Mathematics at an undergraduate level is frequently
presented to the students in quite a traditional way. When implementing the
Bologna education reform in Portuguese universities, the number of contact
hours of the courses decreased (considerably in some cases), therefore
increasing the need of a more self-responsible learning by the student. This
means that the student has to work by himself (i.e., outside lectures and
examples classes) on a regular basis. In practice this implies that the
lecturer is supposed to plan the students work, in principle weekly basis. In
this SEMINAR we intend to describe an experience made at the Department of
Mathematics for Science and Technology of the University of Minho in Portugal.
Using an e-learning platform specially designed forteaching Mathematics called
Maple T. A., we designed, programmed and made available for the students
various sets of exercises organized in Question Banks on the course of
Calculus. We also make a comparison of alternative ways to program the
questions of a questions bank. The advantage of this platform is that if
properly designed, the questions can be always different and with different
methods of solving (because of the use of random variables), the student can do
it whenever and wherever he is (he does it via internet) and it feedback is
made available to the students as soon as he submits the exercise. At the end
of the academic year and with the aim of being able to evaluate how did the
students feel about this experience, the students were given a survey
implemented on the elearning platform. The results obtained from this survey
strongly suggest, among other things, that using Maple T.A. helped the students
in the study of the course of Calculus, and that it helped to achieve better
results on the course. Results presented here were presented in 14th WSEAS
Intern. Conference on Applied Mathematics (Math'09), and later on an extended
version was published on line in the International Journal of Education
and Information Technologies. |