Overview

My future plans are to retire within the next couple of years, so I may not continue with formal professional development for much longer. But before I retire I want to complete various projects I have been working on over the past few years and leave them in a state that somebody else can take over their maintenance. This is one reason why I have moved our undergraduate information into QMplus, since I hope that support will be available for the Moodle facilities that I have used, which (apart from the addition of some JavaScript) are standard and fairly widely used across Queen Mary. Generally, I plan to spend more time teaching other people how to maintain QMplus and less time doing so myself. I have already discussed with a couple of Professional Services colleagues how they might take over maintenance of our QMplus intranet course area.

I plan to rationalise the distribution of module information between our module details database and individual module course areas and then link to information in the database, so that it needs to be maintained only in the database. This is probably my main outstanding task.

I plan to give the notes for the module I currently teach a final polish but not make any further substantial revisions and I hope to improve the quizzes I set up in QMplus this year. I know a bit more about the maths support in Moodle than I did when I wrote the quizzes and I hope to make better use of MathJax. I may also add some more quizzes if I can get the maths support to work properly. Having looked at this again recently, I currently believe that the support for MathJax in quiz feedback is broken in QMplus but I am hoping that it will be fixed by our upgrade this summer to Moodle 3.0. I was talking to the head of our Learning Development Unit recently and she told me that the LDU used Numbas successfully to implement maths quizzes in QMplus, so I plan to investigate this possibility.

I am thinking about trying to encourage my colleagues to use maths more generally within QMplus and not only within PDF files. I may try to set up some non-trivial examples of using maths within HTML in Moodle pages, etc. Ideally, I think it might be best to work with a colleague who is willing to give me the LaTeX source files for some of his or her lecture notes. I will then try to develop a reasonably automatic process to convert the LaTeX source into something that can be easily added into QMplus and will work properly. This is more or less what I tried for our visually impaired student a few years ago, although then I used my own web server rather than a CMS. I also managed a project to do something similar in Blackboard for some past Essential Mathematical Skills exams. This worked but the person who did the programming frequently asserted that everything would work much better in Moodle and I have sometimes thought that it would be interesting to see if that's true.

In the longer term, I plan to return to spending some of my time on open source programming projects, such as Emacs and REDUCE, which I have not had time to do for a long time. I have considered the possibility of turning the teaching materials for my current module into something that I could release independently of its current existence as a Queen Mary taught module. I would probably make it open source, partly as a matter of principle and partly because the income that I would be likely to receive from a commercial publisher would almost certainly not justify the constraints (deadlines, format, style, etc.). I may also consider other writing projects, which will probably involved some combination of mathematics, computing, education and possibly physics. I would quite like to develop educational resources as web and/or mobile device applications.

Francis Wright's CMALT ePortfolio

Francis Wright's CMALT ePortfolio

CMALT 6

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