Skip to main content

5 reasons to use the Numbas e-assessment system for Mathematics

5 reasons to use the Numbas e-assessment system for Mathematics

 I first learned about Numbas when Julie Crowley approached me in 2015 to do some work as project assistant for the teame (Transitioning to E-Assessment in Mathematics Education) Project. My first job was to test the existing questions that had been developed for use in two Cork HE Institutions. After that we did a lot of work on making it easier for other institutions to use the resources we had developed. We wrote an implementation guide and tried to spread the word on how well this system can work.
Roadmap for transitioning to e-assessment in maths
Numbas is a freely available e-assessment system for Mathematics that has been developed in Newcastle University.The Numbas system has a proven track record and a strong reputation (B. Foster 2012) and (Perfect 2015). It has been used in Cork Institute of Technology and University College Cork as well as at Newcastle University (B. Foster 2012) , University of Leicester, and Kingston University, London (Denholm-Price 2014) among others. It allows students to input mathematical formulae easily and creates a similar but different question for each student. It is actively maintained at Newcastle University and is easy for students to work with straight away.

So why should you go to the effort of learning about a new mathematics e-assessment system?

1. It supplies Immediate feedback on student's work.

When students submit an answer they know straight away if they were correct or incorrect. Depending on settings you can allow for more than one attempt per question.  A really useful feature of Numbas is that a student can generate a new questions which is very similar to the last one. This allows them to get extra practice on areas where they have difficulty.
The potential for feedback on student performance to influence lecture content and online content can be exploited by the lecturer to dynamically tailor the lectures to the needs of students.

2.It can provide hints to students on how to solve each problem.

It is possible to embed media into a Numbas quiz including in video format. Numbas allows the integration of innovative and interactive content including geogebra and video. There is the option to include an advice button on a question. Here the student can be scaffolded through the question.

3. It integrates with VLE's such as Blackboard and Moodle. 

You can embed a Numbas test in to your course on Blackboard or Moodle and track grades and analytics.

4. It manages lecturer workload and corrections.

Lots of research has shown that regular testing has benefits for student learning. However in large institutions where the class size can run over a hundred students it is impractical for Lecturers to correct regular assessments. Using Numbas or other similar e-assessment tools allows for this regular assessment and gives students immediate feedback.
Quote about motivations for using Numbas. Workload, students help each other


5. It's free!

Since Numbas is an open source tool with a global community of users, expertise and experience can be shared nationally and internationally.  Numbas is an ideal tool to facilitate collaboration as resources are open source and free to use. It is even possible to create collaborative projects where members can work together on creating shared content.

Further Reading

Foster, B., C. Perfect and A. Youd. 2012. "A completely client-side approach to e- assessment and e-learning of Mathematics and statistics." International Journal of e-Assessment vol. 2, iss. 2.
Perfect, Christian. 2015. "A demonstration of Numbas, an e-assessment system for mathematical disciplines." CAA Conference .
Denholm-Price, J. and Soan, P. 2014. "Mathematics eAssessment using Numbas:experiences at Kingston with a partially ‘flipped’ classroom." Presentation at the STEM National Conference.

Numbas as an engagement tool in first-year Business Studies Students

 https://www.numbas.org.uk


page7image26120
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visibly Random Groupings

About six months ago I was browsing on twitter when I came across some Maths education people tweeting about #VRG, #VNPS and #thinkingclassroom. This led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of figuring out what these mysterious acronyms stood for. In today’s blog post I’m going to focus on #VRG which, I discovered, stands for Visibly Random Groups. Visibly Random groups is an idea put forward by Peter Liljedahl.  Usually when it comes to carrying out some group work in the classroom there are two standard ways that the groups are formed. Either the students themselves pick the groups or the teacher picks the groups. When the teacher picks the groups, there is usually some underlying reason that the groups are assigned in this way. Perhaps the teacher wants to make sure that there is one strong student in each group. Or maybe the teacher wants to split up some students who tend to be chatty. When the students pick the groups they will tend to pick groups with their friends. In visib
Post a Comment
Read more

Domino Logic Gates. Fun and hands-on.

Domino logic Gates: A hands on lesson on boolean logic One of my favourite classes this year was one where we built domino Logic gates. We were seven weeks into a first year maths course for computer science students. We had been working through sets  then algebra and then Boolean Algebra. Each week we had one three hour lecture (horrific, right). In the seventh week there was the first in class test for the module and I knew that the students were going to be tired after doing the test and I needed to keep it "light" somehow for the remainder of the three hour period. I was also working with these same students in a module called Effective Learning and Development and from discussion in that module I knew that a few of the learners were the type of learner that liked to move and do hands on work (there was a time that I would have said they were learners with a kinesthetic learning style but I know that is all out of vogue at the moment). I had been thinking of ways to t
Post a Comment
Read more