E-learning for math

March 14, 2007 3:30 PM

What e-learning systems provide students with the math-related symbols they need and lets them "show their work," while still letting them submit all answers online?

My college's distance learning program is trying to get the math department to offer all-online courses. But the professors want students to "show their work," so they have them fax or scan in homework.

The distance learning program currently uses Blackboard as its primary e-learning system.

It would be helpful to have professors be able to comment on the answers they receive.

posted by ejvalentine to education (8 comments total)

My son uses the add-on in Word to do formulas for maths assignments, and I know a lecturer who marks assignments (not maths) using comments in Word. Would that work?
posted by b33j at 4:09 PM on March 14, 2007

I don't know of any online system that is set up to let students show their work, as well as the answers; if I (a math professor) really wanted to see students' work I would go with the scan-in-and-e-mail procedure. The reason is that entering symbols, even with something like Equation Editor (or, dare I say it, LaTeX) is a big hassle; I would be more concerned with students doing the work correctly in a reasonable amount of time rather than spending hours trying to get the formatting correct in addition to trying to get the math correct!

I don't know how you would effectively comment on the scans, except maybe by annotating in Acrobat or by and and re-scanning.

Having said that, there are some interesting options for students to submit math answers online and get feedback. One I am familiar with is called
AiM (Assessment In Mathematics)
which is an online quiz generation system that uses Maple as its brains. You write questions and students answer them online, through a web browser; they can either answer multiple choice/response questions or answer open-ended questions. With the open-ended questions, the answer the student submits is compared by the Maple-brain to the answer entered by the instructor in the question design (by subtracting the student's answer from the correct one and seeing if you get 0). The nice thing about the system is that questions can be randomized, either in order or by content (e.g., different constants for each student), because it's the power of Maple behind it, so you can do all sorts of symbolic algebra questions. Maple itself also has a similar (more expensive) program called Maple TA that should do the same stuff, probably in a slicker fashion.

It's not a complete solution to your question, but some sort of automated system, coupled with occasional submission of scanned work, might go a long way.

I do not find Blackboard helpful for this sort of thing.

Feel free to e-mail me, if that would be helpful.
posted by leahwrenn at 5:09 PM on March 14, 2007

Of course, it depends on what level courses you are talking about. For math majors, especially when they are learning to write proofs, I have no problem with asking them to learn LaTeX and submit typed .pdfs of their work (to me, in paper, but there would be no reason they couldn't e-mail it). These could be annotated using some .pdf annotation procedure, when comments needed to be made.

But this would be inappropriate for College Algebra or Calculus courses.
posted by leahwrenn at 5:13 PM on March 14, 2007

LaTeX is beautiful. I started using it my freshman year in college, and never went back to paper (although, granted, my handwriting is so bad even I can't read it).

Mastering Physics has an interface you could look at, if you're interested in developing something like this. Their site is craptacular - slow and unreliable and all that - and the interface could be improved, but at least it's easy to use.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 5:41 PM on March 14, 2007

Oh, I forgot...if they're serious about having students type math so it looks pretty, there's a program called LyX which they say is a What You See is What You Mean document processing program; it uses TeX as its back end, I guess. It's supposed to have a much shorter learning curve than just using LaTeX.
posted by leahwrenn at 6:07 PM on March 14, 2007

I'm actually surprised that Bb isn't supporting a native MathML editor at this point in time. Is your school a legacy Bb school or a WebCT school? I ask because I'm pretty sure that WebCT had MathML support.

For the biggest ease of use, I would suggest the Word add-in as well, but it really comes down to the complexity of the mathematics we're talking about. Have you asked this question over at the Math Forum?

(Once, over half a decade ago, in another life, I worked for Bb. I am an Instructional Technology professional but I am not your Instructional Technology professional.)
posted by wildeepdotorg at 6:16 PM on March 14, 2007

I'm taking a calculus class online right now through San Francisco State University. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but my problems with it aren't stemming from the submission of homework. The other students and I have to show our work and most either scan their work or take a digital picture of the pages and crop them to allow for viewing. Obviously the quality of the photograph has to be pretty good to allow for cropping out nearly 75% of the image without becoming pixelated. This has a lot to do with minimum focusing distance for the camera and not just megabites. Anyway, I digress.

When I submit my homework I use a program that was developed by the professor that allows you to drag and drop the formula onto the page you are working on. I believe that this is a latex based program. I don't find it hard but it can be time consuming. If I'm in a hurry I'll sometimes just take a picture.
posted by Brachiosaurus at 11:17 PM on March 14, 2007

The University of Texas has a browser plug-in called the Mathpad that allows students to type in equations and make graphs. They can submit the material to the graders and the graders can scribble on it and return it. You can contact me if you want to see it. I designed and programmed it.

There is another tool I've seen but I don't know if it's out yet. It's very cool. Called Ibis. It's a Flash based equation editor.

http://www.saplingsystems.com/images/content.swf
posted by nonmyopicdave at 10:09 AM on March 15, 2007