MeLQS: Mathematics e-Learning Question Specification -- a common base for sharing questions among different systems

Wednesday
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The Boiler House

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In recent years, e-learning has become increasingly popular in mathematics education. However, there are many different systems and hence the contents should be developed independently in each system. We think that sharing contents among different systems would be important for the diffusion of math e-learning/assessment systems.

Main contents in math e-learning/assessment systems are computational questions. The structure of them seems essentially compatible between many systems including STACK and Maple T.A.. Based on this observation, we proposed Mathematics e-Learning Question Specification (MeLQS) as a common base for developing contents in mathematics e-learning/assessment systems. MeLQS is constructed with two specifications: concept design and implementation specification. Concept design is a specification of questions that describes their concepts. Each concept design is described as mathematical statements, not as programming statements, so that mathematics teachers can understand the concept. We implemented an authoring tool for creating concept designs as a Moodle plug-in. We are planning to implement a math input interface MathTOUCH so that all teachers can edit mathematical expressions more intuitively. Implementation specification for questions is designed for those who have experience in authoring questions for online tests. In the implementation specification, enough information needed for implementing questions are provided, but in the form not depending on a specific CAS syntax which is used in the specific math e-learning system. Questions based on the implementation specification can be easily exported as a suitable format for any mathematics e-learning system. We are planning to provide MeLQS as a cloud service with which users can design questions and share them with each other. At the conference, we give an overview of MeLQS and demonstrate the authoring tool for creating concept designs.