The Numbas Blog

We’re planning on running some more Numbas training sessions.

The first session, aimed at beginners, is scheduled for 14:00 BST on Tuesday 2nd February. It’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. No previous knowledge of Numbas will be assumed.

The second session, aimed at more advanced users of Numbas, is scheduled for 10:00 BST on Thursday 4th February. Again, it’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. Christian will demonstrate a few things, then there’ll be time to work through question-authoring problems from attendees.

If you can’t attend these sessions, you might like to watch the recordings of the previous sessions.

Register for a training session:

• The introductory training session on 2021-02-02.
• The advanced training session on 2021-02-04.

Both these sessions will be recorded. If you’d like to attend but would prefer not to appear in the recording, please let us know by email.

If you’re looking to start using Numbas in a hurry because of the CoViD-19 crisis, have a look at our blog post about how Numbas can help.

You might notice this update was published in December: November was a busy month!

The Numbas runtime and editor mainly got bug fixes this month. There’s a big new feature in the LTI provider: the ability to automatically remark a resource after you update the exam package. This has already become invaluable for us, with more lecturers than ever setting Numbas assessments and misconfigured marking becoming more common. The remarking feature should be considered experimental: we’ve used it on a few assessments, but I expect to uncover bugs and limitations as we use it more often.

I went from paternity leave in September straight into the mêlée of our first entirely online semester. Here’s an update of development work on Numbas during the month of October.

The vast majority of changes are bug fixes, now that so many more people are using Numbas and discovering edge cases. (And I made a couple of mistakes when introducing Numbas v5, sorry!)

We’re continually working on Numbas, fixing bugs and adding new features. I thought that it would be a good idea to post more regularly about updates to the Numbas software, rather than waiting until each year’s major version release to list everything that’s changed.

I’m going to go into a bit more detail on changes than I normally would in major-release posts, to give an idea of what day-to-day development on Numbas looks like.

I’d like these posts to be monthly, but I’m about to embark on a month of paternity leave, so don’t expect another one until the end of October.

So, here’s what’s changed since Numbas v5.0 was released in June.

The E-Learning Unit in the School of Mathematics, Statistics & Physics at Newcastle University has received the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE). These awards recognise collaborative work that has had a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning, highlights the key role of teamwork in higher education.  

We’ve just released a minor new version of the Numbas LTI tool provider.

Changes in this version include:

• A global dashboard view, showing resources which are active today.
• An option to only show completed attempts when viewing the statistics for a resource.
• When the student ends their attempt, they’re shown an encoded receipt which they can use as evidence of their score, even if no receipt email is sent.
• Bug fixes around time zone handling, sending email receipts on attempt completion, cross-site security and text formatting.

We recommend updating any servers running the LTI provider as soon as possible, by following the upgrade instructions.

The installation instructions for Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Heroku have all been updated.

Here are the recordings of our recent training sessions held over Zoom.

First, there was a beginners’ session on the 15th of July, covering the Numbas editing interface, how to deliver exams to students, and writing a first question:

And an advanced session on the 22nd, covering explore mode, custom marking algorithms, and custom part types:

We’re planning on running another Numbas training session for beginners, following the series we ran in March and April.

The first session is scheduled for 10:00 BST on Wednesday 15th July. It’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. No previous knowledge of Numbas will be assumed.

Following demand, we’ve scheduled a more advanced training session, for experienced Numbas users.

This will take place at 10:00 BST on Wednesday 22nd July. Again, it’ll run over Zoom and last about two hours. Christian will demonstrate a few things, then there’ll be time to work through question-authoring problems from attendees.

Register for a training session:

• The introductory training session on 2020-07-15.
• The advanced training session on 2020-07-22. (This will be recorded)

If you’re looking to start using Numbas in a hurry because of the CoViD-19 crisis, have a look at our blog post about how Numbas can help.

It’s time for another major version of Numbas. This release includes a radically new way of presenting questions, as well as a few other helpful new features.

We’ve made a short video to demonstrate the new features:

We’ve also made a demo exam so you can try it out yourself.

This morning we ran the second of our online Numbas training sessions organised in response to the coronavirus crisis.

Here’s the recording of the session:

There’s at least one more session to go, at 10:00 BST next Wednesday, April 8th. You can still register to attend. If there’s demand for it, we might schedule more sessions.