From exam to education: the math exam/educational resources

peer-reviewedThe Math Exam/Education Resources (MER) is an open online learning resource hosted at The University of British Columbia (UBC), aimed at providing mathematics education resources for students and instructors at UBC. In this paper, there will be a discussion of the motivation for creating this resource on the MediaWiki platform, key features of the implementation that support student learning (including the evolution of the MER wiki from an exam database to more general learning resource), data on student use and response, potential for future development, and a brief description of how the project was implemented. Preliminary correlation data between wiki usage and exam performance are shared along with some preliminary data from an ongoing impact study.peer-reviewe

A New horizon for online teaching and learning

The Polytechnic Institute of Oporto (IPP), which has a solid history of online education and innovation through the use of technology, has been particularly interested and focused on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) developments. The aim of this paper is to present the whole process from initial discussions to completion of the “Mathematics Without Limits” MOOC Project that exists in IPP and also to contribute for a change in the way as teaching and learning Mathematics is seen and practiced nowadays. In 2013, IPP developed its own platform, which gave us the opportunity to explore new educational techniques as a pedagogical resource as well as to enhance students’ motivation, through a set of interactive materials at their disposal, totally adapted to their needs. Students lack of motivation is mainly justified by their weak Math preparation, poor consolidated basis on the subject and different backgrounds of the students. To tackle this issue and based on our Math online courses teaching experience, we decided to create short duration MOOC, expecting to aid retention of students and also to reverse the path of students giving up on Math by giving them a friendly way of managing their own learning commitment. We also think that this MOOC will be a good approach to level out some math skills among freshmen.IPP/ISCAP - CIC

MathBERT: A Pre-trained Language Model for General NLP Tasks in Mathematics Education

Since the introduction of the original BERT (i.e., BASE BERT), researchers have developed various customized BERT models with improved performance for specific domains and tasks by exploiting the benefits of transfer learning. Due to the nature of mathematical texts, which often use domain specific vocabulary along with equations and math symbols, we posit that the development of a new BERT model for mathematics would be useful for many mathematical downstream tasks. In this resource paper, we introduce our multi-institutional effort (i.e., two learning platforms and three academic institutions in the US) toward this need: MathBERT, a model created by pre-training the BASE BERT model on a large mathematical corpus ranging from pre-kindergarten (pre-k), to high-school, to college graduate level mathematical content. In addition, we select three general NLP tasks that are often used in mathematics education: prediction of knowledge component, auto-grading open-ended Q&A, and knowledge tracing, to demonstrate the superiority of MathBERT over BASE BERT. Our experiments show that MathBERT outperforms prior best methods by 1.2-22% and BASE BERT by 2-8% on these tasks. In addition, we build a mathematics specific vocabulary 'mathVocab' to train with MathBERT. We discover that MathBERT pre-trained with 'mathVocab' outperforms MathBERT trained with the BASE BERT vocabulary (i.e., 'origVocab'). MathBERT is currently being adopted at the participated leaning platforms: Stride, Inc, a commercial educational resource provider, and ASSISTments.org, a free online educational platform. We release MathBERT for public usage at: https://github.com/tbs17/MathBERT.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2021 MATHAI4ED Workshop (Best Paper

