and the installation will begin.

The installation of ATutor is incredibly simple. You will walk through a few pages where you will enter the necessary information unique to your installation. The final step is to send the information collected during the installation to the ATutor site. You do not have to do this, but it will help the developers know what their application is installed on. You can also submit your installed URL if you like, but you can uncheck this option if you are uncomfortable sending this information.

Figure 1

When you are finished you should go back and remove the /var/www/atutor/install directory for security.

Figure 1 shows the main window for ATutor. As you can see this tool offers quite the amount of tools. Your best bet to get up to speed with ATutor is to simply start poking around.

The first place you will want to look is the System Preferences tab. Within this tab you can enable self registration (which will save you a good amount of time.) Take care of this tab and then head on over to the Course tab where you can begin to set up your courses.

Final thoughts

ATutor is perfect for anyone needing a course managment tool but doesn’t want to either have to do any development or spend a lot of money. If you are looking for a single tool to handle all of your course management tasks, ATutor is the tool for you.

• Get course information
• Contact the instructor
• Read or download lecture notes
• Get assignments
• Ask questions and get answers
• Communicate with other students

CourseForum is incredibly easy to “install” on Linux, Windows, Mac,? FreeBSD, or Solaris and can be accessed from any web browser. Let’s take a look at this classroom software from the Linux point of view.

Getting and Installing

Since CourseForum even has its own server built in you can install CourseForum anywhere on a Linux machine. CourseForum comes in a single executable binary that starts and runs CourseForum on port 3455. So after you download the demo follow these steps (as either the root user or using sudo):

Untar the package into your servers’ document root (i.e. /var/www/html for Fedora /var/www in Ubuntu)

Change into the newly created directory (courseforum-linux) and issue the command:

./courseforum &

The CourseForum daemon will start and you can now point your browser to:

http://IP_OR_DOMAIN:3445

Where IP_OR_DOMAIN is either the IP address or domain the server is on.

CourseForum Admin Page

This address will take you to the front page of CourseForum. The first thing you will need to do (before you can do anything else) is set an administrative password. Once you do that you can access the administration page and start building your course. NOTE: The demo is restricted to only a single course. If you purchase the full version you can create unlimited courses.

As you can see (in the image to the left) all administration tasks are taken care of in one window. There isn’t a lot of admin work to do with this software which makes it an even better solution for busy instructors.

Some of the more important tasks your instructors will want to do are:

• Messages: This is really just the welcome message displayed on the front page of CourseForum.
• Custom Links: This isn’t really what it sounds like. What this feature does is allow you to create custom? commands that can do any number of things like formatting or integrating third-party content. There is a good how-to page on the CourseForum site to illustrate how these are created.
• RSS/Email Notification: If you want to enable RSS feeds and/or email notification on your CourseForum site you will have to enter the information for your SMTP server here.
• Web Views: This allows you to create a read-only version of the CourseForum. Since the basis of CourseForum is a wiki, any registered user will be able to edit pages, so you will want to be ablel to serve up versions of pages (such as Syllaubus, lectures, etc) that are read-only for the public to view.

There is one administrative task I would highly recommend. When you create a new course you will have to administer that course independently of the site administration (In other words it has its own admin page). Within the course administration page you will want to take care of at least two things:

• Check the “Only course administrator can create projects” check box.
• Under the Require Password dropdown select “To edit pages” otherwise any registered user can edit your course pages.

And that’s pretty much it. The rest of the tool works like a standard Wiki page.

Final Thoughts

If you have been looking for a tool to allow students (of any type) to not only stay current in your classroom but also be able to interact, CourseForum might very well be the solution for you. I have deployed it for a few teachers who have been very pleased with the results. It’s remarkably seasy to install, simple to use, reliable, and it’s a fairly cheap solution ($119.00 USD).