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 resource
Learning 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 Chart
Format Server Interactivity Notation Authoring Alternative
support Formulae GUI representation
SWiM, STeX,
OpenMath/
OMDoc pantha-rei, Y Y OQMath, XHTML+MathML
C-MathML
ActiveMath jEditOQMath
OpenMath/
mathdox- limited, via XHTML+MathML,
MathDox Y LaTeX/ -
player xslt PDF, LaTeX
MathML
XHTML+MathML,
CNXML cnx.org N Y C-MathML LaTeX, Word
PDF
PDF, PPTX?, DOCX,
OOXML N N N OMML MS Office
DOC

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

CMS for mathematics
ActiveMath, MathDox,
http://demo.activemath.org/ http://www.mathadore.nl
ActiveMath2

Editors
MathDox formula editor jEditOQMath LaTeXML
web-based produces for OMDoc documents for those familiar with LaTeX
OpenMath used in ActiveMath
faithful emulation of TeX's
integrated into HTML easy input syntax of behaviour
pages mathematical
formulae extensibility by packages
intended for
interactive pages preservation of both semantic
and presentation cues
WIRIS OpenMath toolS
support good Presentation
java applet MathML, in future Content
MathML and OpenMath.
moodle integration
sTeX
conversion CNX, C-MathML,
OMDoc, Dublin-Core, and
PhysML

Making eContent known
Once 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 descriptions
Entered 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 of
time 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

MapleTA Exercise Collection
Organized into
classes
Poor metadata
support
Poor search support
Ad hoc
classification
(depends on the
author)

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

Summary
Choice 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!