What can I say? 2020, Covid, unprecedented, etc. You already know this. Well, since I’m co-organising a Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (TALMO) workshop today on lessons learned following the sudden switch to online teaching I decided to write down some of my lessons learned. The TALMO meeting can be found at Tackling Term 2: Top Tips from Term 1. Last term, apart from a single hour right at the start, my teaching was online. As expected it didn’t go perfectly. Actually, some of it went quite badly and I’ll talk about that on another day. For the moment I’ll…
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With the current Covid-19 crisis many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are moving to take away exams which by their nature are open book exams. Many mathematicians do not have experience of take home open book assessments and this post is intended to help deal with this. This has been put together quickly and is intended to be practical rather than theoretical. I hope you find it of use. I will update when I can so if you have any suitable links or ideas, then please leave a comment. Principles Throughout the next few months, students and staff will be sick,…
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I’ve been attending a conference for the last few days and so didn’t have much time to write a post. I did learn about the e-assessment packages Stack and Numbas. I will definitely be trying these in the future.
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A common technique in teaching mathematics is to go from the particular to the general. We can look at a few examples and then state and prove the general result. We can do this for proofs as well. Instead of giving students a proof of a statement, give them the proof for a specific example of the statement and ask them to prove the general from that. A classic example of this is to prove the irrationality of and then that of . Once the common features have been determined the proof for irrationality of for prime is (hopefully) straightforward.…
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Writing mathematics clearly is a crucial part of a student’s education. Too often students begin higher education with the misconception that writing mathematics merely involves putting down a sequence of symbols without paying too much attention as to whether they make sense to the reader. As long as the answer is there in some form and underlined, that’s ok, the thinking goes. Since the marker can see that the answer is there, this may be almost acceptable for problems such as finding the derivative of some product. But it does not work for writing proofs where a logical and coherent…