National Teaching Fellowships: Communicating mathematics and science to the public / LOLA, the Missing Link in Computer Assisted Assessment

HEFCE awards 20 National Teaching Fellowships of £50,000 each year, administered by the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT). They are designed to recognise excellent practice in teaching and the facilitation of learning by individual teachers who can demonstrate national standards of excellence. The first wave of fellowships included three mathematicians - Patricia Egerton, Keith Hirst and Peter Edwards - who were featured in our August 2000 issue. The second wave included two more - Chris Budd and Michael McCabe whose summaries are published here. Further articles will be carried from all the projects as they develop. The article covers 2 projects….Communicating mathematics and science to the public by Chris Budd: Communicating mathematical ideas to a general audience is a vital skill for any mathematician in the workplace, and as mathematics becomes increasingly important to modern technology, it is vital that we have good communicators of mathematics and that the significance of mathematics becomes as widely known as possible. Unfortunately the techniques for communicating mathematics have in general not been taught to undergraduates, nor has the vast creative potential of undergraduates as enthusiastic communicators been exploited. The project funded by the ILT teaching fellowship aims to change this…/…LOLA, the Missing Link in Computer Assisted Assessment by Michael McCabe: Teaching by questioning is fine in theory, but not always so easy in practice. We can ask students to complete work on paper, but then the feedback is slow. We can provide computer assisted assessment (CAA) to speed up the feedback and can even deliver CAA online, but the in