"Serving Mathematics" project

"Serving Mathematics" project

by Gustav W Delius -
Number of replies: 9

Moodle has been chosen as the integration platform by the JISC-funded project "Serving Mathematics". This means that some fancy tools for delivering and assessing mathematics are coming to Moodle. You can find details on the project website. 

The project will take up its work in September and deliver its tools before next March. The project is open-source and encourages community participation. We would love to see your comments in our forums.

One of the project's tasks is to make it easier for mathematics learning and assessment systems to interoperate with each other and with the VLE. The systems currently taking part are: AiM, CABLE, METRIC and WaLLiS. It would be nice to include others like WeBWorK.

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In reply to Gustav W Delius

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
This is absolutely terrific, congrats again ... I'm looking forward to seeing this happen!
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In reply to Gustav W Delius

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Jurgis Pralgauskis -

Hello, very interesting indeed.

Our Uni this Year starts to use automated math quizes for evaluation. Dean of Funamental sciences faculty said they looked at ~20 systems and chosen EDUCampus http://www.brownstone.net/products/edu/. Why not WebWork I asked? One of the biggest priorities was security (prevention of cheating) - as better grades meen bigger scholarships. Commercial companies guarantee those security issues.

little oftoppic: what do You know about commercial alternatives (may be EDUCampus as well), and what could You propose..

And who, in Your opininion, could/should give juridical guaramtees, so my dean could turn to OpenSource without worry?

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In reply to Jurgis Pralgauskis

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by colin melville -
Dear Jurgis,

Has anyone developed an interface between Edu and Moodle? The idea would be to link seamlessly into Edu for question sets, capture answers from Edu and allow grades to be displayed in the gradebook.

I'm very much champing at the bit in terms of the wonderful stuff that Gustav is producing, and have to do a demo project with Edu.

Colin
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In reply to Gustav W Delius

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Michael Gage -
WeBWorK is happy to look into this as well. I'm just beginning to use moodle, but Zig Fiedorwicz at Ohio State University has extensive experience with both systems as you know.

WeBWorK already works as a kind of webservice using "userland frontier" or "userland radio" as a client.

See http://webhost.math.rochester.edu/webworkdocs/ww/listLib?command=setsOnly

which implements a client on frontier which responds to a browser request by which calling a webwork-daemon and asks it to render the particular problem. The daemon returns the rendered problem to the client on frontier which inserts it into some boiler html and returns the result to the browser.

See the following for the xmlrpc request currently being used to transfer information from the client to the daemon and back:

http://webhost.math.rochester.edu/webworkdocs/discuss/msgReader$755?mode=day

Since the semester is starting up in two weeks and I'll be away all next week, it may be two or three weeks before I can read through all the material and give you more pertinent information. If can do some this week I will.

For those already familiar with frontier and/or radio I can send you a webwork plugin "tool" which will implement the client side of this process. It's still not ready for prime time, but with a bit of patience you can trace through the way the functionality is currently implemented.

Good luck.

Take care,

Mike
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In reply to Michael Gage

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Gustav W Delius -

Hi Mike,

it is exciting to hear that WeBWorK already has a web services interface. I have looked with interest at the examples. It would be good if we could build on this to agree on a common protocol. Could you please post a copy of your message in the forum at http://maths.york.ac.uk/serving_maths/mod/forum/view.php?id=90? If we do manage to agree on a common protocol then as part of our project the Moodle quiz module will automatically become a WeBWorK client.

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In reply to Gustav W Delius

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Michael Gage -
Dear Gustav,

I'll do that. The WeBWorK group at Indiana is also working on making an interface between WeBWorK and Sakai. I haven't heard from them for a month or so, so I'm not sure what the situation is now. I'll try to find out.
I hope that after a few iterations we can converge on a standard that will suit everyone.

I have only glanced at the IMS-QTI standards (they're pretty complicated) but I suspect they will not fit a problem/questions conceived of as a dynamic object (i.e. a program or subroutine) instead of as data. I could be wrong.

What I posted earlier is the current xmlrpc request we use. Our tentative plans for the next generation (same information, a bit more organized and human readable) are at http://devel.webwork.rochester.edu/twiki/bin/view/Webwork/MikeRemoteRendering

See also
http://devel.webwork.rochester.edu/twiki/bin/view/Webwork/WeBWorKAsWebService.
for Sam Hathaway's ideas.

Take care,

Mike
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In reply to Michael Gage

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Gustav W Delius -

Thanks Mike.

I agree with you that IMS QTI can not capture all the possibilities of assessment systems like WeBWorK. The idea is however that a large proportion of questions do not need all the flexibility and that there is something to be gained by creating these questions in a standard format that is then translated into the specific format of WebWorK or AiM or CABLE or ...

If we could interoperate with Sakai as well then that would be great. Let's continue the discussions over at "Serving Maths".

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In reply to Gustav W Delius

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Ger Tielemans -

Great, this is the kind of recognition (JISC!!) Moodle needs, congrat, show it to your Boss Tim!

  1. the website of the project talks about "extending the IMS/QTI (for maths I presume) Does that mean that this project brings Moodle quizzes to IMS/QTI? (or is the project focused on communicating with a Maths-"broker"?)
  2. My math-teachers are looking for question sheets like the matrix/tables on the Wallis website, promissing..
  3. the exerciseML (also Wallis) could bring Moodle further to XML-structure.. (import/export and "mapping structure"?) It looks like a simple version ofQTI/XML, so in the spirit of simple is better...
  4. Aim, also nice?.. only that TomCat.. but I am not a maths teacher, so I will show it to them..
  5.  The link to Metric is not correct in your email, BUT ALSO on the project site (dirty trail, removing that brings you on the right spot.) 

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In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: "Serving Mathematics" project

by Gustav W Delius -

Hi Ger,

thanks for catching that wrong link to METRIC on our website, I have corrected it.

IMS/QTI will indeed come to Moodle, however not only due to our project but also due to the APIS project, which is another JISC funded project implementing IMS QTI v.2. This will integrate into Moodle via the same web services interface as our mathematical question engines.

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