School of Mathematics

George Kinnear has been awarded funds to back a project which will help deliver and enhance higher education

George Kinnear has been awarded $10,000, in the 2020 U21 Global Educational Enhancement Fund Call, to back a project which will help deliver and enhance higher education. The project team consists of Chris Sangwin, University of Edinburgh, and Igor' Kontorovich, University of Auckland, with George Kinnear acting as the Project coordinator. This project is expected to start in June 2020 and conclude by March 2021.

The project, titled "Developing effective resources for online teaching and assessment of mathematics", aims to establish a central resource, by combining content and professional development, to help institutions advance their digital provision for university mathematics. To achieve this the project will focus on three key actions:

  1. Coordinate the production of a series of interactive workbooks for core topics in university-level mathematics, to be made available to partners within months through a central website.
  2. Update existing high-quality content developed by a major project (tinyurl.com/helm-workbooks) with an effective pedagogical design that has recently been developed for fully-online mathematics courses, to provide a robust, long-term solution for online teaching and assessment of mathematics.
  3. Deliver a series of professional development events, drawing on our experience of successfully using STACK in online teaching, to help other institutions to develop their approaches to online assessment.

The project expects to have the following outputs:

  1. A central STACK website. Any institution will be able to request access and use this website to deliver online assessments for their students.
  2. Training events. A programme of online training events about computer-aided assessment in mathematics will be run. These will be advertised on the website and through mailing lists and will be open to all.
  3. Interactive workbooks. This project will develop a set of HELM workbooks as interactive quizzes using STACK. These will be available to partners on request, with an expectation that they will contribute to the project in return (e.g. by helping to produce further workbooks, or by taking part in testing and quality control of new resources).