A Personal Tribute to Cliff Beevers, OBE

I have known of Cliff’s work since the mid-1980’s, when he started the CALM project (Computer Aided Learning of Mathematics), but did not get to know him well until the early/mid 90’s. When he began the CALM project, it was difficult to attract recognition and funding for research and development in this field. Cliff’s achievements with CALM must be viewed in this context. If only because there was relatively little educational computing activity before CALM started, it must be recognised as a highly innovative project. Recently I have heard Cliff describing his work to a group of e-Learning and e-Assessment professionals, including many from internationally leading companies and groups in many educational sectors. It was remarkable that much of what Cliff does, and indeed was doing in the late 80’s, is the sort of thing that many are now aspiring to do. Very few projects worldwide can match the integration of learning resource, formative feedback and final assessment that CALM has achieved. This was all well described in the book Cliff wrote with colleagues: Software Tools for Computer Aided Learning in Mathematics (C E Beevers, B S G Cherry, M M G Foster and G R McGuire)…