How To develop a maths course on articulate

Feb 05, 2012

Hi All.

Am looking for ideas on how to develop a Maths course any body please help

5 Replies
James Brown

A very long time ago I bought a trigonometry tutorial and it was basically a step approach to trig. Basically it's like taking a text book and then converting it into a course. You just need to figure out what you want each math course to teach. You begin the course by explaining what the student will need, i.e. a ti-82, scratch paper and a pencil. Next you define a topic. Say the quadratic formula. You design an example of the formula in use and then you walk them through the process of solving a couple sample problems. You then give the student a series of practice questions to solve and using quiz maker you put up some multiple choice answers for each question. Piece of cake if you ask me.

Kevin Dowd

James that sounds absolutely awesome!  A simple process that would teach the material beautifully.

The only thing I would add, is if you had the time, instead of starting with the question and only giving answer choices for the final answer, I'd walk through each step, and have each step be a separate multiple choice question.  As an additional learning opportunity here, I'd have branching for wrong steps as well too.  So, they'd be thinking they're doing it right, work through the problem, and then at the end you'd tell them they had the wrong answer, and pinpoint where they messed up.  This would be "easy" for you design because that particular branching path would have that one mistake.  This would work particularly beautiful with proofs, for they'd easily see at the end that 1 does not equal 3.

For example,

A common mistake (that some how, amazingly, trips up calc students) is adding both the numerators and denominators instead of finding a common denominator.  So if you had a calc problem where somewhere in it they have to add (1/2) to  (2/3), your next step would have that sum as 3/5.  Then when they get to the end of the problem and have the wrong answer, you'd explain that it was because, 3 steps earlier, they added the fraction wrong.

Disclaimer: I never designed a math elearning course before.  Just my thougths based on my math degree and my experience TAing and tutoring calculus.

James Brown

Heidi if you think about an online math course just think of a text book. They always give three to four pages of introduction that explains what is being taught. Then they follow it up with examples and step by step guide showing how the problem was solved followed by a blocks of practice questions. 

Back to what you said, you could do a couple step by step guides with quiz maker just to get them familiar with the code and then test them on it. As BF Skinner would say this is taking the stress of the learner since they would not need to wait until the next day to see if they got the problem correct. 

Kevin Dowd

Hi James,

Oh yes, I an interactive learning section AFTER the material has been clearly presented. I loved everything you had - was just suggesting an addition of a "now let's work through the problem and see where each step would take you" section.

That video is awesome.  I wonder what he would think about the state of elearning today...

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.