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Important concepts and terms

Torus operates broadly in two different modes:

• Authoring: Authoring mode is a set of features used by authors to create, update and publish the material within their course project.
• Delivery: Delivery mode is a set of features used by Instructors and Students during the delivery of course material to students in a course section.

The material with course projects is modeled as a collection of Resources of different supported resource types. The following lists the various types of resources that exist:

• Container: A collection of pages or containers that can correspond to "Units" or "Modules" within a course.
• Page: A collection of content and activities that offer student instruction and assessment. Pages can be either "graded" or "practice".
• Activity: A scorable interaction used in both practice or assessment contexts.
• Objective: A learning objective that course content attempts to instruct and that activities offer practice and assessment on.
• Tag: A tag is a flexible mechanism that can power a variety of platform functionality such as activity bank selection.

Activities have several important concepts:

• Activity type: Torus supports a variety of different kinds of student interactive experiences such as multiple choice, ordering, and check all that apply.
• Activity instance: An activity instance is created when an author defines (aka "authors") a new activity of a supported activity type.
• Activity reference: Activity instances are not directly embedded into pages, rather a reference to an instance is stored within pages. This mechanism allows activity instances to be shared across pages.
• Activity bank: A collection of activity instances that can be randomly selected according to a defined set of criteria at delivery time. A page can contain activity bank selections which allows the system to select and render different activities for each different student attempt.
• Parts: Activity instances have a collection of one or more parts. A part offers a mechanism to track student interaction and submission, and ultimately to store a system or instructor assign score. Some activity types have a fixed number of parts: for example a multiple choice activity has only one part which models which choice the student selected, their received score and any received feedback. Other activity types feature multiple parts, and in some cases the number of parts is dynamic and determined at the time that the author defines the activity instance. For example, an author can create a "Multi input" activity that features three "fill in the blank" text inputs in the middle of the question stem. This activity instance would have three parts, one for each of these inputs, and allows each of them to be scored individually.
• Grading approach: Each part within an activity instance can specify its required grading, or scoring, approach. The supported options are automatic and manual. Automatically scored parts require the definition of a collection of responses that specify the rules to use to allow the sytem to perform automatic scoring. Manually scored parts for activities ultimately require the instructor to review the submission for the part and to assign a score and provide feedback.