Presentations and Workshops

Last week I deployed the new question search and organisation interface to the mathcentre editor. We noticed that the global question database was becoming quite unwieldy now that we have so many users (not complaining!), and finding both your questions and good questions written by others was getting harder. The new interface downplays the big list, instead presenting you with a few different ways in to the most useful parts of the site.

The questions index page now shows you a kind of ‘dashboard’, with links to the most popular tags, your recently-edited questions, as well as some highlights picked by us and your starred questions – you can save a question to this list by clicking on the star next to its name on the question edit page. You can still search the entire database by entering keywords or question titles in the search box at the top of the page.

It’s not a coincidence that we also delivered a workshop on using Numbas at eAssessment Scotland 2013. An hour really wasn’t long enough to do very much at all, but everyone seemed very positive about Numbas and keen to investigate it further. I asked for a show of hands at the start to find out who had signed up for the workshop because they’d already heard of Numbas, and I was pleasantly surprised by the response!

In future conference action, James Denholm-Price of Kingston University London will be giving a talk titled “Using Numbas for formative and summative assessment” at CETL-MSOR 2013 on the 10th of September. James used Numbas in his linear algebra course last year and has many interesting things to say about it. Also at CETL our two summer students, Hayley Bishop and Sarah Jowett, will be talking about their work on the maths support wiki we’re creating with Birmingham University, to complement our respective maths support centres. More on that later!

On the 23rd of October I’ll be giving a talk about Numbas at an IOP-sponsored event on “Promoting learning through technology” at Edinburgh University. I don’t think the event has a webpage or even a definite venue yet; I’ll give details when I have them.

Finally, we’ve set up a numbas-users mailing list on Google Groups. The idea is to have a place to discuss Numbas use, ask and answer questions about authoring, and talk about features you’d like to see. Bill has started it off by asking for comments on the new searching interface.

We’re giving a day-long workshop titled “Building online maths assessments using Numbas” at the University of York on the 4th of July. It’ll be an introduction to using Numbas, from logging on to the mathcentre editor, through selecting questions to make a test, to eventually writing your own questions.

The workshop is provided by the Sigma North East network for excellence in mathematics and statistics support, and attendance is free.

There’s more information, and a booking form, on the Sigma NE event page.

Date: 10 Apr 2012

Time: 09:30 – 16:00

Location: Herschel Building Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne Tyne and Wear , UK, NE1 7RU

Booking: The Higher Education Academy website

Contact email: Bill Foster

This event is being hosted as part of the Higher Education Academy’s OER Workshop and Seminar Series Read the rest

I gave another presentation about Numbas last week at the e-Assessment Scotland conference in Dundee. I revised my old slides and created a better demo exam, so I thought I’d better link to them from here. I’m thinking about recording a screencast of how to use Numbas – would that interest anybody?

Anyway, those slides – click here.

I’ve had to give a few presentations about Numbas at various places in the past month, so I wrote a quick set of slides. I’ve just uploaded it here.

I created the slideshow using Slidy, which is much better at using HTML for slideshows than my attempt.