APECS’ Online Conference, Virtual Posters and Webinars to the World

The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) is a multidisciplinary, international organization dedicated to maintaining a network of early career researchers (ECRs) and professionals (ECPs) to share ideas, develop collaborative research directions, provide opportunities for career development, and promote education and outreach as an integral component of Polar research. Science outreach is one of APECS’ key objectives and we have found that online media is a powerful tool for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) knowledge transfer. We introduce the use of online presentations as a platform for communication, education, and networking. APECS’ Online Conference, virtual posters, and webinar series provide case studies to examine how online technology bridges geographic and disciplinary boundaries. APECS’ Online Conference allows ECRs and ECPs to present their research to an interactive, online room of viewers. The third iteration of this annual event (March 2017) appealed to science communicators with the theme: “Outside the Box: encouraging alternative solutions for undertaking and communicating polar research”. Virtual poster sessions have allowed members to share work on an array of topics, from whaling and tourism to showcasing studies affiliated with specific national research programs. Webinars have covered a variety of skills-based and scientific topics, with invited speakers addressing everything from writing grant proposals to eco-cultural communication. Each presentation is recorded and saved on APECS’ website as a free resource. ECRs, ECPs, and APECS mentors from around the world attend our events, promoting diversity in networking and helping steer the Arctic community in positive directions. We will provide examples of connections fostered by and benefits of online events, including easier dissemination of ideas across geographically distant regions and minimal cost. While this presentation focuses on APECS’ experiences, we will highlight how innovative communication promotes international cooperation and offer suggestions on how to incorporate similar elements into other outreach programs

Maths Apps index #maths4us Project Report

This report provides an overview of the Maths Apps index project led by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as part of the maths4us initiative during 2012/13

Multinational perspectives on information technology from academia and industry

As the term \u27information technology\u27 has many meanings for various stakeholders and continues to evolve, this work presents a comprehensive approach for developing curriculum guidelines for rigorous, high quality, bachelor\u27s degree programs in information technology (IT) to prepare successful graduates for a future global technological society. The aim is to address three research questions in the context of IT concerning (1) the educational frameworks relevant for academics and students of IT, (2) the pathways into IT programs, and (3) graduates\u27 preparation for meeting future technologies. The analysis of current trends comes from survey data of IT faculty members and professional IT industry leaders. With these analyses, the IT Model Curricula of CC2005, IT2008, IT2017, extensive literature review, and the multinational insights of the authors into the status of IT, this paper presents a comprehensive overview and discussion of future directions of global IT education toward 2025

Escaping the Trap of too Precise Topic Queries

At the very center of digital mathematics libraries lie controlled vocabularies which qualify the {\it topic} of the documents. These topics are used when submitting a document to a digital mathematics library and to perform searches in a library. The latter are refined by the use of these topics as they allow a precise classification of the mathematics area this document addresses. However, there is a major risk that users employ too precise topics to specify their queries: they may be employing a topic that is only "close-by" but missing to match the right resource. We call this the {\it topic trap}. Indeed, since 2009, this issue has appeared frequently on the i2geo.net platform. Other mathematics portals experience the same phenomenon. An approach to solve this issue is to introduce tolerance in the way queries are understood by the user. In particular, the approach of including fuzzy matches but this introduces noise which may prevent the user of understanding the function of the search engine. In this paper, we propose a way to escape the topic trap by employing the navigation between related topics and the count of search results for each topic. This supports the user in that search for close-by topics is a click away from a previous search. This approach was realized with the i2geo search engine and is described in detail where the relation of being {\it related} is computed by employing textual analysis of the definitions of the concepts fetched from the Wikipedia encyclopedia.Comment: 12 pages, Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 2013 Bath, U

Understanding the Impact of Technology: Learner and School Level Factors

The first part of this report focuses on the factors impacting on learner performance in national tests at primary and secondary level. This was the central research question of this research. The second section focuses on teacher and learner perceptions of their own responses to learning and the learning environment. This was centred on, but not confined to, their school. The institutional structures record the level of development of the schools sampled here and investigate the use of two key technologies – interactive whiteboards and learning platform

Creating, Doing, and Sustaining OER: Lessons from Six Open Educational Resource Projects

The development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER) has generated a dynamic field of widespread interest and study regarding methods for creating and sustaining OER. To help foster a thriving OER movement with potential for knowledge-sharing across program, organizational and national boundaries, the Institute for Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), developed and conducted case study research programs in collaboration with six OER projects from around the world. Embodying a range of challenges and opportunities among a diverse set of OER projects, the case studies intended to track, analyze and share key developments in the creation, use and reuse of OER. The specific cases include: CurriculumNet, Curriki, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), Training Commons, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), and Teachers' Domain