How to make mathematical

eContent travel well Olga Caprotti*, Matti Pauna*, Mika Seppälä

University of Helsinki

*Work funded by the JEM Thematic Network ECP-038208

travelling eContent

Electronic resources and, more in general, eContent produced for education

‘’travel well’’

when they can be reused across national borders and in different curricular frameworks

...on a variety of devices

In this talk features of mathematical eContent that make it

travel well:

semantic markup such as Content MathML and OpenMath,

metadata for learning resources

producing mathematical eContent and convert it to ad-hoc formats

multilingual mathematics

JEM-Joining Educational Mathematics

EU-funded thematic network of 20 nodes in 10 countries

http://www.jem-thematic.net

promote eContent in mathematics education

eContent from the partners HAS to travel well

Characteristics of the traveling resourceLearning resources travel well if they are high quality and in addition if they

do not rely on written or spoken language,

use alternative representations,

avoid jargon used in country of origin,

are highly visual,

are modular,

clearly state the IPR

Mathematics is universal but not all formats are created equal

may or may not support localization of notation to place and subject (communities of practice)

may or may not support alternative modalities: e.g. aural or braille presentations

even font scaling can become an issue

What format then?

Comparative ChartFormat Server Interactivity Notation

support Formulae

Authoring GUI

Alternative representation

OMDoc SWiM, pantha-rei, ActiveMath

Y Y OpenMath/C-MathML

STeX, OQMath, jEditOQMath

XHTML+MathML

MathDox mathdox-player

Y limited, via xslt

OpenMath/LaTeX/MathML

- XHTML+MathML, PDF, LaTeX

CNXML cnx.org N Y C-MathML LaTeX, Word XHTML+MathML, PDF

OOXML N N N OMML MS Office PDF, PPTX?, DOCX, DOC

The WebALT mathematical grammar library, released under GPL, allows to generate problem statements in several languages from a unique representation in OpenMath.

Multilinguality

ActiveMath, http://demo.activemath.org/ActiveMath2

MathDox, http://www.mathadore.nl

CMS for mathematics

MathDox formula editor

web-based produces OpenMath

integrated into HTML pages

intended for interactive pages

WIRIS OpenMath toolS

java applet

moodle integration

jEditOQMath

for OMDoc documents used in ActiveMath

easy input syntax of mathematical formulae

LaTeXML

for those familiar with LaTeX

faithful emulation of TeX's behaviour

extensibility by packages

preservation of both semantic and presentation cues

support good Presentation MathML, in future Content MathML and OpenMath.

sTeX

conversion CNX, C-MathML, OMDoc, Dublin-Core, and PhysML

Editors

Making eContent knownOnce produced, such material is very valuable.

Learning repositories allow to share resources.

Use standards

for describing learning resources, e.g. LOM (IEEE learning object metadata, 70 fields in 9 categories)

for federated searches across repositories (OAI)

Metadata descriptionsEntered manually by author in a form

e.g. interactivity type (active,expositive,mixed),

e.g. learning resource type (exercise, simulation,

lecture, graph, questionnaire, diagram, figure, index, slide, table, narrative

text, exam, experiment, problem statement, self assessment)

Automatically produced by online services

SAmgI (Simple AMG Interface)

JEM Learning Repository

The problem oftime traveling resources

Course-ware development occurs during years:

lecture notes, slides, podcasts, mobile-maths

OUR CASE: interactive exercises

Electronic archival issues:

no one knows anymore what is there

multiple authors, locations, versions

non-uniform naming

tailored for several specific use cases

Organized into classes

Poor metadata support

Poor search support Ad hoc

classification (depends on the author)

MapleTA Exercise Collection

Reorganize!

agree on a meaningful naming scheme: e.g. Topic information

encoded in the QB name: 010202 for Fractions easier to locate questions topics are smaller maintain one version

Metadata generation

Structure: Atomic

Format: application/mapleta

Interactivity type: Active

Learning resource type: Exercise

Intended end user role: Learner

Managing MapleTA exercises

Search & browse:

question text

algorithm

hints

solution

LOM fields

SummaryChoice of format for eContent will impact how well the material can travel to places, and through time

The richer the format, the more involved the authoring process

Choosing to author using a semantic markup now is possible

Thank you!