63 Replies
Daniel O'Keefe

Making Mathematics tutorial for graduate level courses. Def considering purchasing, this is a huge barrier. People expect better than ^.  (and whatever other symbols we need). It's a tool for developing learning modules, right? Yeah, somebody might want to think about Math soon.

great tool of course, for what it is. Would love to eliminate "for what it is" from that statement.

John D
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi all, 

I wanted to give you a heads up that we just released another update for Articulate 360, and included a few important fixes and new features that you'll see in the release notes here.  

One of the new Rise features is increased text formatting options, including subscript and superscript. I hope that helps with your writing equations in Rise!  Here’s a quick tutorial on editing text in Rise. 

You can access all the Articulate 360 and Rise tutorials from this page.

Let us know what else you need and keep the feedback on Rise and Articulate 360 coming! 

Algonquin College

Hi Ashley, yes I did notice that, and it is helpful.

For any course that teaches Math or relies on formulas (Chemistry, Physics, Accounting, Statistics, and so on), support for LATEX is critical.

MathJax makes this very very very easy with their existing JS library.  All that is needed is for it to be included in the export by default.  As well, as shown in my code, the Articulate development team needs to ensure that the MathJax processor is re-called when any content is dynamically written to the browser, which Rise seems to do a lot!

While we have a work around for the time being, support for accessible Mathematics seems like a simple functional addition to Rise, and will have a huge benefit to the overall accessibility of the product.

Cameron Ward

I will concur with the need. I have been watching this thread for some time with hopes of an update on this.

While things like sup/subscripts and Greek characters help, the reality is that until LaTeX is supported, Rise will never truly be ready for STEM courses. I have two 36 week courses in Chemistry and Physics that I would like to build in here, but that is not going to be realistic or accessible until LaTex is natively supported. An equation editor can be built on top of LaTeX. But LaTeX compatibility, itself, will be necessary before STEM courses can take Rise seriously.

I know that Rise is a new product, and we LOVE where it has gone so far. I just wanted to add my two cents about how equation editing is crucially important if Rise is going to be taken seriously by the sciences and technical fields.

Fiona Williams

Hi I'm new to Rise and loving it.

However I also mainly develop science and maths courses and so the lack of support for equations is a big issue for me. I see that quiz choices can be formatted to include superscripts and subscripts, but I can't see any way to change the font of individual characters e.g. to produce a single character in symbol font etc. within a line of text?

Support for LaTex would be brilliant. As a stop-gap can we upload images into quiz options? That way the equation could be produced as an image file elsewhere, and uploaded into Rise. As far as I can see, images can only be loaded into the question text, and not the choices, or the answer.

Thanks!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Fiona, 

We're working on a feature to allow custom fonts in Rise - as currently the font type can only be adjusted to a set group of fonts for the entire course. The ETA on that feature isn't yet set, but we'll keep you posted as we have a better sense for timing! 

For quiz questions, you can add images to the question text but not to the answer choices. I can understand how that would make life easier. I think it would be worth telling our product team about it here!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks Michelle for sharing that insight here. I hadn't heard of LaTex before this discussion, but science and math were never my area! I took a quick look at their website and I'm curious how you use this in other applications? Can it be installed as a part of tools like Powerpoint? Is it a browser based add-on? 

I'd love to get a bit more insight on how you're using it today with other tools to pass that along to my Product team! 

Michelle Allan

Hi Ashley,

If we're working with straight HTML pages, we attach a link to the LaTeX script inside the header tags and that picks up the code and renders it as a formula when the page loads.

When we're working with our LMS, the link to the LaTeX script is already integrated in the site so we just type in LaTeX code where we need it.

LaTeX knows when you're using it because you frame your code with '\(' and '\)'. Then most things are coded by putting them inside curly braces (i.e '{ }'). I've attached an image that I use to teach LaTeX to my colleagues that you may find useful.

LaTeX can be used in much more complicated ways (you can build entire documents with it), but this is how we use it to build formulas.

Hope that helps :)

Cheers,
Mich

Algonquin College

Hi Ashley, just to add to Michelle's comments.

LaTeX is a method for writing math equations.  

Some applications directly support LaTex, others require an add-on or extension.  For instance I believe MS Word 365 now supports LaTex in the equation editor.

For displaying math on the web, LaTex is not directly supported by web browsers.  MathML is another method of writing equations, but it is only supported by Firefox (and maybe Safari?)

Both LaTex and MathML are fully supported by "MathJax".  MathJax is a Javascript library that processes the formulas and replaces them with elegant HTML/CSS.  Mathjax is not the only parser available, but it is a standard one that is used.

 

Cameron Ward

Thanks for explaining, John! The broadest point to all of this is that there has to be an equation editor, and it should be able to read LaTeX or MathML and be accessible. If that feature was available in Rise (and other products), it would open a world of possibilities as that feature is really needed by anyone building curriculum in the STEM fields.

Michelle Allan

Hi Ashley, 

Have there been any developments with introducing an equation editor (or the ability to convert LaTeX) in Rise? We're still inserting equations as images but it's really not ideal as it is terrible for readability (images are automatically scaled down on small screens), as well as accessibility.

Cheers,
Mich

Jamie Traynor

Been waiting almost a year for some solution to math equations. Hoping it moves to the top of the priority list. Whether it is an equation editor in Rise or the ability to embed LaTex would be very helpful, mostly for accessibility but also for design. If you have an equation in the middle of a sentence adding the equation as a graphic is not visually appealing (especially if there are more than one equation in a paragraph). Thank you.