Pedagogic issues in setting online questions

In the last few years, there has been much interest in CAA, driven perhaps by lecturers’ belief that students learn best by actually doing mathematics, or more cynically, that students will only engage in a course and do mathematics if they are rewarded by marks! (This is certainly true of many weaker students – this is probably why they are weak in the first place.) At the same time, several excellent systems have emerged for assessing mathematics. These range from quite simple facilities embedded in VLEs such as WebCT, through more sophisticated and specialised software, to maths-specific software linked to symbolic manipulators, such as AIM. . Some degree of convergence in the content is evident; numbers displayed on screen are generally randomly selected from predetermined ranges and inserted into interpreted plain text with mark-up syntax, such as MathML. It is hoped that such “pedagogic convergence” will be mirrored by interoperability following standards QTI IMS, so that questions can be shared and answer files written by one system can be read by others….