Now that face-to-face teaching in many institutions has been cancelled in response to the coronavirus crisis, many lecturers are looking for ways to move their teaching and assessment online.
We’ve put this page together as a reference to describe how Numbas could be used to help your students and to replace paper-based assessments.
Read the restA few people have asked us for an accessibility statement before they start using Numbas, so we’ve written one.
In fact, we’ve written two: one for the exam interface seen by students, and one for the editor.
The statements describe the accessibility requirements that we’ve designed Numbas around, some tips on how to use Numbas effectively with different assistive technologies, and details on the outstanding accessibility issues that we know about.
If you’ve got any feedback about the statements or accessibility in Numbas, please let us know.
Nick Walker has developed a set of Numbas questions to support his teaching of Spectroscopy to first year students of Chemistry at Newcastle University.
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We’re releasing another major version of Numbas. This release incorporates a couple of exciting new developments, which greatly expand Numbas’ capabilities.
If you want to dive right in, have a go at the demo exam we’ve made to show off the new features.
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The short story: We’ve written an extension to Numbas which adds a data type for handling quantities with associated units, and a custom part type which asks the student to enter a value with units. Read the rest
The programme for the E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS) conference has been released, with speakers from across the globe presenting the latest developments in the field and offering a unique opportunity to get hands-on with maths e-assessment systems, whether you are a user, a developer, or just interested! The conference takes place over 3 days at Newcastle University, between 28th and 30th August. Read the rest
We’re running Numbas workshops this month in Durham and Huddersfield:
The workshops are a hands-on introduction to Numbas, including getting started on the Numbas mathcentre editor, selecting questions to make tests, and writing your own questions.
The workshops are free to attend and will include lunch. There are limited places available; if you would like to book a spot, please contact Chris Graham (christopher.graham@ncl.ac.uk) before June 13th.
Today we’ve released Numbas v3.0. It’s the thing I’m second-most proud of producing in the last year (my daughter was born last October).
The marking code at the heart of Numbas has been completely rewritten, to make it much easier for question authors to change how students’ answers are marked. This has also allowed the introduction of custom part types, to make it easier to use and reuse different marking algorithms. Read the rest
The international conference on E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences (EAMS) is a three-day academic conference organised by Newcastle University taking place 28th – 30th August 2018.
Building on the success of EAMS 2016, the conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in e-assessment for mathematics and the sciences, with an emphasis on enabling attendees to have a go at creating material, and getting an opportunity to share expertise directly. It will consist of a mix of presentations of new techniques, and pedagogic research, as well as live demos and workshops where you can get hands-on with leading e-assessment software.
Over three days, EAMS 2018 will comprise a mix of talks and hands-on activities:
Compared to EAMS 2016, the emphasis this time is much more on enabling attendees to have a go at creating material, and getting an opportunity to share expertise directly.
The call for talk and workshop proposals is currently open. If you have some research or an innovative technique related to mathematical e-assessment that you would like to present, EAMS 2018 is the perfect venue. The deadline for talk proposals is May 31st.
The conference fee is only £75 and includes a conference dinner. You can find out more about EAMS, as well as the forms to register for the conference and propose a talk, at the conference website, eams.ncl.ac.uk.
During our project to create material for students making the transition to university, I did a bit of development work on Numbas based on issue that our interns raised. I’ll describe those here. Read the rest