At the time of writing, the JISC/HEA funded Open Education Resources (OER) project for the MSOR Subject Centre – FETLAR (Finding Electronic Teaching, Learning and Assessment Resources) [1-2] - is more than half way through. We would like to communicate the highlights of what the project has so far achieved. These are all in the area of mathematics e-assessment. Our ongoing work with other forms of e-resources will be described in future articles.
STACK questions
We are pleased to announce the release of approximately 215 calculus questions in the mathematics e-assessment system STACK [3] format as open educational resources. Each of these questions has randomly generated versions and fully worked solutions. They are inspired by, with permission, the questions in the Calculus Refresher [4]. These questions can be tested using the STACK demonstration server [5] (note: the guest account cannot take a quiz: you will have to register and enrol on the course to have a look at the materials). The source code of these questions has been bundled with the distribution of STACK itself in the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS). This means we can have the benefit of version control on the code, hopefully ensuring that you will have confidence you have the latest versions. For those without a CVS client, you can download the files from the CVS, which is available online from [6]. These materials are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence. UK institutional users of STACK include the University of Birmingham, The Open University and The University of Manchester.
FETLAR Virtual Appliance. We are also pleased to announce a freely available portable installation of the MathAssess tools called the FETLAR Virtual Appliance (henceforth referred to as the Appliance). The intention behind this is to provide an exemplar (“known good”) installation of the MathAssess tools in a portable form, which can be used for testing, dissemination, and as a platform for partners and other institutions to be able quickly to deploy their own instance of the tools. The Appliance takes the form of a virtual machine image that includes the MathAssess tools, Moodle and a plug-in interface between them (known as QTIPlayr). The Appliance also contains STACK and a selection of demonstration questions.
At the time of writing, the JISC/HEA funded Open Education Resources (OER) project for the MSOR Subject Centre – FETLAR (Finding Electronic Teaching, Learning and Assessment Resources) [1-2] - is more than half way through. We would like to communicate the highlights of what the project has so far achieved. These are all in the area of mathematics e-assessment. Our ongoing work with other forms of e-resources will be described in future articles.
STACK questions
We are pleased to announce the release of approximately 215 calculus questions in the mathematics e-assessment system STACK [3] format as open educational resources. Each of these questions has randomly generated versions and fully worked solutions. They are inspired by, with permission, the questions in the Calculus Refresher [4]. These questions can be tested using the STACK demonstration server [5] (note: the guest account cannot take a quiz: you will have to register and enrol on the course to have a look at the materials). The source code of these questions has been bundled with the distribution of STACK itself in the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS). This means we can have the benefit of version control on the code, hopefully ensuring that you will have confidence you have the latest versions. For those without a CVS client, you can download the files from the CVS, which is available online from [6]. These materials are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence. UK institutional users of STACK include the University of Birmingham, The Open University and The University of Manchester. FETLAR Virtual Appliance. We are also pleased to announce a freely available portable installation of the MathAssess tools called the FETLAR Virtual Appliance (henceforth referred to as the Appliance). The intention behind this is to provide an exemplar (“known good”) installation of the MathAssess tools in a portable form, which can be used for testing, dissemination, and as a platform for partners and other institutions to be able quickly to deploy their own instance of the tools. The Appliance takes the form of a virtual machine image that includes the MathAssess tools, Moodle and a plug-in interface between them (known as QTIPlayr). The Appliance also contains STACK and a selection of demonstration questions.
