Pre-Arrival Online Maths Refresher Course
Overview
In response the disruption of A Levels during the pandemic and research which indicated that the biggest predictor of degree performance was first-year Maths and Statistics modules, the Department of Economics created an online maths refresher course for incoming undergraduates. The online Moodle course is split into topics, which are further divided into sub-topics. Each topic begins with an introduction explaining its relevance to Economics and a diagnostic quiz. Students begin with a diagnostic quiz in order to ascertain whether they need to revise that specific topic. The intention is not for students to complete the entire course, but instead to get a sense of which topics they need to revise and to focus on those specifically. Should a student decide to revise a particular topic, they are able to access bespoke recorded lectures and associated quizzes. They are also offered the opportunity to look at more advanced resources and get an introduction into some of the Economics theories they will study during their degrees.
The online course aims to tackle the problem of students arriving at Warwick with a wide range of abilities, by providing a refresher of key mathematic concepts and skills which are relevant to Economics. It also provides context for why they are relevant to Economics. Out of a student cohort of roughly 900 students, approximately 600 students used the resource. While it was designed for undergraduates, it has also been made available to masters students. Although the course is voluntary and its use is not monitored, the Economics department can use data from the Moodle course to track student ability and progress more generally.
Lesson plan
- Led by Emil Kostadinov (Economics) and Andrew Brendon-Penn (Mathematics Institute), the Economics department worked with a group of student interns to develop the online resource.
- The team split the Moodle course into topics and sub-topics. Putting together the Moodle course involved using HTML code to create the layout.
- The student interns were trained in JavaScript and used this to create quizzes on Numbas, a platform for computer-graded assessments. The quizzes were developed for students to be able to learn by doing.
- Staff from the Economics department created bespoke videos using whiteboard software with e-pens and OBS (Open Broadcast Software).
- Once the resource was completed, it was sent to incoming students in advance of their arrival at Warwick.
- Incoming students first completed the diagnostic quiz for each topic to see if they needed to revise that topic.
- Depending on the results of the quizzes, students went on to revise relevant topics using videos, quizzes and tutorials.
Tutor's observations
The open question is who ended up doing this course. Was it the students who we believe would have benefitted the most or was it the students who actually would have done well without it?… If the 200 students who didn’t do it were exactly the ones we felt this course is addressed to, it raises a challenge for the future about how to communicate this in a way that is not intrusive.
The intention was that [as part of the resource] there would be a forum and two office hours per week, but in reality what happened was, with 900 students enrolled, this was very limited… in the beginning there were a lot of clarifying questions about things we should have explained better in the first place, but it did not involve as much work as we thought…we were prepared for it to involve a lot more work.
We used HMTL code to make it look a little bit sharper than what you see on the standard Moodle, but actually this could be achieved on Moodle itself.
This kind of computer-graded assessment could be used for many other quantitative subjects.
Links to more like this
Categories: Introduction to HE learning, Reusable learning content, Teaching at scale, Widening participation
Tools: Moodle, Numbas, OBS (Open Broadcast Software)
Departments: Economics